Assad would still rule if Hamas had not attacked Israel and Hezbollah had not rocketed Israel

 

Prisoners freed from the Syrian gulag

 

https://x.com/KseniaSvetlova/status/1865636199349829854

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib on the fall of the Syrian regime

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib 2 hr

Let there be no doubt: without a weakened, defeated, tamed & humiliated Hezbollah, the Syrian opposition would not have been able to march on Assad's forces which are nothing without Russian airpower and ground support from the group. Ironically, defeated "resistance" = liberation

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib 3 hr

Assad's fall appears inevitable, weakening the Iranian-led "Axis of Resistance" that has brought so much devastation, death & destruction to the Middle East. The fall and defeat of Hamas, Hezbollah & Assad's Syria are a direct outcome of Sinwar's grave 10/7 miscalculation in Gaza

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

From Ben Walzer on Facebook:

Astounding to follow the precipitous collapse of the murderous Assad dynasty that has killed half a million Syrians in the last decade for starters. Opposition says the regime been officially overthrown.

[Unconfirmed reports among Syria airspace-watchers that, while his family has reportedly fled to Moscow, Assad's plane may have been shot down over rebel territory, Homs, possibly with an abandoned BUK missile system, same type Russia used to shoot down Malaysia Flight 17 in 2014 over Ukraine, accelerating its imperial war there.] 

The regime has abandoned its entire air force, Russia seems to be evacuating its base in Tartus, at least of heavy equipment. Hezbollah/Iran apparently not coming to the regime's aid in any serious way. 

Damascus airport also abandoned by security, police and military. Political prisoners, some who have been jailed since 1980, being freed who think Assad's father Hafez, who died in 2000, is still in charge. Head spinning change in just days. 

Says Oz Katerji, "Iran’s land bridge to Lebanon is over; Russia’s military occupation of Syria is over; the Assad regime’s mass murder of Syrians is over." 

And נדב איל Nadav Eyal: "It’s over: Assad has fled Damascus, according to senior officers in the Syrian regime (Reuters). Syrian state television also reports that he is no longer present. Rebel forces are making their way to the communication buildings to announce the establishment of a new interim Syrian government. 54 years of the Assad dynasty and over 60 years of Ba'ath rule have come to an end. The regime has fallen." 

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The Assad regime has fallen!

It has just been announced that Assad has fled Damascus and that rebels have entered the presidential palace. I remember when Aleppo fell in 2016, and the desolation I felt. This whole week has seemed like an unbelievable dream. 

I hope that what is ahead for Syria and Syrians is better than the past, that the different rebel groups can work with each other in rebuilding the country, and that Syrian refugees who want to return will be able to go back to their old homes.

The more than a year that has passed since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 has been a bloody horror with very little light. It seems like the fall of the Assad regime would not have happened without Israel smashing Hamas and Hezbollah, and engaging in open fighting with Iran, along with Russia throwing most of its forces into the war against Ukraine. 

Anti-Israel course at Cornell: "Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance"

Professor Eric Cheyfitz of Cornell University will be teaching a course in spring 2025 with the title of "Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance." Professor Cheyfitz is an activist in the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement - he first came to my attention in the spring of 2014, when he was invited to speak at Ithaca College in favor of the academic boycott of Israel.

This is the course description as published in the Cornell online catalog:

AIIS 3500
Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

The first half of the course will be devoted to situating Indigenous peoples, of which there are 476,000,000 globally, in an international context, where we will examine the proposition that Indigenous people are involved historically in a global resistance against an ongoing colonialism. The second half will present a specific case of this war: settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel with a particular emphasis on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) finding "plausible" the South African assertion of "genocide" in Gaza.

Outcomes 

• Identify and analyze key components of Indigenous perspectives on political, social, and environmental systems(this can be observed/assessed through written reflections and discussions).
• Define and differentiate key terms such as "Indigeneity," "Resistance," "Settler Colonialism," and "Genocide" in both international law and Indigenous contexts(this can be observed/assessed through writing assignments and presentations).
• Conduct a historical analysis of Indigenous peoples' current situations(this can be observed/assessed by researching and presenting findings in a paper).
• Conceptualize your idea of a just society through the comparison of Western and Indigenous epistemologies (this can be observed/assessed through argumentative essays and class debates based on insights gained from the previous outcomes).
• Apply these outcomes to an understanding of the history of Israel/Palestine with a focus on the history of Gaza and the current Gaza war (this can be observed/assessed by researching and presenting findings in a paper).

Adjunct Professor of Law Menachem Rosensaft just published an opinion article in the Cornell Daily Sun (the student newspaper) criticizing this course. 

When I first learned last month that Professor Eric Cheyfitz will be offering a course this coming spring entitled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” I wrote to Interim President Mike Kotlikoff expressing my concern that it would “promote and inflame political divisiveness at Cornell and encourage antisemitic manifestations against Israeli and Jewish students.”

My principal objection to this course is not that it has a decidedly and unabashedly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bent. What I find most problematic and unacceptable about it is that it is firmly rooted in shoddy, selectively and inflamingly biased pseudo-scholarship. The course description leaves no doubt that Cheyfitz intends to convey a narrative that casts Palestinians writ large as protagonists while Israelis and, by extension, Jews will be portrayed as villainous antagonists perpetrating “settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel” against a background of “plausible genocide.” Not only is such a narrative historically false — more importantly, it also constitutes antisemitism on steroids, and is likely to incite antisemitic rhetoric and worse against Israeli and Jewish students and faculty at Cornell.

By way of context, I write as a Zionist who has been supportive of and engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement for over 40 years. I believe that Israel has every right to exist in security free of terrorist attacks and at the same time support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict that will provide the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza with independence and self-determination. I am also sharply critical of many of the policies of the present Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and believe that voicing such criticism, as I have done frequently, is entirely appropriate.

By premising his course in the context of a “global war against an ongoing colonialism,” however, Prof. Cheyfitz goes much further than that. His course description implies not too subtly that Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians can be an acceptable, even justifiable, means in such a “global war.” The course description’s references to “ongoing colonialism” and “settler colonialism” also call into question the very legitimacy of the State of Israel which, it bears recalling, was established pursuant to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) of November 29, 1947, that partitioned then British mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

I am quite certain that no faculty curriculum committee at Cornell would ever even consider approving a course predicated on the premise that Jews alone had preeminent rights over the territories between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. I am equally certain that no such faculty committee would countenance a course whose formal description contained a dog whistle to the effect that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians on the West Bank was somehow justified or justifiable....

In his course description, Prof. Cheyfitz totally ignores the savage pogrom perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli civilians on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border on October 7, 2023, including the brutal killing of close to 1,200 men, women and children, the rapes and brutal violation of Jewish women and girls, and the taking of hostages into captivity in Gaza. This deliberate omission alone of the horrific events that sparked the present Israel-Hamas war in Gaza casts serious doubts about the course’s academic and intellectual integrity, let alone legitimacy.

To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Prof. Cheyfitz is entitled to his opinions, however controversial or even offensive such opinions may be, but he is not entitled to promulgate his own alternative facts to his students. Those of us who reject Prof. Cheyfitz’s premises as inflammatory and dangerously misguided have an obligation to make our negative assessment of his Gaza course crystal clear. And I am grateful to Interim President Kotlikoff for expressing his disappointment with Prof. Cheyfitz’s course clearly and unambiguously in his reply to my letter to him.

Simply put, academic freedom and First Amendment rights apply and must be deemed to apply every bit as much to those of us who consider Prof. Cheyfitz’s skewed anti-Israel views to be abhorrent as they do to those who believe that he should not be publicly taken to task or in any way criticized for wanting to promulgate these views to students in his classroom.

More articles on the course:

From JTA - https://www.jta.org/2024/11/11/united-states/cornells-handling-of-a-new-course-on-gaza-could-preview-campus-israel-battles-under-trump 

Three weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel, a Jewish professor at Cornell University named Eric Cheyfitz offered a “teach-in” titled “Gaza, Settler Colonialism, and the Global War Against Indigenous People.”

Just before the teach-in, the school’s Jewish provost called him and asked if he wanted extra security.

Like other scholars of settler colonialism, Cheyfitz has long viewed Israel since its founding as a colonizer of indigenous Palestinian land, an argument that has gained increasing prominence in pro-Palestinian activism and that supporters of Israel reject. Now, Cheyfitz is turning that teach-in into a full-on course titled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” which he’ll teach next term.

And that same provost, who has since become Cornell’s interim president, is opposed to the idea.

From Inside Higher Education (December 5, 2024): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/12/05/cornell-president-accused-violating-academic#

Cornell University’s interim president is facing public accusations that he suppressed academic freedom after he criticized a pro-Palestinian professor’s planned course in an email and that email was shared with a reporter.

The fracas started with a Nov. 6 email from a Cornell adjunct law professor, who wrote to interim president Michael I. Kotlikoff that a course set for the spring was antisemitic and could cause violence against Israeli and Jewish students. The course, Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance, is going to be taught by Eric Cheyfitz, who is Jewish.

From the Times of Israel (December 7, 2024): https://www.timesofisrael.com/cornell-presidents-leaked-criticism-of-gaza-class-prompts-new-row-over-academic-freedom  

JTA — Cornell University’s Jewish interim president is facing growing blowback from higher education groups over emails published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month, in which he raised objections to an upcoming class on Gaza.

Michael Kotlikoff’s remarks, which JTA reported on November 11, were a violation of academic freedom, say representatives of the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. The episode is the latest instance of campus scrutiny over Israel shifting from protests to the classroom, more than a year removed from the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught that launched the war in Gaza.