00:00 Miriyam Aouragh: … [Inaudible — a question about a speaker who could not attend.] I think it's really a shame that [she] didn't make it, because I think she's a very important person to listen to. Basically, for me, when people talk about the Palestinian position about Syria etc., everyone should shut up, listen and learn. Listen, read, learn from what people themselves have to say about these contentious issues, rather than trying to figure out some kind of algorithm in a room in London or Bonn or Oxford. It would really save a lot of time and frustration.
00:30 But let's at least not essentialise Palestinians. Palestinians are part of a very — I would say filthy — emotional blackmail around Syria, and they've been used to say, don't resist the regime too much, because otherwise Israel, or whatever. We all know this is nonsense.
01:05 And I would really say that we should also remember that Palestinians are not one embodied entity of political opinions. It's also very patronising [?] to think that there is *a* position — what is the Palestinian position? There is no Palestinian position. Palestinians are also divided like us; they also have a class society; they also have different political tendencies. Many Palestinians are divided over the issue of Syria as well, for political reasons, for ideological reasons.
01:36 So we should not fall into the trap of thinking that by knowing the position of the Palestinians we can counter the regime's propaganda, because the truth is you will find Palestinians — and I have them in my group of comrades — half of them are with Bashar [inaudible]. So they are just as divided.
02:06 But I think, really, listen to what's coming out of [inaudible]: there are very concrete proposals and suggestions for solidarity actions [?] that you can look at.
02:06 I think Syria has made us realise, more than any other conflict in our history of revolution, [that] — at least for me — there is no *one* anti-imperialism. There is anti-imperialism of the left and there is anti-imperialism of the right. And this is what I learned in the last two years [as] part of the anti-war activist networks [?], particularly in the West, that have been very important [inaudible].
02:36 And this is for a simple reason: that they do not believe in popular social change from below. They are politically only [able] to assess change and transformations on a political level, through a top-down interpretation of change. So they do not reflect my progressive politics. It is an insult to my progressive politics to prefer Russian imperial intervention over American imperial intervention.
03:09 I really don't understand these assessments, particularly from people who I learned a lot from, people who wrote about [this]. Growing up as an activist, one of the things that struck me the most was the sentence "neither Washington nor Moscow". I don't understand [how] people who used to write [things] like that are now saying rather Moscow over Washington. I really don't understand it, and I don't [get] upset any more; I just want to leave it behind us.
03:40 So I think that Marxists here, when they ask this question — I think it [would be] very helpful for you to listen to what [inaudible] has to say in Syria. Really, just listen, read the blog [inaudible], read the stuff of his comrades there and people who are writing [inaudible]. And they are not waiting for us to help them invent [it]; they've already written about these things eighteen months ago. It really helps to read and to listen.
04:12 So again: it is an insult to my progressive politics to understand self-determination only when it is a purely red one. There's no such thing as a perfect revolution. There will be horrible things, there will be sectarianism, there will be sexism, there will be blind, indiscriminate murder. That is the reality of people on the ground. If you're going to wait for it to come with an image of an [unveiled, unbearded] [?] revolution, you can wait a long time.
05:14 So that's not my politics. And I understand the legacy of Iraq, really I do, but there are two things that are really important. [Bashar] al-Assad and his father played an important role in helping Bush manufacture [the case for] and organise the war in Iraq — and [in] arresting people, bringing them to Guantánamo, torturing them etc.
05:47 Secondly, Syria is not Iraq [?]. I tried to show in all these slides what Syrians are actually doing. We did not see that kind of thing from Iraq. That's a big difference. It's not a minor detail. [It is not the case] that there is nothing in Syria that you can side with. We are not paralysed. We are not like during Iraq, when we only had the option of saying: against Western intervention. Now we can say against Western intervention *and* for the Syrian revolution. There are many examples. Let's not pretend that they don't exist — they are there.
06:18 So let's focus on the grassroots groups that are asking us at least to listen to them and to echo what they're saying. They're not [asking] us to help them — they know pretty well what they're doing, we can learn from them, they don't have to learn from us. But the least we can do is echo [and] mediate what they're saying.
06:18 And the last thing I want to say is that as long as we are going to be stuck in this debate about imperial politics being something that has to do with geopolitical decision-making, we're not going to get any further. The world is beyond that. Ordinary people — your family, my brothers and sisters, my [inaudible] — when they are watching the news, [they] have a reflex to support the Syrians. That's what ordinary, normal people feel when they see what's happening in Syria.
06:48 Don't forget that these pedantic debates about whether it's a revolution or not belong to a very small section of people. It's a small section within a small section of the left, within a small section of the anti-imperialist group. That should not be our focus. Our focus should be outside, with the unions, with other groups. I learn more about anti-imperialism from sixteen-year-old kids [who] graffiti walls than from Stop the War.
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