The Christian Science Monitor wonders: “Should Obama call for Syria’s Assad to go? And would it matter?“
…according to some experts, a call from the White House for Assad to go would hasten the disintegration of his government. In this view, Syrian elites view current US sanctions as an attempt to get Syria to distance itself from Iran as much as a tool intended to end their internal crackdown. Continue reading “Should Obama call for Syria’s Assad to go?”
The silence of Arab leaders in the face of the brutal crackdown taking place in Syria is examined by Nicholas Blandford of the Christian Science Monitor I am quoted at the end:
“The important thing is to remain committed to the peaceful nature of the movement, despite ongoing provocation by the regime and the moral cowardice of the international leaders,” says Ammar Abdulhamid, a leading Syrian activist based in Washington. “Admittedly, this will get more difficult from now onward.”
Mention in The Guardian as relating to my mother’s political position:
Others have hedged their bets. The actor Muna Wassif, the mother of the democracy activist Ammar Abdulhamid, who runs a blog on Syria’s revolution, called in May for an end to the killing and the lifting of sieges on villages but stopped short of calling for the regime to go. In May a group of international filmmakers signed an online petition denouncing the killing of protesters for making “demands of basic rights and liberties”.
There are protests taking place throughout Syria almost daily, while the city of Hama is reported to be de facto without so much as a traffic policeman. As the Syrian dissident in exile, Ammar Abdulhamid, said, the Syrian revolution is not stillborn – it is a healthy baby that may form the “foundation of a future Syria”.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 