“At this stage, fame may be more of a danger than a protection because the regime does not want any prominent figure to come to the fore and provide a public face for the revolution,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, a US-based dissident and son of Syrian actor Mona Wasif.
Tag: Crackdown
Syrian TV star joins anti-regime protesters
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”.
Syria’s opposition meeting was a PR exercise
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”.
Change Appears Inevitable In Syria, Analysts Say
So far President Obama has stopped short of saying Assad must go. But his recent speech on the Middle East came awfully close, at least to the ears of Ammar Abdulhamid, a U.S.-based Syrian opposition activist:
“When they give [Assad] a choice between lead democratic transition or, sort of, get out of the way, they really mean get out of the way either with some dignity or without dignity. So in a sense, they are pressing for complete change and overhaul of the system,” he says.
Abdulhamid and other opposition figures plan to meet in Turkey later this week to try to get better organized and lobby the West for a tougher response.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 