The narrative coming out of Washington and the MSM is that al-Assad is a tyrant, and murderer of his own people. If that were true, then it would logically follow that he would not be supported by the Syrian population. Let look at this issue a bit closer:

"Furthermore, they completely disregard the popular support the government maintained throughout the whole conflict, which can almost completely be established by admissions in sources linked to Assad’s adversaries. A Turkish poll from late 2011 showed that only 5% of the Syrian respondents supported violent protest, while 91% opposed it,[22] and a Qatar-sponsored enquiry from around the same time found that 55% of the Syrian population wanted Assad to stay.[23] In addition, an internal NATO study in 2013 estimated that 70% supported the president in contrast to a mere 10% support for the armed opposition.[24] After constitutional amendments following a referendum, the first real democratic and competitive presidential elections in decades were held in 2014. Although Western media were quick to dismiss the credibility of the elections, the over 100 international observers present - coming from allied (e.g. Russia and Iran) as well as nonpartisan (e.g. Brazil, Venezuela and Uganda) countries around the world - issued a statement in which they declared that the elections were “free and fair” and were held “in a democratic environment, contrary to Western propaganda.”[25] Assad won the elections against his two opponents with 88,7% of the vote, with a massive participation rate of 73,4%.[26] This means that a staggering 64% of the eligible voters chose for Assad to remain in power, which is more than double of the 26% of the eligible American voters that put Donald Trump into office. As Sunnis make up 75% of the population and Alawites only 11%, this completely shatters the false representation put forward by Western media and officials of the Syrian government’s rule as a sectarian Alawite dictatorship suppressing a Sunni majority."

This is further supported in previous posts which I have linked below. I believe it is time to dispel the myth of al-Assad as a brutal dictator, and try to understand that it is Washington's post 9-11 balkanization and destabilization of mid-east countries that should be examined. I urge you to read the following article on NewsBud in order to understand the real truth of what is going on in Syria: https://www.newsbud.com/2017/04/23/newsbud-exclusive-the-balkanization-of-syria-iraq-the-roadmap-to-us-israeli-hegemony-in-the-middle-east/

Published on Apr 5, 2017
This press conference went largely ignored by the world, as you will see in one shot later in the video (10:30) the audience is bare and miserable. Most journalists refused to attended the conference and listen to the truth.
https://youtu.be/lGq6aLTOF_I

Have you read the article in the Guardian stating that a recent poll (YouGov Siraj poll on Syria commissioned by The Doha Debates, funded by the Qatar Foundation) states that 55% of Syrians want al-Assad to stay, motivated by fear of a civil war. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians-support-assad-western-propaganda

How about this one:
The Inconvenient Truth: Assad’s Popularity Confounds NATO Propagandists
http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/06/25/the-unconvenient-truth-assads-popularity-confounds-nato-propagandists/

You ask a number of questions including "Why do so many rebels not affiliated with ISIS throw away their lives to get rid of him?" Answer, they are mercenaries recruited and paid by the Saudi's and other countries that have economic interests (gas and pipeline routes), and countries such as Israel and Turkey that covet Syrian territory and have security issues. Don't overlook the U.S. oil-and-gas industries, including pipelines (oilfield services) as well as marketing (Exxon, Halliburton, etc.). http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-10/competing-gas-pipelines-are-fueling-syrian-war-migrant-crisis

For those few readers who will appreciate this:

"I do not know — and yet I am glad to see that the fact I speak of is so — why people are so much interested in knowing what conscience is and where it is located in the human constitution and how you can make it function. We know that while man is a stream of consciousness, he is a septenary stream, and each aspect of the septenate again has its divisions, which is one reason why men differ amongst themselves so greatly and so widely; and it is a pity that this is not better understood. Men would differ more but quarrel less. Quarrels are stupid; kindly "scraps" make firm friends — if they are kindly!

Now, as I understand the matter, our conscience to which we all too infrequently pay heed, to our loss, is that friendly, warm-hearted whispering from above, which we feel as showing us the right and the wrong, and it comes from the stored up ethical wisdom in our being. It is not in the disputatious brain-mind: it is in the heart. It is the highest part of the human ego, the treasury of ethical experience, the accumulated wisdom of past lives, garnered and treasured in our higher parts; and as far as it goes its voice is infallible and powerful; but it does not go far enough to make its voice in our soul an infallible guide, because we have not had past human lives throughout eternity and we are not infinite beings, humanly speaking.

One man's conscience is strong; another man's conscience is weaker. Two reasons why: the one may be more evolved and may have learned to hearken more attentively to the inner monitor. Therefore its voice is familiar, strong, and steady, and as we say, warm and sweet. We love that, and one reason why we love it is because it is so personal to ourselves. It is the highest part of each one of us as a human being, whispering to us admonitions of right, and denying to us the ways of wrong-doing. It is the buddhi-manas part of the human being, garnering experience of past ages of births and rebirths, the echo of past sufferings and heartaches from which we have gleaned wisdom and treasured it on the tablets of the Self. That is the conscience.

But higher than conscience is intuition: Intuition is infallible. Its voice is immeasurably infallible, because it is the whispering within us as it were of the truths of the Cosmic Spirit. It is a ray direct from the Divine Spirit in our hearts. Our conscience won't tell us the truth about a fact of Nature, nor whisper into our minds guidance along the paths of scientific or religious or philosophical discovery, because it is the garnered ethical wisdom familiar to the soul of each one of us. But the intuition will tell us instantly, it has instant vision of truth. Its voice is neither familiar nor unfamiliar. It is utterly impersonal. Its atmosphere is neither "hot" nor "cold." It is neutral in this respect; and it is the voice of the Atma-buddhi-manas within us, the Monad as H. P. B. called it.

Do you get the distinction? The conscience is our own treasury of spiritual-ethical wisdom. It is infallible as far as it goes, as far as we can hear its voice; and we can hear it ever more by practice, by training, by hearkening to it, by just recognising it and following it. But because it is only our own gathered treasury, it is not infinite, and therefore not in the true sense always infallible. But so far as concerns each one of you as individuals, when your conscience whispers to you, follow it, because it will whisper only when you are in danger, or when you are seeking to do aright: whereas the voice of the intuition is the voice of the Spirit within us, and it is infallible. It has no frontiers. It is, so to speak, a ray direct from the Mahabuddhi of the Universe; and we can allow intuition to become ever stronger within us, enlightening our minds and opening our hearts, by not being afraid of it, afraid of having hunches, by not being afraid of following our conscience, and our intuitions when they come to us. They are coming to us all the time.

Most men are ashamed to act intuitively. They don't want to make mistakes. Prudential, yes! But it is only prudence, and uncommendable, cowardly and weak, and small, if it is merely because you don't want to begin to make a fool of yourself until you have learned more. The strong man is not afraid of making a fool of himself occasionally, because he knows that that very fact will stimulate him, awaken him, make him think; and after awhile he will not make a fool of himself. He will learn to trust his inner powers. That is the way to cultivate the intuition, by cultivating it; not being afraid of what is within you. Suppose you do make mistakes — what of it? By practice in its exercise the mistakes will grow fewer and fewer.

Make a companion of your conscience. The man or woman who has not heard the voice of conscience whispering in his soul, who has never felt its presence, is not truly human. You know what I mean by that companionship: we call it a voice which whispers to us. It is a light which lives within you always and which tells you what is right — and to follow it; what is wrong — and to abandon it. Make a companion of your conscience, stimulate it, open your hearts and your minds to it. Your lives will be beautified, strengthened, made happier than now they are, because you will be following the voice within which is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages.

Furthermore, just in proportion as you learn to know your conscience which is your own self, the higher part of you, and trust it and follow it, the more will intuition brighten your lives, bringing you knowledge direct, knowledge infallible."

http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/soph/sopthl13.htm#lokas

Pretty expensive way to push him out the door!

I cannot verify the accuracy of this, but it's an intriguing potential story, nontheless.
https://youtu.be/vmN9_jsewfA

I personally believe that the "What if it all stops" is closer than we imagine. There are numerous SHTF scenerios, any of which would spiral events out of control. Brace for the unexpected.

Kankune, when Napolitano says "What If", what he really means is "That's the way it really is Jack". His "what if" is just like a fiction writer who writes a book as fiction, but it's really "non-fiction" - helps avoid lawsuits or being labeled as a "conspiracy nut".

By Andrew P. Napolitano
April 20, 2017

What if our belief in self-government is a belief in a myth? What if the election of one political party over the other to control Congress changes only appearances? What if taxes stay high and regulations stay pervasive and the government stays oppressive and presidents fight wars no matter what the politicians promise and no matter who wins elections? What if the true goal of those whom we elect to Congress is not to be our agents of self-government or even to preserve our personal liberties but to remain in power by getting re-elected?

What if they use government to aid their own re-elections by bribing us with our own money — the rich with bailouts, the middle class with tax breaks and the poor with transfer payments?

What if Congress has written laws that are too complex for its own members to read and understand? What if the language of most federal laws is intentionally arcane so that ordinary voters cannot understand it? What if that language is actually written by faceless bureaucrats and not by accountable members of Congress? What if members of Congress in fact rarely read any legislation before voting on it? What if some legislation refers to secrets and secret procedures that only a few members of Congress are permitted to see and utilize?

What if when the select few members of Congress who are permitted to see those secrets do see them, those members are themselves sworn to secrecy? What if that means that our elected representatives — our supposed agents of self-government in the government — do not fully know what the government is doing and that even if they do, they can’t legally tell us?

What if our representatives in Congress don’t really represent us? What if they really represent a political party? What if each political party is controlled by a small leadership group that punishes members who defy it? What if Congress has written laws and rules that permit its leaders to punish members’ defiance? What if another way to characterize defiance of political party leadership is political courage?

What if the laws that Congress has written about the CIA have delegated congressional power to a small secret committee of members from both houses of Congress and both political parties? What if that committee can authorize secret wars in foreign lands conducted not by the military but by the CIA? What if the reason these folks authorize the CIA and not the military to conduct secret wars is the existence of federal laws that require reporting to and a vote of the entire Congress for the military to be used but require only the small secret committee to approve for the CIA to be used?

Because wars cost money and often cost lives, what if the effect of the decisions of the small secret committee is that the committee is basically a Congress within Congress? What if the Constitution says that only Congress can spend tax dollars and declare wars but Congress has let the Congress within Congress do this? What if the voters will never know what the Congress within Congress has authorized? What if the very existence of the Congress within Congress mocks, defies and betrays the concept of American self-government?

What if the data seen and discussed and the decisions made in secret by the Congress within Congress are generated by the CIA and other intelligence agencies? What if these intelligence agencies selectively reveal and selectively conceal data to manipulate the decisions of the Congress within Congress? What if those manipulations often result in bloodshed about which the American people often never learn? What if the bases for the decisions of the Congress within Congress are kept from the other members of Congress, from the media and from the voters?

What if the folks from both political parties who set up the Congress within Congress care more about wielding power than they do about preserving self-government? What if those who pull the levers of power in the intelligence community are so far removed from the voters that they don’t know and don’t care what the voters think? What if they know that the voters would react forcefully and decisively if the voters knew what the members of the Congress within Congress know but they still won’t tell us?

What if all this diversion of power from the elected Congress to the Congress within Congress and all this reliance on secret data has resulted in the most pervasive surveillance by any government of any people at any time in world history? What if the federal government’s domestic surveillance today captures and retains digital copies of every telephone call and every computer keystroke of every person in America and has done so since 2005? What if members of Congress who are not in the Congress within Congress do not know this?

What if the Congress within Congress has authorized American spies to spy without personal suspicion or judicial warrant on the military, the courts, the police and every person in America, including the remaining members of Congress, much of the remaining intelligence community itself and even the White House?

What if the selective use of the data acquired from mass surveillance can be used to manipulate anyone by those who have access to the data? What if those who have access to the data have used it to manipulate the president of the United States? What if all this constitutes a grave but largely unseen threat to our liberties, not the least of which is the right to self-government?

What if we don’t really govern ourselves? What do we do about it?

Compare the information that the MIT Professor Dr. Postel has provided in his report (below link) and compare it with the information disseminated by the White House, consider both sources carefully, ... and then draw your own conclusion as to which one you choose to believe.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/khan-sheikhoun-syria-the-nerve-agent-attack-that-did-not-occur/5585818

For anyone who is interested in reading Dr Postel's report, you can find it here:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/khan-sheikhoun-syria-the-nerve-agent-attack-that-did-not-occur/5585818

Here is a brief summary of the report:

Final Comments

This abbreviated summary of the facts has been constructed entirely from basic physics, video evidence, and absolutely solid analytical methods. It demonstrates without doubt that the sarin dispersal site alleged as the source of the April 4, 2017 sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun was not a nerve agent attack site.

It also shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only mass casualty site that could have resulted from this mass attack is not in any way related to the sites that are shown in video following a poisoning event of some kind at Khan Sheikhoun.

This means that the allegedly “high confidence” White House intelligence assessment ssued on April 11 that led to the conclusion that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack is not correct. For such a report to be so egregiously in error, it could not possibly have followed the most simple and proven intelligence methodologies to determine the veracity of its findings.

Since the United States justified attacking a Syrian airfield on April 7, four days before the flawed National Security Council intelligence report was released to the Congress and the public, the conclusion that follows is that the United States took military actions without the intelligence to support its decision.

Furthermore, it is clear that the WHR was not an intelligence report.

No competent intelligence professional would have made so many false claims that are totally inconsistent with the evidence. No competent intelligence professional would have accepted the findings in the WHR analysis after reviewing the data presented herein. No competent intelligence professionals would have evaluated the crater that was tampered with in terms described in the WHR.

Although it is impossible to know from a technical assessment to determine the reasons for such an egregiously amateurish report, it cannot be ruled out that the WHR was fabricated to conceal critical information from the Congress and the public.

Give me the specifics on what is fake here. It is easy to say FAKE but if you do not state what you believe to be fake then your claim lacks credibility.

I cannot disagree with what you have said. It is tough to make an honest appraisal of the facts when there is so much that is unknown, and unverified. I would simply point out that the Trump administration came to a very rapid conclusion on this matter, despite an almost identical 2013 claim of a CW attack by the Syrian government that was proven false by a UN mission report and journalist Seymour Hersh.

I have posted about the CIA's previous intervention in Syria, Wesley's Clark's remarks about taking out 7 Arab countries in 5 years, the competing pipelines issue, the large supply of gas in Syrian land coveted by our Arab allies Saudi Arabia and Quatar, their desire to see a Syrian regime change and partitioning, our corporate interests (Exxon/Halliburton, etc) seeking contracts, all of which lead me to question the main stream narrative. Add to that the UN Peace Conference report, the recent poll that most Syrians support the al-Assad regime, numerous intelligence reports (leaks) stating that many of our own analysts don't believe the present government narrative, and simple logic that this would be counter-productive for al-Assad to do what is claimed. For all these reasons, I have no difficulty accepting Dr. Postel's observations, nor do I have difficulty believing Syrian girl's (now Partisan girl) comments because they are consistent with the pattern of information that I have laid out.

Very good response Lindajoy. You make a good point that I would like to expand upon. It is important to know the source of the article, and to question the motivation of the author. But isn't that the case for all communication? I don't want to sound paranoid, but I question everything I read. Does it pass the smell test? Does it sound logical and reasonable? We all have our views of the world around us that have been shaped upon a lifetime of experience and learning. What I find objectionable is the attitude that "I don't have to read this article, or view this video because it was written by XYZ or appeared in XYZ. To prejudge an article, story, video without even reading or watching it seems to me to be intellectual arrogance.

I have not problem with an honest disagreement with a viewpoint that can be expressed in a straightforward manner. But let us discuss the issue, not who wrote the article, or where the article appeared.

Robert FISK

Do they feel no sense of shame? What callousness. What disgrace. How outrageous that our compassion should dry up the moment we realised that this latest massacre of the innocents wasn’t quite worth the same amount of tears and fury that the early massacre had produced. It fact it wasn’t worth a single tear. For the 126 Syrians – almost all of them civilians – who have just been killed outside Aleppo, were Shia Muslims being evacuated from two government-held (ie Bashar-held) villages in the north of Syria. And their killer was obviously from al-Nusra (al-Qaeda) or one of the Sunni “rebel” groups we in the West have armed – or quite possibly from Isis itself – and thus didn’t qualify for our sorrow.

The UN, clip-clopping on to the stage-boards as usual, did speak out. The latest attack was “a new horror”. And Pope Francis called it “ignoble” and prayed for “beloved and martyred Syria”. And having been brought up by a pretty anti-Catholic dad, I said what I often say when I think the Pontiff has got it right, especially Francis: Good old Pope! Why, even the virtually non-existent anti-Assad “Free Syrian Army” condemned the attack as “terrorist”.

But that was it. And I recalled all those maudlin stories about how Ivanka Trump, as a mother, had been especially moved by the videotape from Khan Shaykoun, the site of the chemical attack on 4 April, and had urged her father to do something about it. And then it was Federica Mogherini, the EU’s ‘High Representative” for foreign affairs and security policy, who described the attack as “awful” – but insisted that she spoke “first of all as a mother”. Quite right, too. But what happened to all her maternal feelings – and those of Ivanka – when the pictures came in from northern Syria this weekend of exploded babies and children packaged up in black plastic bags? Silence.

There’s no doubting the flagrant, deliberate, vile cruelty of Saturday’s attack. The suicide bomber approached the refugee buses with a cartload of children’s cookies and potato chips – approaching, I might add, a population of fleeing Shia civilians who had been starving under siege by the anti-Assad rebels (some of whom, of course, were armed by us). Yet they didn’t count. Their “beautiful little babies” – I quote Trump on the earlier gas victims – didn’t stir us to anger. Because they were Shias? Because the culprits might have been too closely associated with us in the West? Or because – and here’s the point – they were the victims of the wrong kind of killer.

For what we want right now is to blame the “evil”, “animal”, “brutal”, etc, Bashar al-Assad who was first “suspected” to have carried out the 4 April gas attack (I quote The Wall Street Journal, no less) and then accused by the entire West of total and deliberate responsibility of the gas massacre. No-one should question the brutality of the regime. Nor its torture. Nor its history of massive oppression. Yet there are, in fact, some grave doubts about Bashar’s responsibility for the 4 April attack – which he has predictably denied – even among Arabs who loath his Baathist regime and all it stands for.

Even the leftist but hardly pro-Syrian Israeli writer Uri Avneri – briefly, in his life, a detective – has asked why Assad should commit such a crime when his army and its allies were winning the war in Syria, when such an attack would gravely embarrass the Russian government and military, and when it would change the softening western attitude towards him back towards open support for regime change.

And the regime’s claim that a Syrian air attack set off explosions in al-Nusra weapons store in Khan Shaykoun (an idea which the Russians also adopted) would be easier to dismiss if the Americans had not used precisely the same excuse for the killing of well over a hundred Iraqi civilians in Mosul in March; they suggested that a US air strike on an Isis arms lorry may have killed the civilians.

But this has nothing to do with the weekend’s far more bloody assault on the refugee convoys heading for western Aleppo. They were part of a now-familiar pattern of mass hostage exchanges between the Syrian government and its opponents in which Sunni opponents of the regime in villages surrounded by the Syrian army or its allies have been trucked out to Idlib and other “rebel”-held areas under safe passage in return for the freedom of Shia villagers surrounded by al-Nusra, Isis and “our” rebels who have been allowed to leave their villages for the safety of government-held cities. Such were the victims of Saturday’s suicide bombing; they were Shia villagers of al-Foua and Kfraya, along with several government fighters, en route to what would be – for them – the safety of Aleppo.

Whether or not this constitutes a form of ethnic cleansing – another of Bashar’s sins, according to his enemies – is a moot point. Al-Nusra did not exactly urge the villagers of al-Foua and Kfraya to stay home since they wanted some of their own Sunni fighters back from their own encircled enclaves. Last month, the governor of Homs pleaded with Sunnis to leave the city on “rebel” convoys to Idlib to stay in their houses and remain in the city. But this is a civil war and such terrifying conflicts divide cities and towns for generations. Just look at Lebanon 27 years after its civil war ended.

But what ultimately proves our own participation in this immoral and unjust and frightful civil war is our reaction to those two massacres of the innocents. We cried over and lamented and even went to war for those “beautiful little babies” whom we believed to be Sunni victims of the Assad government. But when Shia babies of equal humanity were blasted to pieces this weekend, Trump could not care less. And the mothering spirit of Ivanka and Federica simply dried up.



And we claim that Middle East violence has nothing to do with us.

counterpunch.org

https://youtu.be/suz-Y5n-1Fc

You use the classic AD-HOMINEM argument (attack the arguer instead of the argument). Instead of addressing the specifics of what they say, you try to discredit the source. Classic failed logic. Continue getting your news from CNN, the Wapo, and the NYT - no fake propaganda news there, right?