Foreign Policy: A town in northwestern Syria has become the creative center of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad. Since the beginning of the uprising, the residents of Kafr Anbel have drawn signs that skewer the Assad regime and express outrage that the world has not done more to stop the killing in Syria.
The signs come in two basic varieties. Some are cartoons, often drawing their inspiration from Western movies or TV shows, which lampoon the Syrian government and its allies, notably Russian President Vladimir Putin. Others are straightforward, text-only banners that call for NATO intervention in Syria or arming the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA). Many of the signs are written in English.
Raed Fares, an activist in Kafr Anbel, explained to FP that the town’s residents chose to draw in English, rather than Arabic, explicitly to reach an international audience. “It’s very important to send our message to all the world,” he said. “And English is the public language.”
I worked for the UN briefly in the early years of the NATO invasion and occupation. When they arrived I had already been there for some time working with deminers under the Taliban. Of all of the people I knew who really knew the country, had long years of experience in the field, and spoke the languages, all but one had left or been thrown out by the end of 2003, because nobody wanted to hear what they had to say. The one who was still there, was murdered. The UN is but a tool of the American empire, and the vast majority of its employees in Afghanistan have been people who had not the slightest knowledge of or interest in the country in which they happened to be working at the moment. The first thing that the UN told me when I signed a contract with them was to stop wearing Afghan clothes and to shave off my beard. The UN sees it as its job to destroy the local culture and install American values. Secular materialism is the only permitted religion on this planet now with the Yankees as tyrant, and they take their fondness for alcohol and rule by women and ram these Northern European barbarian preferences, these Viking values, down the throats of millions of ancient peoples who know better.