The following interview with a Syrian couple originally aired on an independent French news outlet. One interviewee spoke in English, and the other in French. The English segments were already subtitled in French, and now the French parts have been subtitled in English.
The subjects of the interview are supporters of — or at least sympathizers with — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Since the primary patron of Mr. Assad’s regime is Russia, the couple’s statements reflect the standard Russian talking points about the civil war in Syria and the American government’s role in financing and supplying various jihad factions, a.k.a. the “Syrian rebels”. Nevertheless, much of what they say is essentially true, and worth listening to.
Many thanks to Oz-Rita for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Transcript of English subtitles:
00:00 | Video financed by donations to TVLIBERTES | |
00:04 | ||
00:48 | I’m 29 years old. I live in Belgium, but | |
00:53 | I’m from the Group “European Front for Syria” | |
00:57 | and also from “Front for Cyprus” and “Front for Kosovo” | |
01:01 | I visit these countries | |
01:05 | regularly. Why have you joined Europe? | |
01:09 | ||
01:34 | What is the situation in Syria today? | |
01:38 | ||
03:11 | What do you think of the Western political-media discourse | |
03:16 | a propos Syria and her President, Bashar al-Assad? It is a little weird. | |
03:20 | Bashar al-Assad has been the President for | |
03:24 | 13 or 15 years, | |
03:28 | and after 11 years he is now a criminal for the West. | |
03:32 | That’s weird. During those 13 years we have observed | |
03:36 | European tourists in Syria we have seen | |
03:40 | Bashar al-Assad participate in all important international meetings. | |
03:44 | We have seen John Kerry visiting | |
03:48 | Assad in Syria, we have seen all that | |
03:52 | and then, out of the blue in 2011, | |
03:57 | Bashar al-Assad has become a criminal for the West. | |
04:01 | And from the day they criminalized the President | |
04:05 | in effect they have | |
04:09 | polarized the situation. They never talked | |
04:13 | of a solution, because it’s true that in Syria too change is | |
04:17 | needed for many things. There are | |
04:22 | negative points in Syria. One has to find solutions but | |
04:26 | I have never seen IS or Al-Qaeda | |
04:30 | help any country develop well. | |
04:34 | If there is corruption and the mafia in Syria, it’s true | |
04:38 | another revolution (is needed?) for after | |
04:42 | this crisis, that will be a second revolution. | |
04:46 | now it’s a revolution against terrorism; after the war a revolution | |
04:50 | against corruption. But the President | |
04:54 | had been arranging many things, developing | |
04:58 | the country, but Europe has made the | |
05:02 | wrong decisions. What do you think about yesterday’s terrorist attacks on Paris? | |
05:06 | Well, yesterday Paris saw | |
05:10 | the results of the politics of Hollande, Merkel, | |
05:15 | David Cameron and Obama. | |
05:19 | You see, the West has always used terrorists, | |
05:23 | and they are hypocritical. For example, the Saudis, | |
05:27 | a few weeks ago the Saudis were at the beaches | |
05:31 | of Nice I think, it’s not important; | |
05:35 | they were in France, they made a big tour | |
05:39 | of the beaches. | |
05:43 | One can say that Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State | |
05:47 | are accepted by the West. The Americans used the Taliban | |
05:51 | against the USSR, they used the | |
05:56 | the Albanian terrorists in Kosovo, | |
06:00 | they used the Turkish terrorists, and today | |
06:04 | they use the terrorists of the Islamic State | |
06:08 | and Al-Qaeda and many other groups in Syria, | |
06:12 | because they want a change of leader | |
06:16 | they want to colonise Syria once more. | |
06:20 | Our two countries have been very close in the past, France had the mandate to | |
06:24 | protect Syria and Lebanon. How do you explain | |
06:28 | the attitude of the French government today? | |
06:32 | ||
07:42 | Do the Syrian people feel abandoned by France ? | |
07:46 | ||
08:31 | The West plans to organise so-called democratic elections | |
08:35 | in Syria, without Bashar al-Assad. What do you think of that ? | |
08:39 | ||
09:36 | I want to add that it’s always | |
09:40 | the EU who voted in Juncker, | |
09:45 | who voted in | |
09:49 | in Italy the last three Prime Ministers, | |
09:53 | Renzi, Letta, Monti, there was not one | |
09:57 | Italian who voted for them, | |
10:01 | for that war against Libya | |
10:05 | against Syria – who voted for that? Also in France, | |
10:09 | you can get 49% of the votes yet | |
10:13 | have zero members of parliament. Is that | |
10:17 | democratic? Does your activism resonate with European leaders? | |
10:21 | Evidently, | |
10:25 | it’s not easy, because freedom of speech does not exist | |
10:29 | in Europe. During this week I had a big discussion | |
10:33 | with one of the best known Belgian journalists, | |
10:37 | and if we want to present our arguments | |
10:42 | they don’t listen. They insult, for example, | |
10:46 | he said we are paid by the Syrian government | |
10:50 | I can confirm to you that the only thing I received | |
10:54 | was a cup of coffee. Well, | |
10:58 | no. We would not risk our lives | |
11:02 | for Syria if our hearts | |
11:06 | (were not in it?) It is very clear | |
11:10 | that with our fight we can change things, but we need | |
11:14 | time, and, obviously journalists, politicians | |
11:18 | are controlled by the US | |
11:22 | and the EU. It’s not easy, but we are seeing the first results. | |
11:26 | we now have many contacts with independent journalists, | |
11:31 | with parties in the EU parliament, | |
11:35 | with activists, so we see | |
11:39 | the first results, but it’s a very | |
11:43 | intensive battle, but what is our work (compared with) | |
11:47 | I don’t know… 50,000 martyrs | |
11:51 | in the Syrian Army? When you see the circumstances | |
11:55 | of the Syrian people today, our combat | |
11:59 | is … | |
12:03 | our respect for the Syrian soldiers and the Syrian people. | |
12:07 | Do you support the Syrian refugees? | |
12:11 | ||
13:37 | Firstly, | |
13:41 | there is a big discrimination. There is the discrimination between | |
13:46 | Syrian refugees (unclear) who are in the West? | |
13:50 | and the Syrians in Syria. In effect | |
13:54 | there is a financial and a political discrimination. Because | |
13:58 | for our leaders, the Syrians who don’t leave Syria, | |
14:02 | they are probably members of | |
14:06 | Bashar al-Assad’s party. The West couldn’t give a damn about | |
14:10 | refugees. For them its a weapon | |
14:14 | for capitalism. They want to colonise, because it’s the colonisation | |
14:18 | of a country. When Syria tomorrow needs | |
14:22 | doctors, engineers, | |
14:26 | who will reconstruct this country? | |
14:30 | Who? If all the young ones | |
14:34 | are in Europe. They want to destroy the future of a country. | |
14:39 | They want to destroy the Syrian people, the Syrian state, | |
14:43 | and that is their only interest. Because there are many | |
14:47 | mafiosi who earn a lot of money. And you see | |
14:51 | at the moment how many | |
14:55 | of these mafiosi are arrested? Not (even) ten. | |
14:59 | But during one year, many doctors, | |
15:03 | many engineers, many students have left their country because | |
15:07 | Hollande and Merkel and the others said: Come to us. | |
15:11 | That is their goal: Not to help people, but to use the people | |
15:15 | against the Syrian Government and against the Syria of tomorrow. That is | |
15:19 | their goal, that is their project. The Syrian situation, is it comparable | |
15:24 | with the Libyan situation? | |
15:28 | ||
17:02 | There is an international coalition | |
17:06 | of more than sixty countries, | |
17:10 | and what is the result? Nearly nothing. | |
17:14 | In Afghanistan there is IS and the Taliban. | |
17:18 | Was the intervention good? No. | |
17:22 | We see the same thing now in Syria. | |
17:26 | But now the countries of the East have said: Stop, | |
17:31 | they said “No Pasaran”. Against Mr. Hollande, | |
17:35 | against Mr. Obama, against Mme Merkel | |
17:39 | they said “No”. Why are the Saudis | |
17:43 | with their coalition now bombing in Yemen? | |
17:47 | But they do nothing against Al Qaeda? | |
17:51 | In Yemen. Why? Why? | |
17:55 | It’s an official question: Why? | |
17:59 | What evolution do you see in the Middle East and Europe after the recent events? | |
18:03 | ||
19:33 | Personally, in Syria. | |
19:37 | I think that for the moment things | |
19:41 | are better with the Russian and Iranian intervention. | |
19:45 | Today, | |
19:49 | it’s Saturday, the 14 November, there are negotiations | |
19:53 | in Vienna, of course I’m not there | |
19:57 | so I don’t know the results, but I hope | |
20:02 | that the West with this migration crisis | |
20:06 | with yesterday’s terrorist attack in Paris, | |
20:10 | perhaps now Mr. Hollande will change his politics. | |
20:14 | I hope that in a few months it will develop. | |
20:18 | Well, I also hope that now the Islamic State is finished, | |
20:22 | because for them terrorism is an weapon. | |
20:26 | The Syrian Army this week | |
20:30 | liberated the Kuweires Airport | |
20:34 | in the north-east of Aleppo, one can also see in Iraq | |
20:38 | the Iraqi army managed to combat | |
20:42 | and to win against the Islamic State, | |
20:46 | so for them … | |
20:51 | it’s not nice, but it’s also positive that | |
20:55 | when the IS is no longer able to win | |
20:59 | their fights, they will use their bombs on Europe. | |
21:03 | Because if they win in Iraq and in Syria, they don’t need Europe. | |
21:07 | Now they need attention | |
21:11 | for their polemics, and so I think | |
21:15 | in this case we are… | |
21:19 | …it’s positive, but in Europe, of course, | |
21:23 | a change of leadership | |
21:27 | is needed. One needs | |
21:31 | an independent European politics. | |
21:35 | One must also try to liberate Europe. One must liberate Syria and Iraq | |
21:40 | and the Arab world from terrorism, but one must also liberate Europe | |
21:44 | from American influence. | |
21:48 | We must work at that. | |
21:52 | With this development we have a chance | |
21:56 | to work for that, | |
22:00 | and it’s really needed. Because if the same leaders remain | |
22:04 | in Europe, it’s only the beginning, | |
22:08 | but now one must change the situation | |
22:12 | in Syria we have many friends | |
22:16 | with our work, and maybe tomorrow | |
22:20 | Syria will have a positive influence on Europe. That’s what I hope. | |
22:24 | Thank you. |
Interesting interview. They made a very good point about the migration of young people evacuating/abandoning Syria to a generational vacuum of engineers, doctors and professionals who will be in great need to rebuild their homeland in the future.
Europeans, no, the whole world, LOVES to hate the USA. However, anyone LESS wanting to COLONIZE Syria, Libya, or anywhere in the Muslim world would be Barack Obama! He may have wanted to get rid of Gaddafi and has imperiously told Assad to fall on his sword, but he can hardly be accused of DOING anything SERIOUS about it, or having a follow-up plan!
Obama is already in bed with the Iranian mullahs despite their mantra of ‘Death to America’, which has displaced Islam as their national religion, and Iran is the greatest State sponsor of Islamic terrorism, followed by SA and Qatar – whom he is also on good terms with.
These bright young people, full of righteous fury (as they should be) have fallen into the ‘it’s all about the West STILL wanting to colonize the Third World’ idiocy, despite all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps they ought to read a little history so they understand what a colonial administration looks like!
The Syrian civil war began after the Damascus Arab Spring when Assad refused to institute democratic reforms, and we know full well that he represents, (like Saddam Hussein’s government), MINORITY RULE!
They are on very strong ground, however, when they say that the West can’t bomb a country into democracy, even though that’s exactly what we did do in the Second World War! Germany and Japan were FORCED to have democratic governments, and I believe that Western politicians assumed the same could be done for the Muslim and non-Muslim Third World which has proved to be an utter misreading of those nations and their peoples. Why?
Because, in a nation where there is no full literacy or a high level of education for the masses: where there is no democratic tradition, but rather only an experience of dictatorship, supported by religious and traditional beliefs: in which tribalism is rife: corruption is part of the culture: where over-population (due to traditional attitudes coupled with the decline of infant mortality) has ensured a class of angry young males who can’t get jobs in their lousy economies – all these factors mitigate against a good outcome, even if democracy IS introduced -as was demonstrated in Palestine and Egypt, where terrorists were elected to government!
What they failed to mention are the desires of the global financial empire whose members are salivating to get their hands on natural resources, reconstruction and investment. THEY ARE THE MAFIOSOS – home grown and foreign. Their power is so great that they use our governments to implement their plans.
From this perspective, both the West and the poverty-stricken (though resource rich) Third World have a common enemy – PEOPLE LIKE SOROS AND HIS ILK.
It is the Soros’, the merchant bankers, the bond market, the central banks, the financial currency traders, the 1%ers who are turning this world into a 1984 nightmare because information technology is facilitating the destruction of the open market by the monopolization of their power into supra-national organisations. The EU is an administrative unit of the global financial empire and so is the USA. It has an inexorable dynamic which is sweeping everything and everyone before it!
So these young people are correct in asking EU member nations to resist and act according to the interests of their national populations, not those of the global financiers. But that is not easy to do. We’ll see how far Hungary gets in this quest.
The writing on the wall is that mayhem will continue until it is overtaken by the greater mayhem of economic collapse, due to the policies of the global financial empire of growing their profits on the back of our debt. So far it’s been propped up by silly money being printed by central banks but sooner or later the [excrement will impact the circulation device]. It is an unsustainable model! Everyone knows that. I predict it will begin after the inauguration of the next US President. Yallen will not do anything to jeopardize Obama’s last year and she probably knows he would be just as incapable of handling a financial tsunami as he has proved to be incapable on every other issue, other than the denigration of the USA!
But the financiers already have a solution up their sleeves. Having CREATED this mess by killing the open market, they wish to further manipulate it so that when the crash comes, they will be the beneficiaries (‘the time to invest is when blood is in the streets’). They have a good precedent in the 1920 Wall Street collapse, which they also engineered.
This time , the scale is global and so is their solution – WORLD GOVERNMENT! They are already preparing us mentally by fostering conflict in the ME (war is a great source of profit). As the young Syrian woman said, there is a coalition supposed to be in charge of Libya which is a joke – because they don’t have enough power, as yet, to FORCE a solution!
People like Barack Obama and Angela Merkel want the supra-national organisations like the EU and ultimately, the UN to have MILITARY FORCE so they can ram their ‘peace-keeping plans’ down our throats!
Migration invasion, (funded in the EU by Soros as he admits) which is responsible for terrorist attacks inside our nations is another excellent way to encourage the people to support a world-wide solution, which would involve national states giving up their military power. If that happens, we are done for!
Climate change is the most farcical of the world government strategies, but the fact that man-made climate change is a scientific swindle is irrelevant. Political Correctness is compulsory now and the truth is considered traitorous.
Russia has nothing to lose. It’s economy is in dire straights. It’s billionaires ship their money out of Russia because they correctly don’t trust Putin (same happening in China). Putin, unlike Obama, is a patriot of the old style and is following the time worn example of when in domestic trouble, turn to war and invasion! However, if he can be used as a lever against the global capitalists, well and good. But as many are also Russian, I don’t hold out much hope. However, checks and balances are necessary to prevent monopoly – so his muddied contribution is perhaps not entirely unwelcome. At least it will ensure than no one group can take over the ME!
In the long run there are only a few favorable solutions –
1) universal literacy and the education of Third World populations in maths, science and Enlightenment principles, which means huge investment in schools and teachers.
2) the defeat of Islam as a supra-national ideology. This can only happen in conjunction with the ideological defeat of Marxist Political Correctness by a new intellectual paradigm.
3) birth control in the Third World which means the building of health clinics and training of health professionals on a massive scale.
4) as part of every financial, trade, investment transaction with a Third World government, a stipulation for investment by that government in the education and health of their populations is mandatory. Otherwise, Third World dictators appropriate all the nation’s wealth for themselves and their supporters (of the same tribe, ethnic group, or in the case of the Saudis, for their obscene Royal Family!)
5) under no circumstances must the nation states allow their control of military force to be eroded by supra-national entities.
Germany and Japan had little democratic tradition in 1945. Western, mainly US, troops remained for decades (indeed haven’t altogether left), perhaps mainly for strategic reasons, but it also helped ensure the establishment and maintenance of democracy.
True. Thanks for your input. But I dare say Germany and Japan had more than most African and ME nations. Also they had the advantage of a larger population of educated people.
Right from the beginning of contact with the West, the Japanese were eager to learn Western thinking and perhaps their religion was not anti-science as Islam is.
As for Germany, their education system was superb and was largely imported into the USA to develop ours. They were also leaders in maths and science and philosophy, although their experience under the Weimar Republis was, as you infer, pretty weak.
I was one of those foolish people who initially believed ALL people would embrace democracy. Our experience in Iraq taught me I was an idiot to think so.
I totally agree with these two people.
PERIOD!
The USA was a nice country concerned about freedom… oh, at the end of WWII. THEN came Truman and the rest of his greedy pals!
Ike was about peace and US safety for its people. “Beware” he said of the Military industrial complex.
Those after him were about NOTHING but WAR someplace, almost anyplace but inside the USA. Democrats AND Republicans. War on this and that, even “poverty”.
Then we get the ultimate GREEDY LOSER: OBAMA and look what we have NOW! OPEN AGRESSIONS against those with whom the NEW WORLD ORDER has issues!
EVEN our own people!
THIS GOVT. is NOT the Govt. that the founding Fathers and my many patriotic ancestors had in mind. IT IS NOW AN EVIL EMPIRE in the making!
So MANY, MANY people of the world hate and distrust the USA… except those govt. official$$ who want the NEW WORLD ORDER. Cameron, Hollande, Merkle, ETC … You know who they are.
ASK Gert WILDERS if he agrees with what these 2 young people are saying???