With Israel's attack on Syria, a key Iranian ally and the West's growing intervention in North Africa, the geographical reach of war is widening dangerously

Lindsey German: 

 "Israel has become increasingly worried at the civil war in Syria and at weapons 'falling into the wrong hands'. Yet the paradox here is that groups have been armed and funded by Middle East and western regimes that want to overthrow Assad in Syria."

 And so she implies that those armed groups (who haven't been funded by Western regimes, the lack of funding forcing them to turn to the Gulf states,etc.) are a bad thing, without having the courage so to say. And to make everything about Iran, about the real threats to it from the West not its support for Assad's repression, as with the illustrative photo, is a further disrespect to those Syrians that have had the courage to take on their government. I could further criticise her for opening with two paragraphs of ZOMG Look At The Coincidence, or say that "The target of the attack was a plant near Damascus and convoys of weapons heading to the Lebanese border", which is to accept at face value the Syrian government claim that there was any attack on a 'plant' (I assume this is the same as the 'research centre'). And then she reaches no formal conclusion, and drifts off to talk about something else. As if she doesn't care about Syria at all.

 Though crazy mash-up of the day still goes to one Jon Robinson.[http://www.socialistunity.com/the-swps-internal-regime-and…/] I don't think he's noticed that there does seem to be something of a range of opinions in the SWP on Syria, with some like Judith Orr and Alex Callinicos seeming as concerned about Western intervention as about overthrowing Assad. But as someone comments, "I’m not a defender of the SWP leadership in the current debate about its practice, but with this piece you can really hear the bottom of the barrel being scraped."