All religions are suffering in the Middle East mess

 In which Eamonn McCann turns into a fucking loon. I don't think there's any element of this story that's true.*

 'In September last year, the Christian village of Saidnaya near Damascus was overrun by Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the multitude of groups fighting to overthrow the Assad dictatorship. Local people begged for and were given weapons by a Syrian army base. They then drove the Islamist rebels out. Now the US was threatening to bomb pro-Assad forces in response to a poison gas attack attributed to Assad's army. The Saidnaya Christians believed with reason that they might well be among the targets.

 "We gave you St Paul," one Christian fighter told a British news programme. "You bomb us in return."

 A Russian-brokered deal led to cancellation of the bombing. Otherwise, the US might well have bombed a Christian village because it had fought off Islamist extremists.'

*Clay Claiborne had the details. "First Assad deployed his troops and tanks at the convent on a hill in Qalamoun. Then they started bombing civilians in Qalamoun from that convent. This forced the FSA to attack the Assad forces there to stop them from slaughtering people."

[http://claysbeach.blogspot.co.uk/…/how-fsa-attack-on-conven…]