We were defending British values, say Syria Britons

 These men are heroes. It's easy to cheerlead the Kurds fighting in Kobane, but the Islamophobia which has accompanied the Syrian revolution means those fighting against Assad are all tarred as Islamic extremists.

 "Now rewind to 2013. Back then all anyone could talk about were the thousands of civilians being slaughtered by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. As Syrians demanded their right to freedom and democracy, the government there was using chemical weapons to kill its people.

Meanwhile the government here was considering military action to stop the massacres. Parliament decided not to intervene, but it's within this context that the two British men I've spoken to took it upon themselves to do, they say, what the government couldn't, to defend the people of Syria. Now they're back in the UK and living in fear of arrest."

 Two errors here. Firstly, most of the left was not talking about the civilians killed by Assad, but by the danger the West might do something to stop it, along with sometimes denying that Assad had launched the chemical attacks at all, and parliament never considered action to stop the massacres, Cameron failed to say what action was being proposed which made it easy for the government to lose the vote.