m.bitar,ruba mansour
Whoever wants a civil, sophisticated, progressive, and secular Syria must curb the tide and forces of the fundamentalist Brotherhood in effective, legal, and democratic ways, We do not mean at all the use of violence, dictatorial methods, tyranny, or the suppression of any party, whether fundamentalist or non-fundamentalist, but rather curbing them by presenting a logical and convincing alternative that is acceptable to most of the people.
Factional fundamentalism assassinated the 2011 revolution, just as the Assad regime assassinated the will of the Syrian people and enslaved them, It is not surprising that religious fundamentalism finds fertile ground for its growth under a regime no less violent, criminal, corrupt, and fundamentalist! The corruption of the regime is mainly manifested in theft, exploitation, individualism, and monopolizing the people’s material and moral resources, while the corruption of the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalism is primarily rooted in its intellectual background of racism, reactionism, violence, and dictatorship, in addition to material corruption and its inability to keep pace with civilizational developments, The Muslim Brotherhood is repressive and bloody, with disastrous consequences. These consequences are no different in their catastrophic nature from those of the Assad regime; in fact, they prove to be even worse than Assadism!
There is a direct correlation between the existence of the regime with all its flaws and diseases, and the growth of fundamentalism, The relationship is direct between the existence of fundamentalism and the existence of the regime, and this matter is not difficult to understand. The regime’s civil failure turned it into a fundamentalism, a minority fundamentalism, which provoked another fundamentalism, after the regime transformed the structure of society from a political structure to a religious sectarian structure, In the conflict between the minority fundamentalism and the majority fundamentalism, each occupied a place on the political stage, i.e., a power-sharing arrangement,, Each fundamentalism protected itself with weapons, on one hand, Assad’s brigades, and on the other hand, the battalions of the Takbir mujahideen, They were all violent fighters without reason, and what can we expect from those who lack reason except violence, war, destruction, killing, etc.? They were all barbarians!
The regime’s task was easy, as it only had to outmaneuver religious fundamentalism with some deceptive practices, including the practice of forging legitimate documentation of its existence, such as obtaining 99.99% of the voters’ votes!!!, and also its ability to agree with other fundamentalists on sharing the spoils. Here, some of the regime’s cronies succeeded in getting rich and dragged some of the other fundamentalist cronies with them to get rich. The regime failed intellectually and morally, even in the face of the barbarity of fundamentalism, which the regime’s primitiveness and sectarianism enabled to rise above this regime and threaten it to the point of killing it. The bankrupt Assad regime had nothing left to defend itself with except bullets and sectarianism, not with thought, nor with the rule of law, nor with social justice, equality, freedom, or democracy,The regime was defeated by the weapon it adopted and fought with.
The Assad regime has ruined the country for half a century for personal enrichment, It has corrupted politics, destroyed a party that could have played an important role in society, and destroyed a state project that could have developed into a civil and secular society, It has eliminated thought, speech, and dialogue, justifying this by claiming to protect the regime, which has transformed into a family system that has shaped the country in its own name. Thus, the other fundamentalism was indirectly promoted, not because it was intellectually mature, progressive, or democratic—it was weak and feeble in all areas—but because it was initially stronger than the regime. In the second half of the war, which lasted for about a decade and a half, the situation reversed, The regime fed on the rejection of the other fundamentalist current by some. Those who remained silent and those who became “gray” were not supporters of the regime, but rather opponents of the regime and the armed factions, which were worse than the bad regime itself!