Ms. Rania Khalek recently described the Assad regime’s methods as “overwhelming” force. This underwhelming euphemism is only one more of her mealy-mouthed apologies for collective punishment of civilians living in areas outside of regime control. Justly outraged, activists in both the solidarity movements for the Palestinian and the Syrian struggles for self determination have been publicly critical of Ms. Khalek’s moral failures.

Ms. Khalek claims she is being blacklisted for “differences of opinion” about the “war in Syria.”

First it needs to be said that no one in the solidarity movement with the democratic struggle against Assad has power enough to blacklist Ms. Khalek. Our movement has been fighting a years-long uphill struggle against the slander of the democratic revolution. The slander campaign has come from all corners of the liberal and left media, and Ms. Khalek has been one of its leading voices. Overwhelming evidence about Assad’s crimes against humanity is now slowing turning the tide against the apologists. It is the evidence that the Assad regime is brutally murdering hundreds of thousands that is hurting Ms. Khalek’s career. She is not being shut down by a black list; her career is being shattered by the hard truths she has been consistently denying.

But to be clear, on principle, people who apologize for genocide should be shamed into silence. Public shame is the correct response to such moral failure.

Differences of opinion about events in Syria abound, even among those of us who unconditionally support the democratic and human rights of Syrians, but for Ms. Khalek to paint her position as merely a difference of opinion implies she shares our values.

Since Ms. Khalek is silent about the regime’s atrocities, to grant she is a staunch defender of human rights would require we granted her ignorance of the regime’s “overwhelming” violations of human rights.

Can we really believe Ms. Khalek just doesn’t know?

Let us assume Ms. Khalek were simply ignorant, or grossly naïve. Under this assumption, we could acknowledge an honest difference of opinion about events in Syria. We would have to say that her opinion wasn’t based on a knowledge of the facts, but it would be wrong to equate ignorance with moral failure. And perhaps this is the meaning of Ms. Khalek’s defense; perhaps she is saying that she is ignorant of the regime’s massive crimes against humanity.

Reading Ms. Khalek’s writings on Syria certainly does give the impression Ms. Khalek knows nothing about places such as Sednaya prison. Ms. Khalek certainly does dismiss without mention overwhelming evidence that for six years now Syrians have been fighting and dying for democracy, both in armed and unarmed struggle. So Ms. Khalek certainly could point to her own articles as proof of ignorance.

If Ms. Khalek were simply ignorant, the shame would be ours for being so hard on her.

Ms. Khalek, however, has been cavorting with the regime, and the reports on the regime’s war crimes are now so numerous and so widely corroborated, and her writings so consistently pro-regime, that it is impossible to grant Ms. Khalek patience for being ignorant.

Her protests notwithstanding, Ms. Kahlek is not being shamed for condemning atrocities committed by Al Queda, or for pointing to the sordid history of the United States and the Saudi monarchy in sponsoring violent sectarian forces, but Ms. Khalek can do better then to describe Assad’s bombing of schools, hospitals, and aid convoys, as “overwhelming” force in the fight against “terrorism”. Children in schools, doctors and nurses, and aid workers are not terrorists, right Ms. Khalek?

There is a hard fact against which all who speak about Syria can be judged. It is the anvil against which the writing careers of the ignorant, the deceitful or the morally bankrupt are shattered: Assad is first and foremost responsible for the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Assad is burning Syria. Given the overwhelming evidence, any failure to acknowledge this hard fact is a moral failure.

Assad is by far and away the number one terrorist in Syria, the terrorist who is destroying the country, and it defies the imagination to believe Ms. Khalek isn’t aware of this hard truth.

Anyone reading about events in Syria and making a decision to condemn the Assad regime for war crimes and crimes against humanity, can either believe many thousands of individual testimonies, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Physicians for Human Rights and the United Nations, or they can believe vicious fools such as Vanessa Beeley or the somewhat more sophisticated — slick — Ms. Khalek, and their shrinking band of sycophants and apologists.

— David A. Turpin Jr. via Facebook