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I think that they should start by informing themselves and understanding the complexity of the Syrian revolution, recognizing the legitimate demands of the Syrian people, understanding the long history of dictatorship in Syria, building alliances and networks with Syrians who are on the ground but also Syrians in the diaspora.

I think that Syrian migrants and the Syrian refugees in general should play a major role in building those movements in the United States and Europe and other places. So building a grassroots global coalition to put pressure on the Syrian regime and Russia and other players to put an end to the war in Syria and remove the Syrian dictator from power.

That has to be done in many different forms. I think that grassroots movements in the past have been very creative and powerful, and there are numerous examples; the Vietnam antiwar movement, the movement against South African apartheid, the more recent Palestinian struggle and global boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) campaign, that we should learn from.

I think the starting point is to have an open and sincere conversation with Syrian activists who, because of the war and because of the revolution, have been exiled and are present in almost every society on earth. Many of them were involved to different degrees with the grassroots movements in Syria. The European and US left could benefit and learn from those Syrians, while strategizing to build a coalition that unites the antiwar movement in the United States with Black Lives Matter, women and LGBT movements, and the BDS movement.

I think we need to think about Syria and the Arab world in the long term. It’s going to be a long struggle unfortunately. The counterrevolution is currently winning and the revolution is in many ways besieged, like many cities and villages in Syria. So the question is how do we break that siege and how do we make the voices of the Syrians on the ground heard? How do we translate the struggles of the Syrians to Western audiences that don’t necessarily speak the language? I don’t mean by that speaking Arabic but rather the political and cultural language and the way that people are struggling and fighting back and resisting.

Oftentimes they’re not necessarily familiar with those strategies, and because of the newness of the Arab revolt and the specificity of Arab dictatorship and Syrian dictatorship, people in Syria have come up with new strategies and new tactics that are not necessarily known in the West. That’s making the formation of solidarity between the grassroots Western movement and the Syrian people more difficult. I think that should be the entry point, trying to build a public sphere where Syrians can have their voice heard to explain the conflict and the revolution to Western audiences.

The Western grassroots movement should be more humble in understanding and supporting the Syrian people. It’s not going to be easy, we should think about the long term. We should understand the nature of the counterrevolutionary movements and avoid easy explanations through conspiracy theories or “anti-imperialism,” whose analytic tools don’t function the same way anymore.

The entry point to building a coalition is not asking a set of demands from the Syrian opposition and the people who are struggling in the region, but rather understanding the difficulty of operating in Syria and the Arab region more generally. Not denigrating Syrians because they are too Islamist or too religious or not secular enough or not feminist enough and so on and so forth, but rather understanding how feminism in that region functions, without bringing the orientalist clichés. Understanding that Islam can be also emancipatory and that pious people have also rights to a politics of dignity.

That’s a big agenda and a difficult movement to build but I think we can see some of that emerging in the West and in the United States. For example, there is more and more fragmentation in the antiwar movement. Part of the antiwar movement is opposed to foreign intervention while ignoring completely the violence of the Russian intervention in Syria or the violence of the Syrian regime. That kind of obsolete politics should be opposed and this is why I think that a new antiwar movement should emerge.

Likewise, Syrians who are in the diaspora should also understand the struggle of Black Lives Matter for example and support that, understand that the struggle against the police state in the United States is a continuation of their struggle, and the migrant struggle in France against xenophobic parties is also a continuation of their struggle in France and Britain and Germany and so on and so forth. Basically, the question is how do we make that kind of global movement, how do we make those connections and translate each other, and understand the priorities of the different struggles, to build a multi-layered horizontal movement that addresses all these different questions.

I think that’s necessary in the context of the economic crisis; of the xenophobic parties emerging in the West; also of the jihadist groups that have gained momentum not only in Syria but the entire region. The momentum of some of the old discourses such as clashes of civilization and a Western war against Islamic fundamentalists and so on should be opposed. Instead we should find the commonalities between the West, Syria, and the Arab world; and make connections between the labor movement and the antiwar movement and the antiracist movement and so on and so forth.