Idealists are not naive by definition but, when they are, they are ripe for exploitation as propaganda stooges.
So wrote the businessman whom Catherine Connolly met in Syria in response to a seven-year-old girl’s tweet during the Battle of Aleppo. The little girl had written that Bashar al-Assad would, one day, have to face his maker for killing her friends.
In a disturbing interview with the Sunday Independent 12 days ago, the presidential candidate was asked if she could remember the businessman’s name. She replied that she did not have it to hand.
This may jog her memory.
His name is Fares al-Shehabi. When Connolly met him during “a fact-finding” trip with Clare Daly and Mick Wallace in June 2018 he was a member of the Syrian parliament, enthusiastically supporting Assad’s repressive Russia-backed regime. He subsequently lent an insight to his mentality when untrue rumours circulated in 2020 that a prominent female journalist had been “raped and left for dead”, and he joined an online pile-on pronouncing that to be the fate of traitors.
In a disturbing interview with the Sunday Independent 12 days ago, the presidential candidate was asked if she could remember the businessman’s name. She replied that she did not have it to hand.
This may jog her memory.
His name is Fares al-Shehabi. When Connolly met him during “a fact-finding” trip with Clare Daly and Mick Wallace in June 2018 he was a member of the Syrian parliament, enthusiastically supporting Assad’s repressive Russia-backed regime. He subsequently lent an insight to his mentality when untrue rumours circulated in 2020 that a prominent female journalist had been “raped and left for dead”, and he joined an online pile-on pronouncing that to be the fate of traitors.
Continue @ Irish Times.
Cannot access the rest of the article as it is behind a paywall, Anthony.
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DeleteJust done it and read the article. Thanks, Anthony.
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