‼️ 🔜 ME201 SCHEDULE CHANGE 👏

🚨🚨🚨 Read this lest I be eaten by marauding dingos. ‼️ Plus: ☞ 🌏👀 Global Eyes Mini

Syrians have been celebrating in Damascus.

🌏👀 Skip down for Global Eyes Mini.⬇︎

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📌🕟‼️⭐️ SCHEDULE CHANGE ‼️💫🌓📌📣

Hey everyone, good news. Tomorrow we’ll be joined by ME101 favorite

Gabi Mitchell

, who will help us make sense of the recent news from Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, and, of course, Israel. But 4:30 pm Paris time is too early for him, so we’ll be meeting at 7:15 PM JERUSALEM TIME which is 6:15 pm Paris time; that’s to say, one hour and 45 minutes later than we usually meet.

DON’T: MEET AT 4:30 PM PARIS TIME

DO: MEET AT 6:15 PM PARIS TIME

Now, I know from experience that no matter how many bright red exclamation points I use, someone just won’t read this and will therefore be very worried that I’ve been eaten by dingos.

If that’s you, just remember: There are no dingos in Paris. So it is very, very unlikely that the dingos have eaten me. Probably, if you read your email carefully, you’ll discover there’s been a schedule change.

This meeting, like last week’s, is open to all subscribers who’ve done the reading. For new people, here’s an introduction to Gabi:

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The reading

(The videos and podcasts are optional, but very interesting.)

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The further reading

If you have time, please also read the articles below. (Read the summaries, at least, if you don’t have time.)

The tactics of the former Assad dictatorship were shaped by Nazi war criminals who fled abroad after World War II, as well as the East German Stasi:

Horrific images have been circulating online since the liberation of Saydnaya Prison in Syria, five floors of which were hidden underground. The images show gaunt, emaciated people, some standing in packed, overcrowded cells. Many prisoners had to be carried out of the building. The liberators also filmed a room where people were huddled in the semidarkness, screaming. Numerous bodies were found with signs of having been tortured to death. Thousands of prisoners were being held in the complex on the day it was liberated, according to media reports.

As many as 15,000 people were extrajudicially executed in the prison between September 2011 and December 2015 alone, according to the human rights organization Amnesty International. Some people on social media see a direct link to the Nazis, in particular, Alois Brunner, a commanding officer in the Nazi paramilitary SS who fled to Syria in 1954. Brunner was a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, who, as one of the architects of the so-called Final Solution, was partly responsible for the persecution, expulsion, deportation and murder of millions of Jews.

Brunner was not the only former SS or Wehrmacht member in Syria, as Noura Chalati from the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin research institution explained. “Many of them were employed directly by the Syrian general staff on one-year contracts, advising the army and the military intelligence service,” she said. Documents show that the general staff was particularly interested in these people because, at the time, they were stateless, from a country that supposedly had no colonial history—and, of course, because of their experience in war, including with methods of mass extermination. “They were valued for their practical experience,” said Chalati, whose research focuses on the relationship between the former East German state security service (Stasi) and Syria’s secret services.

Brunner, who was sentenced in absentia to death for crimes against humanity in France in 1954, arrived in Syria shortly afterward under a false identity. In his book “Fugitives,” about Nazi war criminals who fled abroad, Israeli historian Danny Orbach wrote that Brunner soon got involved in the smuggling of Western arms to Arab countries. In 1959, the then-head of one of Syria’s secret services had Brunner arrested on suspicion of spying and threatened him with life imprisonment, whereupon Brunner revealed his true identity and offered his services to Syrian intelligence. Over the years that followed, Brunner trained intelligence personnel in counterespionage and interrogation techniques. Many infamous Syrian secret servicemen took part in his training courses, including General Ali Haydar, who led the Syrian special forces for 26 years, Ali Douba, head of military intelligence, and Mustafa Tlass, subsequently defense minister for the Assad regime, who was responsible for brutally suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in Hama in 1982, in which as many as 30,000 people were killed. …

Brunner proved useful to Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, who seized power in 1970 and was the father of Bashar Assad. “He knew exactly how to extract and use information, how to manipulate people, what is important for the activities of secret services,” wrote Brunner’s biographer, Didier Epelbaum. “He knew more than any Syrian officer. As a result, he was involved in restructuring the secret service.”

“The deal was protection. In exchange for Nazi know-how. Brunner trained the Nazi secret service, the circle closest to Hafez al-Assad,” explained Aouidj, who was able to shed light on Brunner's final years. He said Brunner was ultimately thrown in prison by the Assad regime in 1996, where he remained until his death, thought to have been in 2002.

I didn’t know this. I did, however, know exactly how evil those prisons were, so I’m not surprised. I was living in Turkey when the revolution began; soon after, refugees began streaming across the border. I began interviewing them.

• “Hama Doesn’t Forget or Forgive.” I wrote this in 2011. One of the two refugees I interviewed for this piece had been tortured to the point of madness. I’ll never forget the way his eyes darted and twitched.

• We know what’s happening in Syria. I wrote this in 2016: “At some point, the world will issue a teary apology to Syrians and there will be memorials to the Syrians and lots of children will hear about the terrible first half of the 21st century, and everyone will ask how this could have happened. If anyone ever says, ‘We didn’t know what was happening to them,’ tell them: Shut up. We did.”

• The Evil Regime: A report from Syria. I wrote this in 2012.

• What Ihan Tanir saw in Syria, parts I, II, and III.¹

None of this was a secret. Tulsi Gabbard must be explicitly asked, under oath, if she took money to defend this regime. She should be reminded—while she’s under oath—that if she did, it will come to light very soon, because it will be in the Assad regime’s newly-opened and apparently meticulous archives.

If she says she didn’t know about these prisons, she should be asked why she was the only one who didn’t. A single conversation with a Syrian would have been enough for her to grasp that this regime was the kind of pure evil we (thank God) see but rarely in history.

Plenty of Westerners took money to help Assad get away with murder. I wrote about some of them here, in 2012. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to learn that Tulsi was recruited by the very firm I discuss in that article.