Zionist Attempts to Distort the National Memory... About Kosach and Khaled Al-Roushd we are talking!

The subject, in our view, is greater than these two persons/instruments, and directly related not only to history (though history here has a great importance), but also to immediate targeting which is – in a significant part of it – related to Syria in the present and the near future. Therefore, we will somewhat extend in the subject here, to uncover basic lies that permeated the two episodes of the program (because the space here will not suffice to uncover all lies), but we will follow this article with a series of other articles in each of them we will shed light on a specific aspect of the history of our Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party, from 1924 until the Unity of Syria and Egypt by the year 1958 and the position of the party of it.

The Origination and Working Class

By distorting the history of the working class in Syria and Lebanon, Al-Roushd and his guest pave the way for main lies they want to promote through the program, which can be summarized initially by the following statement: (The Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon was created by the Jews and Armenians, a party of sectarian and nationalist minorities in its origin and even in its entire history. It is a party that has never been popular and public in any day).

In order to reach the above conclusion, it was necessary to be said that the Communist Party originated in our region in the absence of the labor movement, if any, it was confined to Jews and Armenians... As a response to that, we will suffice here with some figures and statistics – and there are many of them to anyone who seeks a careful scientific research:

- The number of textile workers in Syria and Lebanon at the beginning of the twentieth century recorded between (25 - 40) thousand, knitting (5 - 6) thousand workers, (6 - 10) thousands in oil presses, (2 - 3) thousands in tanning workshops, and several thousands more of wage labor in road construction, railways and leather production, (Lutsky, National Liberation War in Syria 1925 - 1927, pp. 37-39).

- The number of workers and craftsmen in Syria in 1937 was between 110 - 130 thousand (ILO, Geneva 1939, vol. 4, p. 514).

- Syrian economists' statistics for the same year [1937] recorded 204 thousand workers and craftsmen, including 33 thousand associated with the industrial sector (Badr al-Din Sibai, Spotlight on Foreign Capital in Syria 1850-1958, pp. 263-403).

- Hundreds of small, medium and large scale strikes by tobacco, textile, electricity, printing and other workers in Syria and Lebanon during the first three decades of the twentieth century, the most famous and powerful strikes of them were the many strikes of tobacco workers in Lebanon and Syria, in addition to: (the strike of the workers of manual looms in Homs, Syria, 1932, when a number of communists in Homs and Damascus were arrested because of their solidarity with that strike; the strike of the electricity workers in 1932, the strike of the printing press workers in Beirut in 1933, in which the workers won and achieved their demands, and it was organized and led by communists... and many other strikes).

In addition, there used to be the celebration of the May Day as a traditional struggle activity, started by the working class very early, 1907 in Bikfaya, Lebanon! These figures are just the tip of the iceberg, and we will expand in details in later article as we stated above. These figures should also be read in the light of another numerical indicator, which is that the population in Syria and Lebanon at the beginning of the century, did not exceed a few hundred thousand, and in 1920 according to various estimates, did not exceed one million and two hundred thousand people.

These figures do not, of course, mean that in Syria and Lebanon in the first three decades of the last century, there was a mature and organized industrial labor movement, but it certainly meant that the working movement existed, and had begun its relatively independent struggle in many places, and that struggle was clearly independent in the places of great concentration of workers. Therefore, the roots of the communists in Syria and Lebanon are not limited to intellectuals sympathetic to the October Socialist Revolution and its great achievements, though it was an importance factor of course, but extends deep in the long-term struggle of the Syrian and Lebanese farmers, workers and craftsmen for a decent life and eight working hours, which began with nineteenth-century manufactures in Syria and Lebanon.

The rudeness of Kosach' lie reached a level that he does not stop at just claiming the nonexistence of a developing working class movement in Syria and Lebanon at the beginning of the [20^th] century, but he adds elsewhere in the interview that “even in 1966, when I was there for the first time, in no way can one talk about the existence of a labor movement at that time»!

The Origin, Minorities, and Arabization of the Party

Before entering into the refutation of lies about minorities in the party, it must be said at the outset that the Communist Party is an international party that does not discriminate people on the basis of national, religious, sectarian, ethnic or gender factors, but stands by the oppressed and exploited in the face of their oppressors, exploiters and looters. This is the party's unwavering humanitarian conviction, and its inalienable principles, which, along with a few other transnational and trans-sectarian parties, have made one of the solid foundations of Syria's unity and independence, and a pillar of national identity and culture in its progressive and humane meanings.

As this is the case, there is nothing wrong with refuting the lies in this context. After the “preliminary bombardment” regarding the working movement, Al-Roushd and his guest move to the next step, by emphasizing that the working movement was non-existent among the Arab population and the “Sunni Arab population” according to the "historical analysis" of Al-Roushd and his guest! In contrast, they claimed, the working movement was confined to Jews and Armenians. Then, they moved to fabricate a lie about the role of Jews and Armenians in the establishment of the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon, by a baseless inflation of the proportion of Armenians in the party at the beginnings; Al-Roushd say that the proportion of the Armenians exceeded 60%, and Kosach speculated more and said the proportion was: even more!

There is no argument that the Armenian Spartak movement was one of the many rings of the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon. But was it of the size described by Al-Roushd and his guest? And was it such at the beginning of the founding of the party?

The best to answer this question is Artin Madoyan himself, the leader of Spartak, and then the leading member of the party, in a speech about the celebration of the first of May 1925, that is, the next year after the founding of the party:

“As for us, the Armenian youth of Spartak, we learned from the press that Arab workers will demonstrate and celebrate in the Crystal Hall in Beirut on the first of May… We did not know anything about the existence of a communist organization among the Arabs. We were about fifty Armenian students and workers… We were overwhelmed by the joy of celebration and the joy of that we will finally meet our Arab comrades. We heard the songs from a far, cars and red flags appeared, I do not remember precisely the number of cars, but they for sure were more than ten cars» (Mohammed Dakroub, the Roots of the Red Oak, 3^rd ed. pp. 92-93).

On the same occasion, and according to the same previous source, Yusuf Yazbek estimated that the number of attendees at the ceremony were between 400 and 500 people. This means that Armenians, according to these figures, did not make up more than 10% of the Communists in Lebanon alone, not to mention the Communists in Syria, which means that their proportion did not exceed, at best – in the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon when it was founded – more than 5%.

Although the percentages that we have deduced here are not fully reliable for an authentic scientific research, in fact we do not care if the ratio was 5% or 95% because the matter for the communists, as we have said, has never been in any time related to sects, nationalities or religions, but it has always to do with the looted people and the looters, but Madoyan's earlier testimony reveals the deliberate and intentional lie that has permeated the program when it dealt with this point.

As for the Jews, they were barely countable on the fingers of one hand, and those were exactly the ones who were targeted by the process of Arabization of the party, which was portrayed by Al-Roushd as if it was Arabization of the party from the Armenians, citing, of course, his lie and the lie of his guest that the Armenians constituted more than 60% of the party's population, which we will address in the following paragraph.

Identification between Armenians and Jews, a Habitual Zionist Behavior!

Since "there is no working movement" and if there is any "it is between Jews and Armenians", and since Armenians made up more than 60 percent of the party, the talk about the history of the Communist Party has come to be, from Al-Roushd's point of view, a talk on the Jews and Armenians in our region. Here, we have to pause for reflecting on the non-innocent identification between Jews and Armenians, and on the emphasize of the similarity of the two historical cases, including the talk of their respective national homeland, massacres, and 'socialist nationalist' thought, but above all, fudging that Jewish migrations between 1881 and 1915 from Tsarist Russia towards Palestine as something similar to Armenian migrations to the south due to the Ottoman massacres, by dropping what is well known about the massacres of Jews in Russia and pushing them towards Palestine, and is revealed by many documents that the same Mr. Kosach has access to, but he wanted to ignore them, and agree to a similarity between the two migrations!

The encouragement and advancement of Jewish immigrants, the Ashkenazi migrations, towards Palestine during that period, was an essential part of the Zionist work, and the later justification of this was also a permanent part of the Zionist work...

Arabization of the Party

Speaking of the Jews, we come to the question of Arabization of the party, which we summarize first of all as a euphemism for the expulsion of the Jews from the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon, who were of a small number countable on one hand, and who were assigned by the Zionist-Trotskyist leadership to oversee the Communists in the East to prevent the development of their struggles.

The program attempted to portray the process as if it were a policy pursued by the Comintern (Third Communist International 1919-1943) to address the assumed problem of nationalistic and sectarian proportions within the Palestinian Communist Party and within the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon.

While we have shown above the invalidity of this supposed problem, the real problem was, in fact, the attempts of penetration by the Zionist-Trotskyite activity to the Communist movement throughout the world, from the Soviet center to our region and other regions. The process of Arabization of the party in Syria and Lebanon, led by Comrade Khaled Bakdash, was concerned with mercilessly and decisively blowing a strike to this particular activity as part of Stalin's overall battle against the Zionist-Trotskyite influence.

It is no wonder that the main witness from which Al-Rushd quotes his words and statements about the role of the Comintern in the Great Syrian Revolution, and on other issues in the history of the party, is precisely Haim (Wolf) Auerbach, the secretary of the Palestinian Communist Party before its Arabization, who came to Palestine in 1922, and who was a "Zionist leftist" before that, and in 1930, during Stalin's war against Trotskyism and Zionism, Auerbach was brought to Moscow, and arrested there because of his connection with the Zionist Trotskyist cells, and hindering the fight against these cells in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

«Psychoanalyses»

To end the dossier on "minorities" and the Arabization of the party, one must stand for a moment with the "psychological analyzes" that have crystallized in the "intelligent" mind of Al-Roushd, with which he transformed from a presenter of the program to a guest who gives his opinion and elaborates it at length. Al-Roushd claims (from his personal experience during his so-called "long life" in Syria) that the Syrian Communist Party did not exist among the "Sunni Arabs" and that "there is not a single prominent figure within the party among them", and that this is due to two factors: religious conservatism in our region, and the absence of any general international consciousness among our peoples. Of course, the other liar Kosach agrees with him, and even says more claiming that this was the case not only in the beginning but also in the period of perestroika (the second half of the 1980s), and he also uses his "personal experience" as proof.

Again, in the face of a blatant lie of this kind (which raises an independent question about the roots of Al-Roushd's infection with the virus of lying and fraud?!), there is no harm to remind that among the first party's founders, comrades Nasser Hadda and Fawzi al-Zaim (who were, by the way, the ones who organized comrade Khalid Bakdash into the party ranks, and Fawzi in particular, whose father, Salah al-Zaim, was a well-known religious Shaikh and publicly  sympathetic with the Communists and their struggles)... No harm also to remember leaders as Najat Kassab Hassan, Mohammed Mahfal, Youssef Faisal, Dhaheer Abdul Samad, Omar al-Sibai, Omar Qashash, Khaled Hamami and Thabit Al-Azzawi... the list goes on and on, does not end and includes a number of heroes and martyrs of the Party in its class and national battles.

The Great Syrian Revolution

We have already referred to the Zionist witness used that Al-Roushd used as a proof in his fiction, and we add here that the narrative that the Comintern hesitated to support the Great Syrian Revolution –because, according to the eccentric interpretations of Al-Roushad: (USSR feared of upsetting the French, British and Americans, because the Soviet Union needed the technology that they have) – It is a narrative that does not withstand, neither in the face of its own argument nor in the face of facts.

Apart from Kosach's own article in Socialist Studies, Issue 12, 1985, entitled "The Syrian Revolution of 1925-1927, the Comintern and Communist Party's position", which Kassioun republished a few days ago, in which he says a complete opposite of what he said in the episode of the TV program – the support provided by the Soviet Union to the Great Syrian Revolution, and the struggles of the Communists, reaching the accomplishment of Syria's independence, are facts that cannot be denied except by a hateful Zionist.

From the midst of that hatred comes Al-Roushd's passage of the lie that Syrian communists "fled" abroad during the revolution!

Indeed, the Communists, despite of their small number at the time, did engaged directly in the struggle, led demonstrations, disobedience and incitement in support of the revolution, even by disseminating party statements among the French soldiers, which resulted in them being arrested (almost the whole party, which was in dozens, was arrested at that time), and infamous military trials were held against the party's members, where they stood steadfastly, solidly and bravely, while they were exposing the colonizer from the tribunals and in front of the masses of young Syrians who attended the trials, and on the basis of those trials, they were exiled in two directions, towards Raqqa, and towards the island of Arwad... That is, their exile by the colonizer, which was because of a direct struggle against it, was turned by Al-Roushd into "escape" from the battlefield!

«Wrinkles of History are not Vulgarized»

The daring of some Zionist footboys on the history of the East which is filled with sincere class, national and democratic struggles, and which is baptized with the blood of the martyrs, and the patience and suffering of the detainees, and the sweating of communists in every arena of the homeland, constitute a direct targeting of their next role in the new Syria, and reflects the fear of these and their commanders, of what will be brought for Syria by the political solution, and of the prospects that will be opened to the political movement in Syria, after the Syrian people fought along a painful path, during which they refined their political consciousness to extents horrifying the enemies of the country and the enemies of its workers… This horror will continue, this horror will turn into reality.