Watch the Press TV video 

by Kevin Barrett

In the background of this the al-Nusra rebel Group in Syria, financed and supported with equipment and training by certain Western and Arab countries, has confessed to being a part of al-Qaeda. Syria is now urging the United Nations to classify the al-Nusra Front as an al-Qaeda-linked group. Syria has always maintained that the bulk of fighting and atrocities in Syria are being conducted by these extremist foreign entities funded by a coalition of enemy countries and that there is no civil war as Western media are leading their populations to believe.
Press TV has interviewed Dr. Kevin Barrett, author and political commentator, Madison about this issue. The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Should we expect the UNSC (United Nations Security Council) to respond positively to this Syrian request?
Barrett: I doubt it. Unfortunately, the United Nations and the leading powers that dominate the United Nations – of course, the US and its NATO allies – are very hypocritical in the way they deal with so-called al-Qaeda.
On the one hand they pretend that al-Qaeda is some sort of jihadist group that wants to destroy the United States, which is why it is OK to run all over the world murdering people with drone attacks. That’s all supposedly part of this emergency of global war against al-Qaeda.

And yet in Syria, which is the main place where we have people who are declaring themselves to be al-Qaeda actually fighting and conducting terrorist attacks, it seems that the big global institutions like the US, NATO and the UN are perfectly happy to not only allow this so-called al-Qaeda radical Islamic group to be wreaking havoc in Syria and destabilizing the Syrian government, but they are actually arming them.
So it will be really interesting to see how the West deals with this situation now that the al-Nusra Front is actually declaring itself to be a part of al-Qaeda.

Press TV: From day one the United States has said it only wants to support moderate groups such as the FSA (Free Syrian Army) according to it, which is moderate. How do you respond to such an argument?
Barrett: The fact of the matter is that the people who were doing most of the fighting in Syria are these people who are calling themselves linked to al-Qaeda.
And the weapons that are going to this so-called insurgent coalition are ending up mainly in the hands of these people.
And of course they’re not really fighting for a kind of a big anti-imperialist Islamic revolution, although a few of them actually believe that. This is all part of a destabilization operation aimed at Syria and the Middle East designed to break Syria up into pieces according to the ‘Yinon Plan’ (Zionist plan for the Middle East) that was drafted in Israel several decades ago.

So this idea that there are good moderate groups blowing up schools and mosques and so on in Syria and then there are also some bad groups, and that somehow the US is going to make sure that the weapons are only going to the nice moderate groups, is really a charade.

The hypocrisy of these Western powers is just getting way out of control.