Comments on the Arab Summit and the Syrian crisis continued through writers’ op-eds this week.
In state-owned daily Al-Ahram, Morsi Attallah wrote that although it might seem like talks on the strikes have cooled down, there are indicators that something related to the operations in Syria is still unclear, especially in terms of reactions to the US-led strikes.
As such, Attallash argued that the issue is wider than standing with Bashar Al-Assad or with the armed opposition, and that President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi gave a “prescription” for the Syrian crisis, speaking at the summit about the need to include the Syrian people in the decision-making process amid unlimited escalating tensions between international powers.
For Tarek Al-Sheikh, the summit did not seem to present a significant coalition, as participants held different stances on a number of issues, including which power they support in Syria. This division and weakness, according to the writer, is the reason behind the West’s easy manipulation of the Arab world.
Al-Ahram’s Hany Assal picked up on a detail in Al-Sisi’s speech which was subject to mockery on social media by users who thought the president wrongly pronounced the word “ballistic” in Arabic. Given that the term used by Al-Sisi was correct but uncommon, Assal took the opportunity to slam his opponents. To him, those opponents are the Muslim Brotherhood, which he called “naïve” and “idiotic.”
Meanwhile in the privately-owned Al-Shorouk newspaper, writers focused on Syria. Talal Salman opined that not only did the “tripartite aggression” on Syria use as an excuse, with no proof, the use of chemical weapons, but it also coincided with the Arab Summit in order to spare Arab leaders from responsibility and leave them to deal only with the results of the strikes.
Talal further argued that the summit was controlled by Saudi Arabia, making it impossible to have a strong voice rejecting the strikes on Syria or the US-Israeli interference in the Arab world.
The newspaper’s Editor-in-chief Emad El-Din Hussein wrote about those “surprised” by a lack of Arab condemnation of the strikes, saying they were detached from reality. To Hussein, everyone is guilty, from Iran to Al-Assad to Russia to Washington.
“Don’t cry over Syria, cry about the Arabs,” wrote Rasha Yehya for the private Al-Bawaba News, saying the strikes on Syria took place “while [Arabs] were asleep…[as Arabs] stand with hands tied in front of the fate of a sister country.”
