As soon as leftwing Tunisian leader Chokri Belaid was assassinated, his negative position towards the Syrian revolution was widely broadcasted, for multiple purposes that may not always be innocent. Indeed, Belaid did not have great appreciation for the Syrian revolution and the many victims who have given their lives for its sake, and went even beyond that by surmising that it is a conspiracy manufactured by incessantly-scheming external parties! It was striking that this view of Belaid received so much attention, possibly as much as his struggle and history – which culminated with his murder – did. The fact of the matter is that Belaid's stance on the uprising of the Syrian people does not at all detract from the pain resulting from his assassination, or solidarity with his family, his party and the Tunisian factions that are standing up to Islamist tyranny. It also does not diminish at all the fears of power in Tunisia remaining in the hands of the obscurantist forces currently at the helm there. But in the same sense, and to the same extent, the fact that Chokri Belaid was killed in this confrontation should not render every word he uttered above reproach and absolutely correct. Otherwise, we would be falling into some kind of adulation that neither befits him nor befits our minds. From this angle, one can proceed to say that Belaid's stance on the Syrian revolution resembles that of his killers towards him and his record: To be sure, both stances are built on the same conspiratorial and superficial elements that do not hesitate to murder when murder is an option. For when Belaid attributed the Syrian revolution to foreign entities, he did not realize that Rachid Ghannouchi, the Sheikh of Ennhada (Renaissance Party) in his country, would blame the ongoing popular protests in Tunisia ... on France! Meanwhile, Belaid's opinion has possibly given an extreme sample of the disparity between the state of one Arab country and that of another, and the stage of one revolution compared to another. For one thing, those who completed their revolutions to find themselves facing the Islamists and their regime, as is the case in Tunisia and Egypt, are in a different situation that those who are still in the midst of revolution, and concerned with finding ways to have the various factions fighting a common enemy agree among one another. This is precisely the case in Syria. At the level of Tunisia, if we translate the disregard of this fact while slipping instead into a simplified position opposed to the Syrian revolution, the outcome would be defending the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, because he was the barrier blocking the Islamist “conspiracy" that brought Ghannouchi, Jebali and their companions to power in Tunisia. Of course, this is not what Belaid intended, having struggled and sacrificed in his battle with the Ben Ali regime, before he lost his life fighting the regime of Rachid Ghannouchi. However, a coolheaded judgment of Belaid's views, in the most generous interpretation, can only lead us to regret the happening of the revolution in Tunisia, and the “Arab Spring" in its totality. While the deceased luminary did not intend that, many others like him, politically and ideologically, in Syria and Lebanon and elsewhere, had indeed said it and meant it. There is no doubt that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and former presidents, Mubarak of Egypt, Yemen's Saleh and Tunisia's Ben Ali, and above them Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, were the founders of this way of looking at things and of judging history.
