Dr. Ismail Salami: Good Terrorists Versus Bad Terrorists in Syria!

Terrorism is terrorism, and it cannot be defined otherwise, unless the interests of one party tilt the scale in disfavor of another, and the dichotomization of the terrorists in Syria into good and bad by the West, casts doubt on its claim on democracy. In a somber political tone, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out as "absolutely unacceptable"the West's support for the terrorists in Syria, in his exclusive interview with Russia Today. Lavrov said the West has divided the terrorists into "bad" and "acceptable," throwing its support behind the latter. "It's absolutely unacceptable, and if we follow this logic, it might lead us to a very dangerous situation, not only in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world, if our partners in the West would begin to qualify terrorists as bad terrorists and acceptable terrorists," the Russian foreign minister said. The dichotomization of such a grave issue by the West is almost nothing new. The delisting of MKO, a long considered terrorist group by Washington, is in line with this process of re-defining well established concepts and terms by the West. Paradoxically, the MKO has been supported by Washington even when it was on the terrorist list. They even received their training at the hands of the Bush administration. In an enlightening article, Seymour Hersh showed that US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) trained members of the Iranian Mujahideen e Khalq (MKO) at a secretive site in Nevada from 2005 to at least 2007. According to Hersh, MKO members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office." In a separate interview, a retired four star general said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of MKO members in Nevada by an American involved in the program. He said that they got "the standard training program in communication, cryptography, small unit tactics and weaponry. That went on for six months. They were kept in little pods." He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration's global war on terror.