An open letter to a man who called me a “bot.”

     Unfortunately, this is the problem. Without any real research or conversation with me, you have dismissed me as a “bot.” My page is open to the public. I’ve been on Facebook since 2008. When I showed my son your comment, he laughed. “Wow mom, that’s amazing! This guy thinks you’re a bot?! He thinks you opened a Facebook account before the war, and then posted thousands of pictures of your family and friends, your garden, your bees, your home improvement projects, your outfits of the day, the food you cook, the food you eat, and the haflis you’ve attended, even our church festival, all so you could discredit the U.S. government’s narrative about Syria? Wow, that’s some serious deep state sh*t!”
      It’s kind of funny, but it’s also not. I’m a real person, a Syrian person. I have a brother and sister who were born and raised in Syria and still live there today. I’ve been to Syria four times since Bashar Al Assad became president. I know the country. I know the government. I know what life is and was like there, before, during, and after the war. My family were eyewitness to events that were misrepresented by the U.S. government and media from the very beginning of the war.
     You say you know our government has lied. In fact, Colin Powell went before the U.N. prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and used forged documents and lies to garner support for the invasion. But because you don’t trust Putin/Iran, you’ll throw your support behind the U.S. government. Part of what you’re missing here is that it is the U.S. government that is the aggressor in Syria. Iran and Russia were not involved militarily until after the U.S.-backed rebels started a war.
     I have firsthand knowledge of Syria. I have done years of research. The article you reference and use against me may very well have a different opinion than mine, but I may have cited it to show that even then, the facts support my position. I don’t know because you don’t want to discuss anything with a “bot.” In less than an hour, you have come to a conclusion that what you’ve believed all along must be true and dismissed me as not real.
     I would say to you, that’s cold comfort for the millions of Syrians dead and injured, displaced from their homes because of U.S. policy. You certainly are contributing to a system wherein the U.S. government collects our tax dollars, lies to us about what’s going on in a foreign country, and then uses those lies to justify squandering our money.
     Our government destroys other peoples’ lives, while simultaneously denying us any benefit from our money – lower taxes, or lower deficits or debt, universal health care, education for our children, support for our veterans or the elderly, infrastructure repair, border security, you name it. Whatever you want to see for our country, we’re repeatedly told we can’t afford it, while our government arms and trains foreign radicals and mercenaries to secure natural resources of countries halfway around the world.
     And who benefits? Oil companies, weapons suppliers, private contractors like Blackwater, and reconstruction firms. This is U.S. foreign policy and I stand against it.