The Atlantic Council on Syria.

From Frederic C. Hof, resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East:

If Netanyahu’s response [“we’re keeping the Golan forEVER, K-Mart shoppers”] was regrettable, the attempt itself was ironic. The Syrian defense minister who presided over the territorial loss [of the Golan Heights] in 1967 and the Syrian president who chose violent repression of his people over negotiating the return of real estate in 2011 share the same last name.^[1]

Yes. Incredible irony.

Civilization on the march.

Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian people certainly chose violent resistance when it came to the presence of tens of thousands of foreign jihadi scum from Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, France, Sweden, Xinjiang, and Iraq, among other places, all financed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Britain, and, of course, the United States. Repression is what leaders do to their own people for their own purposes, like to criminalize free speech to stay in power, like, um, German, France, and the U.K. But . . . it’s hardly “repression” when foreigners, or even locals, take up arms to turn your country into a benighted Salafist cesspool and you do more than say "Oh, dear."

But the Atlantic Council wants to sell the “a regime personifying corruption, incompetence and brutality”^[2] angle so legitimate defense against invasion and insurrection is now “repression.” According to this view, Stalin engaged in it when the Red Army fought the Wehrmacht and its Vlazov allies.

Note to Frederic Hof. This is what the Syrian people think of Assad’s “repression”:

Notes
^[1] "What Bibi Should Have Said About the Golan Heights." By Frederic C. Hof, Newsweek, 4/22/16.
^[2] Id.