Justin Raimondo's Syria conspiracy theory: Israel behind uprising

Paleo-conservative blogger Justin Raimondo of the website antiwar.com has written a column "speculating" that Israel is behind the uprising in Syria and charging that protesters (whom he calls "armed gangs"), and not the Assad regime, are responsible for the violence. (Read here.) Raimondo writes:

With the Palestinians about to declare their independent state, and the UN ready to endorse it, the temptation to create some kind of diversion is likely to take hold of the Israeli leadership. Indeed, I would speculate it already has. Those "armed gangs" didn’t come out of nowhere, and it wouldn’t be the first time the Israelis demonstrated how far their reach extends inside Syria.

Raimondo, after thus "speculating" about Israeli culpability for the Syrian conflict, goes on to further speculate about Israel's motives and about American involvement.

Syria’s ally, Iran, is the real target of what looks to me like a coordinated effort to sow chaos in the region: the idea is to draw the Iranians into a proxy war in support of the regime, and lay the groundwork for an all-out US-Israeli attack on Tehran. The encirclement of the Iranians is proceeding apace, with the Israelis on the front line, the Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan. With Israel’s powerful lobby in the US relentlessly demanding that Washington "do something" about the Iranians, and the growing deluge of phony "intelligence" supposedly proving they have an active nuclear weapons program, it seems like just a matter of time before the fuse is lit and the region explodes. Obama’s demand that Assad step down is a giant step forward on this road.

Oddly, considering the seriousness of Raimondo's charges, he offers no evidence of their truth beyond his imputation of Israel's motive, i.e. that it might want to overthrow Assad to facilitate war against Iran. One could say that Raimondo takes quite a risk by putting his reputation on the line to promote a conspiracy theory for which has no evidence other than his speculation that it may be so. But that is Raimondo's reputation and his stock in trade. He reaches the conclusions which suit with his ideological bias, then states that, while he cannot prove his conclusions true, they certainly make sense to him.

I suggest that Raimondo ask the Syrian people how much sense his conspiracy theories make. That Raimondo rhetorically throws the Syrian protesters to the wolves of the Assad regime by accusing them of being "armed gangs" and Zionist dupes, and that he rationalizes this position as being anti-war, show that peace advocates are sometimes not the humanitarians they claim to be.