James Bloodworth

Mother Agnes has pulled out of the Stop the War conference. And yet she would have fitted in so well

The Stop the War Coalition is a curious organisation. It isn’t so much opposed to war as has accrued a sorry reputation for supporting the other side in every conflict it has pretended to oppose.

Whereas at one time you would be barred from speaking-platforms if you supported a fascist regime, because of the peculiarities of anti-imperialist politics you are likely today to receive top billing at a StWC event not in spite of your atrocious politics but because of them – so long as you are sufficiently bien pensant about United States foreign policy.

In this respect, Mother Superior Agnes Mariam de la Croix fitted the bill to a tee. A Catholic nun working in Syria who describes herself as an advocate of peace and reconciliation, Our Lady was due to speak at the Stoppers’ annual conference later this month. She withdrew over the weekend, however, after a storm of protest over her pro-Assad take on the Syrian civil war.

Mother Agnes is the Syrian equivalent of one of Hitler’s brown priests. She is on the record as saying that the video of the August 21 sarin gas attack on Ghouta in Damascus by the regime of Bashar al-Assad was staged by the Syrian opposition. In her 50-page dossier on the atrocity, she claimed that the corpses of gassed children that appear in the video were not really corpses at all, but rather ‘seem mostly sleeping’ and ‘under anaesthesia’. Mother Agnes told me:

‘Vidéos no. 1-6-11-13 and others related are fake, staged and prefabricated. Saying this I do NOT incriminate anybody and do not innocent anybody. I have no expertise in the matter of chemical attacks but in the videos that are proposed to our visioning I have detected sufficient evidences, especially that some victims are children abducted from the Lattakia mountains.’

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