Syria once stood at the heart of the intellectual history of the Levant and the Arab world; a land w

Syria once stood at the heart of the intellectual history of the Levant and the Arab world; a land where education, scholarship and some of the region's earliest institutions of learning helped shape generations.

And now, in the name of a so-called "revolution" (yeah right) women are being told that entire fields of higher education are off-limits to them.

Law. Economics. Sociology. Engineering. IT. Mechatronics. Maritime engineering.

This is not 'liberation". It is not "democracy". It is not a revolution expanding freedoms. It is the systematic shrinking of them. It is everything opposing freedoms.

The irony is almost obscene: those who sold the world a story about "freeing Syria" are now presiding over a system that tells Syrian women what they are supposedly fit to study, where they can work and which doors they are allowed to enter.

And the West that spent years lecturing the world about women's rights suddenly discovers an astonishing capacity for silence when the perpetrators fit the geopolitical script.

You cannot bomb, dismantle and remake a society, install extremists who STILL belong to Al-Qaeda's ecosystem of terrorism, call the result "liberation" and then expect the world to ignore what happens to its freedoms.

A revolution that takes rights away is not a revolution. It never was and never will be. It is regression wearing an ill-fitting suit and tie.

Banning women from education is not just hypocrisy. It is a crime against human dignity regardless of who is committing it and regardless of how many Western headlines choose to look away.