Life under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime is great, if you believe the words of British far-right politician Nick Griffin.
Griffin, a veteran leader in the British National Party (BNP) until he was expelled in October, was in the Syrian capital recently as a guest of the Assad regime, and he tweeted approvingly about what he saw.
Griffin was in Damascus to attend a conference on terrorism and extremism organized by the Syrian Justice Ministry. The Syrian government claims that representatives from more than 80 countries were invited to the conference, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, though it's unclear who these people were. Griffin appears to have been the only Briton in attendance.
It isn't the first time that Griffin has been a guest of Assad's regime. Last year, he took two trips to Syria as part of a group of members of the European Parliament, in what he described as a "peace mission." At the time, Griffin was criticized for meeting only with the Syrian government and not with any rebels.
Griffin enjoyed that trip, too. He shot video showing his hotel pool and declared that "this place is really quite normal." However, he noted that there were explosions in the distance.
Britain's far right and the Syrian regime may seem like odd bedfellows, but there's history here. Griffin has reached out before to international pariahs in the hope of finding common ground: He tried to build contacts within Moammar Gaddafi's Libya during the 1980s, for example, though he was ultimately rebuffed. Syria, for its part, is thought to have sheltered Alois Brunner, a fugitive from Nazi Germany held responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews to death camps, for decades.
Across Europe, far-right groups have expressed support for Assad's government. Hungarian far-right party Jobbik has said its members "stand for the Assad government," while Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of France's National Front, has said that it is “not abnormal for the Syrian state to defend itself." Their position aligns neatly with that of Russia, a big backer of the Syrian regime.
In the time between Griffin's 2013 visit to Syria and his most recent, more people have gravitated toward that line of thinking. Some analysts have even suggested working with the Syrian government to combat the Islamic State militant group — a statement that would have been unthinkable just a year ago, given the human rights abuses Assad's forces have been accused of.
For Griffin, however, its unlikely that there will be any vindication. Having lost his seat in the European Parliament and watching the populist and more-moderate U.K. Independence Party steal what little support the BNP had, Griffin was expelled from his party in October. He was accused of attempting to "destabilize" the BNP. His trip to Syria won him little praise from other Twitter users:

