In a blog entry that coincided with the
April 2018 missile strikes against Syria in reprisal for the
Douma chemical attack (later published by
Libcom.org and
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières), al-Shami coined the term "'anti-imperialism' of idiots" to denounce the opposition of the Western
anti-war movement to Western intervention (including a
no-fly zone) in favour of the
Syrian opposition in the Syrian civil war, which she contrasted with that movement's "silence on Russian and Iranian interventions" and apparent acceptance of the heavy civilian death toll from the United States strikes to assist the
Raqqa campaign by the
Syrian Democratic Forces in the
war against the Islamic State. Reproaching Western leftists for following their own interests and analysis and for "placing
grand narratives over lived realities", al-Shami accused the "western 'anti-war' left" of selective outrage, blindness to non-Western (i.e.
Russian and
Iranian) imperialism, "deeply authoritarian tendencies" leading to solidarity with "states … rather than oppressed or underprivileged groups", racist ignorance and denial of Syrian
agency in conflating all opposition to Assad with extremists and mercenaries, and colluding with the
far right in
supporting Bashar al-Assad. She later directed her accusations specifically towards
Stop the War Coalition,
Code Pink,
Jeremy Corbyn,
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and
Noam Chomsky, saying "these people will never be allies in liberation struggles". Al-Shami's phrase and arguments were echoed by an open letter of March 2021. The term was adopted by Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian writers to criticise alleged "
campism" on the left during the
Russo-Ukrainian war, with the British journalist
Paul Mason quoting it in his call for "a dis-alignment with the inheritors of
Stalinism" to face the "war being waged against the
collective West", and al-Shami was interviewed on the subject by the Ukrainian magazine
Commons in July 2024. She has credited the local councils (LCCs) of the early stage of the Syrian revolution with "a commitment to decentralized, self-managed forms of organization", emphasising their "independence from … state control". She has stated that the councils and the Syrian uprising as a whole rejected
political factionalism and
vanguard parties. Commenting on the
Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) during the
siege of Kobanî in late 2014, al-Shami called its self-organisation model based on
democratic confederalism "a beacon of light in what's fast becoming a region of darkness" but warned that "anti-authoritarians should not romanticise the Kurdish
Democratic Union Party (PYD)" due to the alleged "authoritarianism of [its] old guard". She decried the relative lack of international support for the Syrian LCCs, attributed this to the "conversion" of
Abdullah Öcalan to
libertarian municipalism, and dismissed the accusations of
sectarianism against the Syrian opposition. Following the
fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, al-Shami opined to a
Ukrainian NGO in January 2025: "Syria today is perhaps the only country in the world where there is some hope", referring to a possible "revival of people's struggles" from the Arab Spring. She said that the
2025 massacres of Syrian Alawites were revenge killings provoked by delays in
transitional justice and denied their sectarian character, while accusing the former Assad regime of "sectarian engineering" and committing a "near-
genocide of the Syrian population". == Books ==