Great in-depth research on your part.
That said, it’s safe to say that anyone opposed to the Assad regime would have had a problem with Gabbard.
The Democrat connections behind this are telling. Syria is a complex entity with warring sides, including Muslim against Muslim, even now, and to include our US' circa 2K troops still there.
It was amazing to me, when searching with a couple of different tools, to see how widely this story was disseminated across much media, and yet how difficult to track down a rather obscure rabbi, probably from New York. And odd that a Turkish paper would be among the progenitors of the coverage.
Given the prominence of "Jewish" in so much of the coverage, and given that the larger minority of Syria is Christian, along with varying Muslim sects, it seemed and continues to seem like some kind of "influencing."