No amount of chaos in the Middle East can ever help fulfill the wet dreams of some Israeli politicians, namely: to drive the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza into neighboring Jordan and Egypt, respectively. The Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are here to stay. There will be no second Nakba.
To this date, any attempt at describing Assad’s war against the majority Sunni population in major swaths of the country as genocide is met with such pushback by all sorts of people, even though in certain towns and villages, the massacres did lead to the elimination of the local Sunni population, through massacres that did not spear women and children, and ethnic cleansing. Moreover, eliminating the local Sunni population was clearly the intention here. So, legally speaking, there is a case for the claim that the pro-Assad militias are guilty of “acts of genocide.” ISIS seems intent on perpetrating such acts as well.
Continue reading “Of Syria, Gaza and Genocide – real and imagined “
10,000 Bodies: Inside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Crackdown – WSJ.
Caesar’s revelations referred in the WSJ article might seem old by now to those following developments in Syria at it has been reported months ago, but now, it is the U.S. official investigators who have examined the evidence supplied by Caesar and who are corroborating his story. Indeed, an Industrial-scale campaign of mass slaughter is being conducted by the Assad regime against his opponent, a campaign that was unleashed soon after the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, even in its year-long nonviolent phase.
Some people have enough moral sense to criticize Israel, but not to criticize anything that Assad and his supporters have done and are still doing. They see ISIS stoning women and chasing away Christians, but they ignore all evidence and testimony of torture, mass rape and mass murder in Assad’s concentration camps. They ignore evidence of collaboration between ISIS and Assad. They ignore Iran’s role in the current mayhem in Syria, Iraq and Gaza, and advocate engagement with her. They defend Russia and ignore her duplicity in war crimes in Syria and Ukraine. Clearly these people cannot truly be concerned with human rights. Their stand by the Palestinians at this stage seems motivated more by ideology than any sense of moral solidarity – an ideology that put Israel and America, and sometimes the West as a whole, at the center of all evil designs in the world; an ideology that, in essence, covets the power that these countries have and longs to appropriate it, rather than be truly dedicated to holding all equally accountable for their misdeeds.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 