Who Are We? We Are Many!

A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD
A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD

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.

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Down in Ukraine

The debris of a jet engine from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is seen near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk. (IMAGE: REUTERS/MAXIM ZMEYEV)
The debris of a jet engine from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is seen near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk. (IMAGE: REUTERS/MAXIM ZMEYEV)

It was not only an airliner that was shut down in Ukraine, but the last vestige of the post-Cold War global order, and the popular myth regarding the containability of “local” conflicts. In today’s hyper-connected world, conflict anywhere is a conflict everywhere, for spillovers are unavoidable and containability a myth.

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Why Is Nobody Saying The Obvious: Putin Destabilized Ukraine

Why Is Nobody Saying The Obvious: Putin Destabilized Ukraine – Forbes.

President Obama did indeed manage to hit the reset button on US-Russian relations, though I am not sure if empowering Putin and return to Cold War politics was the intended result. We have already seen how this situation played out in Syria. Now let’s see what’s in store for the Ukraine. It may not get as ugly, but it won’t be nice.