Comments by Western reporters and pundits describing the plight of Ukrainian refugees show a latent, cryptic, casual racism that they are not even aware of.
"These people are like us", "they have blond hair and blue eyes", "these are not Syrian or Iraqi refugees", etc. are some of the comments. In other words, Syrian refugees are "foreign- or other-looking", they are "not like us", they have dark eyes and black hair (even though many northern Syrians and Kurdish people are in fact ethnically Indo-European and have light hair and eye color). But somehow the insidious message is that greater sympathy is owed the Ukrainian refugees because they look more like us than their Syrian or Iraqi partners in misery.
What is forgotten in the ongoing Russian crime against Ukraine is the fact that the monster in Moscow is himself blond and blue-eyed, and not a member of some "lesser" ethnic group daring to mistreat people who look like us. We've seen on occasion "mid-eastern-looking" members of terror groups like Daesh (or ISIS, or the Islamic State) slaughter westerners with light colored hair and eyes. I can't even believe that we have to point out this stupid ignorant attitude by "liberal-minded" journalists. But casual racism aside, we are forgetting something else that is even more important and that is barely mentioned in today's reporting.
It is Vladimir Putin himself, in cooperation with his Syrian alter ego, the dictator Bashar Assad, who for the past 11 years has been finessing the art of mass-killing from the air in his own Syria. For more than a decade, the Russian Air Force has been decimating large urban populations huddled in Syrian cities (Aleppo for example) reduced to rubble, incinerating schools and hospitals, attacking ambulances, driving millions of people out of their country into neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Syrian "technology" assisted the superior Mig and Sukhoi fighter jets by manufacturing "barrel bombs" and dropping them from helicopters over buildings and fleeing refugees. A "barrel bomb" consists of an empty oil barrel filled with ammonium nitrate and such incendiary chemicals, in addition to nails and scarps of sharp metals, that are ignited upon impact. Not to mention the chemical "chlorine" bombs.
Just like Russian soldiers are conducting their war against Ukraine, Syrian soldiers rarely engage in fighting. They "fight" from the safety of long distance artillery pounding rebel positions to a pulp, and only then do they dare advance. That is exactly what the Syrian army did during its long and brutal occupation of Lebanon between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. I personally lived through two sieges of East Beirut, one in the summer of 1978 and then again in the spring of 1981. They would never target Lebanese Resistance positions; instead they would subject civilian areas for days and weeks with incessant shelling, destroying everything, and in fact they never advanced inside these areas because they did not dare engage in street fighting with their opponents.
In the summer of 1978, I had just gone to my graduation in West Beirut, dragging my reluctant parents to attend, and no sooner had we arrived back home that the shelling began. We lived in the basement shelter of our building, running up and down the stairs during lulls to get food and bread, check on our apartments and cars and the neighborhood. I recall we'd walk over rubble made of glass, cement, metal and wood of which apartments are made. In one instance, we were up in the apartment on the 3d floor when Israeli fighter jets flew so low that my mother was seized by panic convulsions. I had to slap her back to reality so we could continue our downward escape. The Israelis and the Syrians had an gentleman's arrangement that Israel would let Syria do what it wants, including bombing civilians, only on condition that the Syrians never fly their air force over Lebanon. How civilized of the Syrians and Israelis, while we the Lebanese - western newspapers kept saying - were killing each other. Why did the Israeli jets fly so low on that day, one can only assume they were sending a message to the Syrians to reduce the violence they were inflicting. On another day, a Syrian shell hit the outer perimeter of our building, knocking down a pillar of a balcony.
A couple of months later, when that first round ended, I drove to the campus on the other side of the city to register from my courses for the next academic year. Again, the shelling started all of a sudden and I was trapped unable to make it home. There were three of us graduate students from the other side who ended up living in the department, sleeping on laboratory benches, until we were given a windowless room in the basement between the diving club and the museum storage room. We lived there and taught as Teaching Assistants for the next 3-4 years. I remember making it back to East Beirut in a German Embassy van, since I had met people while taking German language courses at the nearby Goethe Institute.
In the spring of 1981, I had just about completed my written thesis which I delivered to my advisor, when the shelling began. This time I wasn't about to spend another few years in a basement. So I decided to take my chances. I drove with a female fellow student through a gigantic traffic jam on the western side of the city, only to arrive to East Beirut under a deluge of fire. I drove my colleague up the Ashrafiyeh hill where she recuperated her younger sister, shells crashing all around us. Again, we drove on glass, aluminum and wooden debris, we saw cars that had been hit and that plowed into electric poles. I hurtled down from Ashrafiyeh and headed to Daoura with the shells falling like rain all around. I have no idea why I was lucky to make it home that day. I spent the next couple of months finishing my thesis and graduated in July 1981.
I can easily imagine what these Ukrainian families must be going through, carrying their lives in a few bags and running for dear life, while cowardly Russian soldiers fire their shells indiscriminately while puffing a cigarette and exchanging jokes. That is how the Syrian soldiers did it back then in Lebanon, then again after 2011 in Syria. Russia is actually recruiting Syrian mercenaries to go "fight" in Ukraine.
How come the West is only now discovering Putin's savagery after all that he did in Syria? I guess the West assumes that blond-haired, blue-eyed children do not deserve what Putin and Assad have unleashed for decades on black-haired, dark-eyed children in Lebanon and Syria. Shame.
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