In the aftermath of the earthquake that hit Syria and Turkey, the situation is so desperate for the Syrian people - a decade of war, displacement, the brutality of all the protagonists including Daesh and the Assad regime, and now the earthquake - that many have been made refugees several times, fleeing from one disaster to another both inside and outside their country. The earthquake will cause a new massive wave of Syrian and Turkish refugees toward Europe and the West, and the EU should prepare itself to welcome them. If this instability continues in the Near East, Europe stands to be torn by internal conflict with strong religious components, by demographic and social changes the likes of which it has never experienced, not even during the two great wars of the 20th century. Just look at what Lebanese Muslims have done to Lebanon's once exemplary power-sharing system with the Christians: Step by step, generation after generation, the Muslims have methodically reneged on every agreement reached after each crisis that they - the Muslims- themselves fomented to begin with. In their evolution, Muslims and Islam have yet to come to terms with actually sharing power with non-Muslims. Today, they are essentially where Europe was in the 16th century: Centrality of religion to everything political and social. In fact, of all historic grudges between nations and religions across history, only one remains alive and well after 1300 years: The enmity between Shiite Islam and Sunni Islam.
Yet, the dereliction and cowardice of the international community is behind this state of affairs. For more than 50 years, the free world tolerated and even collaborated with the murderous regime of the Assad family as it tormented and bullied its own people, as well as its small neighbor Lebanon which it occupied and brutalized for decades.
For years, and while Syria was kidnapping, murdering, arbitrarily detaining, bombing, shelling, invading and torturing anyone who dared say no, the West continued to give the Assads the respectability they never deserved. Every year under the regime of Hafez Assad the father, then Bashar Assad the son, the US Secretary of State and sometimes the US president himself would meet with Assad in Damascus or in Geneva, shake hands, and come to what amounted to criminal agreements with the dictator over issues like the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the flow of terrorists and weapons from Syria to Iraq, the dismal human rights situation in Syria, the backing of the Iranian terrorist militia of Hezbollah which imported the explosive ammonium nitrate to Beirut on behalf of Assad and caused the Beirut Harbor explosion, etc...
And the only thing the West did was to impose sanctions that never stopped the Assads but annihilated the ability of the Lebanese and Syrian peoples to stand up to the brutal dictatorship. In fact, the West kept referring to Assad in positive terms, like "cunning", "keeps his word", "smart", etc.
Why this collusion between the West and Assad?
Because Assad, despite all the harm he did to the peace process, never ever fought Israel after 1973 when US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sealed an agreement with the Assads: Do what you want to your people and to Lebanon, but do not fight Israel. And in effect, Assad "kept his word" by destroying Lebanon and crushing the Palestinian resistance movements, and never ever fired a single bullet across the Golan Heights which Israel occupied and annexed. Even today, when Israeli jets fly over Syria and bomb Iranian-Hezbollah targets, the Syrian regime doesn't fight back, doesn't complain, and life goes on. Meanwhile, the Syrian regime has for decades backed several Palestinian and Iranian militias in Lebanon - but never in Syria - supposedly to liberate territories occupied by Israel. The choreography of Syrian-Israeli-Western deceit could not have been staged better than that.
All Arab dictators (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen....) have been deposed except Assad. The mystery of the durability of the Assad regime can only be explained by its collusion with the West and Israel for the sole purpose of protecting the equally criminal and brutal Israeli regime while it slowly and methodically, with horrendous human rights practices, nibbled at the prospect of one day establishing a free Palestinian state.
The earthquake might have finally altered this 50-year-long lie. Europe, and by extension the West, has put up with millions of Syrian refugees pouring into Europe under the Assad regime's systematic destruction of every city and village in Syria. Yet, not one bomb, bullet, or assault ever targeted the head of the snake: Assad himself. The US brags every day about tracking and drone-killing leaders of Al-Qaida, ISIS/Daesh, Taliban and all kinds of militants. Is it really that difficult to blow up Assad himself and rid the region of the only apparently remaining obstacle to peace?
It is not that difficult. Without Russia's duplicitous support, the Assad regime is a pathetic military weakling that could be easily brought down. So what gives? The ultimate objective of Western policy in the Near East: Protect Israel's brutal colonial rape of Palestine at any cost, at the cost of millions killed, millions of refugees, at the cost of the destruction of Lebanon and Syria, the cost of a now defunct peace process.... All of it so that the Apartheid European colonial enterprise called Israel continues to snuff out any aspiration of a free independent Palestine, any aspiration for the Palestinian refugees to one day return to their historic Palestine, any aspiration for the Syrian refugees to one day return to Syria, and for the region to finally find peace. All of the horrors of the past century - so the West thinks - can be solved by propping up the artificial European colony known as the Jewish Republic of Israel against any semblance of justice and decency. Bottom line: Europe and the West don't want "their" Jews to return to Europe, and are willing to take in tens of millions of Muslims instead. Under this lens, one can understand the "urgency" of denuclearizing Iran: It constitutes a threat to Israel.
The West does not want peace. Peace means having to make compromises the West cannot possibly make. And so the train wreck continues.
Without true justice, there will never be peace.
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