Syrian Mass Grave: The Consequences of Overlooking Genuine Atrocities While Criticizing Israel
Even by the horrifying standards of brutality in the Middle East, the discovery of a mass grave in Syria containing over 100,000 bodies stands out for its gruesomeness.
Indeed, such atrocity hasn’t been witnessed since the grim eras of Hitler and Stalin.
This grave is just one of multiple such sites, attributed to the recently ousted and brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Since 2012, Assad is believed to have tortured and killed potentially hundreds of thousands of his own citizens and adversaries.
This serves as a chilling testament to his depravity, echoing the legacy of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who similarly dispatched dissenters without mercy.
“We really haven’t encountered anything quite like this since the Nazis,” reflects former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp.
How did Bashar Assad manage to evade accountability?
Simply put: The world permitted it.
It turned a blind eye to his malevolence, choosing instead to focus on preferred adversaries like Israel.
Those “enlightened” activists setting up camps on college campuses? They were not protesting Assad’s slaughter machine; they aimed to stop Israel.
Democrats, including President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were not enraged by Assad’s ongoing reign of terror but rather by an imagined “genocide” purportedly perpetrated by the Jewish state against Palestinians.
No, it did not begin with them: Who can forget President Barack Obama’s “red line,” which warned of a US military response if Assad used chemical weapons against his adversaries?
Yet, when the Syrian Army launched missiles containing sarin gas into opposition-held neighborhoods, killing over 1,400 civilians, Obama did . . . nothing.
In reality, he and then-Secretary of State John Kerry invited Vladimir Putin to help “resolve” the crisis (or rather, to alleviate Obama’s embarrassment) by claiming that it had collected Syria’s chemical weapons.
Moscow, which had been ousted from the Middle East decades earlier, became a key ally of Assad and supported him mercilessly during the civil war, relentlessly bombing civilians (particularly hospitals).
All of this occurred with scarcely a whisper on US campuses, nor at the United Nations, International Criminal Court, and other channels.
Elsewhere in Syria, Ankara is currently orchestrating a new offensive against the Kurds — a completely stateless group that endures despite decades of oppression from the rulers of Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and even ISIS.
Meanwhile, the brutal Kim dynasty in North Korea is infamous for the slaughter and starvation of millions. In Africa and Asia, terrorists and despots have eliminated hundreds of thousands more.
Yet, the one nation sacrificing its soldiers to combat Middle Eastern savagery — Israel — somehow ends up being labeled as a “war criminal” by much of the left, as well as by the UN and ICC.
Assad’s mass graves serve as a stark reminder not just of the evil that still prevails in the world, but also of the grotesque hypocrisy exhibited by those who claim moral superiority while being outraged about a non-existent “genocide.”
