I cannot imagine the destruction of Alleppo happening in a White Nation without bringing down the Wrath of the West.
And yet, since it is in Syria ...everyone, including the self claimed pious Progressives are uncharacteristically silent.
I am going to do a series of a few Blogs on this tragic happening ...beginning with a stellar op piece by Terry Glavin of the National Post daily newspaper.
Unless one is totally heartless, it would be most difficult to be unmoved by Glavin's account of what has just transpired.
Aleppo has fallen.
The last and sturdiest bastion of
the Syrian uprising is gone. The Battle of Aleppo is
over, the revolution is finished, and the Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad
has won. Russia has won. Iran has won. Hezbollah has won. The United States has
lost. The United Nations has lost, and the bloody war in Syria, already having
taken nearly half a million lives, goes on.
Aleppo
mattered, it should go without saying, but it’s worthwhile enumerating what did
not matter. You can start with Aleppo’s 31,000 dead and proceed from there
through each and every statutory war crime codified by the International
Criminal Court.
Mass murder by chlorine gas. Massacres of innocents.
Bombardments by Russian jet fighters. The deliberate targeting of hospitals and
clinics. The firing of mortar rounds into crowded neighbourhoods. The terror of
barrel bombs dropped from Syrian army helicopters. The starvation siege that
followed the city’s encirclement by Shia death squads and Assadist militias on
Sept. 8.
None of that mattered, not the
hourly imagery on Instagram and YouTube and Twitter of corpse-strewn streets
and decapitated infants, and not the gut-wrenching final goodbyes uploaded to
mobile phones or sent by text from the survivors in the rebel-held ruins of the
Old City, the al-Shaar district, and the backstreets of Sheikh Saeed.
Leaning
against a wall, his tattered Adidas hoodie drawn against the rain, the young
English teacher, reporter and activist Abdulkafi
Al-Hamdo managed to use his cellphone camera to upload his goodbye to the
video-streaming service Periscope on Monday night.
“What I want to say is, Don’t
believe anymore in the United Nations. Don’t believe anymore in the
international community. Don’t think that they are not satisfied with what’s
going on. They are satisfied that we are being killed, that we are facing one
of the most difficult, or the most serious, or the most horrible massacres that
is in our history. --- We wanted
freedom. We didn’t want anything else but freedom. You know, this world doesn’t
like freedom, it seems.”
There is
no plausible defence any of us can mount against Al-Hambdo’s plainspoken indictment.
In the world’s citadels of democracy, there are no popular constituencies
sufficient to the task of commanding our elected leaders to put their backs
into the emancipation of the Syrian people from their tormentors. After
all, you know, quagmire and all that. Broach the subject of NATO enforcing a
modicum of order in the Syrian abbatoir by means of, say, a no-fly zone, and
you’ll be denounced as a warmonger in the mould of the archvillains George W.
Bush and Tony Blair.
The truth
of it is we’d just rather not take the trouble. We aren’t prepared to suffer
the sacrifices demanded of the commitments to universal rights we profess, so
we absolve ourselves by talking about “the Muslim world” as though it were a distant planet. We talk about Arabs as though they were a different species. It is easier on the conscience that way. Between the
drooling bigotries of the isolationist right and the clever platitudes of the
“anti-imperialist” left, the only place left to address the solemn obligations
we owe one another as human beings is in negotiations over the codicils of
international trade agreements, or in the rituals of deliberately unenforceable
resolutions entertained by the United Nations General Assembly.
The UN human rights office later
announced that it had received credible reports that hundreds of men who
crossed into Aleppo’s regime-controlled districts had gone missing. Young men
were being pulled out of the line at the corridor checkpoints. The
Consultative Council in the Levant Front, one of Aleppo’s main rebel groups, reported
that the men had been taken to “warehouses that look more like internment
camps.”
The Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights reckons that 60,000 Syrians have been starved to
death, tortured to death or executed in Assad’s prisons since the non-violent
democratic uprising began in February, 2011. Relying on regime defectors and
insiders, the Observatory has verified 14,446 deaths at a single facility,
Sednaya prison, near Damascus.
And now
Aleppo is undergoing what UN humanitarians spokesman Jens Laerke calls “a
complete meltdown of humanity.” The still-living lie with dead in the rubble of
bombed out buildings. You can hear them screaming. Regime militias are carrying
out mass executions of civilians. In one case, 11 women and 13 children were
shot “on the spot.” Women are committing suicide rather than face the prospect
of rape and murder.
A planned
evacuation of perhaps 100,000 civilians and rebel fighters from East Aleppo was
heralded as a breakthrough on Tuesday, following the abject surrender by all of
Aleppo’s remaining rebels — hardline Islamists and democratic patriots
alike. By Wednesday morning, the Russian-Turkish understanding had fallen
through, the glimmer of hope had flickered out, the barrel bombs and mortar
shells were raining down on Aleppo again, and from the people, those
gut-wrenching final goodbyes — “Pray for us,” “I hope you can remember us”
— were going out to the world again.
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All the little guy in the White had to do to avoid this slaughter was to impose a no fly zone at the time he was drawing his imaginary red line in the sand.
As he fades into the woodwork he puffs out his chest and proclaims what a good guy am I ... look at all I have accomplished... he says.
You certainly did sir.
As I see it...
'K.D. Galagher'
--------------
All the little guy in the White had to do to avoid this slaughter was to impose a no fly zone at the time he was drawing his imaginary red line in the sand.
As he fades into the woodwork he puffs out his chest and proclaims what a good guy am I ... look at all I have accomplished... he says.
You certainly did sir.
As I see it...
'K.D. Galagher'
