Thursday, February 20, 2014

In Humanitarian Service

"From here, I would like to tell the world, today, as the talks between the major powers and Iran are being resumed, that Iran has changed neither its aggressive policy nor its brutal character. Iran is continuing to support the Assad regime which is slaughtering its own people. This is the true face of Iran. The world can not forget this."
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu
"Nasser," a Syrian patient, was brought to Ziv Hospital in the northern Israeli community of Safad last September for treatment he couldn't get at home after being involved in a car accident near the Syrian city of Dera’a. He is hiding his face because he is fearful of being mistreated when he returns to Syria for having been inside Israel.
"Nasser," a Syrian patient, was brought to Ziv Hospital in the northern Israeli community of Safad last September for treatment he couldn't get at home after being involved in a car accident near the Syrian city of Dera’a. He is hiding his face because he is fearful of being mistreated when he returns to Syria for having been inside Israel. Derek Stoffel/CBC

He should and most likely does know better than that assumption. The world can and will forget this and any other inconvenient realities that irritate and require too much an intervening effort to rouse the world to its earlier vows of never again countenancing any such gruesome atrocities as the regime of Bashar al-Assad is inflicting on the Syrian people of Sunni conviction.

By opposing his regime and the oppression they suffer under a minority Shia Alawite government, the protesters made themselves into terrorists. Scum, to be obliterated.

Iran's very own protocol for ridding itself of protests worked very well on its 'green revolution', and it sees no reason why similar crack-downs cannot be successful in Syria. The difference being, of course, that no outside sources, whether representing other national government militaries or security agents, or foreign jihadists intervened in Iran, leaving the opposition to fend for itself and so it shrivelled and went underground.

In Syria, those being attacked by all means at the regime's disposal -- the civilian Sunni population that has seen its neighbourhoods razed, its Syrian heritage erased, the lives of family, friends and neighbours forfeit by aerial bombing, artillery attacks, helicopter gunship attacks and chemical weapons bombardments -- has seen survivors flee in their millions as refugees, internal and external to the country.

Syria has become a black abyss of mass death and misery.

And Israel is left with a dilemma. This is not Israel's war. But anything that occurs on its borders invariably and inevitably impacts on Israel. The hornets' nest of Syrian detestation against Israel had been kept buzzing but no stings have been experienced for the past forty years. Now, the prospect of Syria being overrun by foreign Sunni Islamist jihadis threatens Israel's borders and the safety of its citizens.

The same terrorists have been demonstrating their extreme animus against Hezbollah and its supporters in Lebanon. Exposing Lebanese to what it feels like for a militia to explode bombs in the midst of civilian enclaves. And targeting Iran's diplomatic missions in Lebanon in acknowledgement of the very tangible ties between Iran, its al-Quds division of the Republican Guard, and its proxy militia Hezbollah, all brought into action to give Bashar's regime traction over the rebels.

For every action the Sunni jihadis mount against Iran in Lebanon in an expression of their hatred, Iran serenely claims that it is all a Zionist plot, a connivance of Israel in alliance with the very Sunni network slavering to destroy Israeli targets equally with Iranian ones. All these inconsistencies in logic reflect Middle Eastern intrigues and unqualified inanities where reality has no presence in the pathology of hate.

And so, in Syria there is the horrifying spectacle of mass destruction of a people, those who represent the majority of the Syrian population, aided and abetted by a neighbouring country and its allied militias. And the one single target of hatred that is capable of bringing consensus to the Arab/Muslim neighbourhood is also the one single entity that sets up a field hospital to save the lives of those who pledge its destruction.

A Syrian woman carries her child past a member of the Israeli army medical staff in a military hospital located in the Golan Heights, on February 18, 2014 (Pool/AFP, Menahem Kahana)
"The service is excellent and they treat you well. People smile. We thank you a lot", a Syrian said in Arabic to Israel's prime minister. Once well enough to leave the hospital, he will be extremely careful to make every effort to conceal having been treated by Israelis in an Israeli hospital. That revelation could cost his life.

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