The
Mother of all Hypocrisy
By Robert
Fisk
April
18, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Independent"-
It was the Mother
of all Hypocrisy. Some dead Syrian babies
matter, I guess. Other dead Syrian babies don’t
matter. One mass murder in Syria two weeks ago
killed children and babies and stirred our
leaders to righteous indignation. But the
slaughter in Syria this weekend
killed even more children and babies – yet
brought forth nothing but silence from those who
claim to guard our moral values. Now why should
this be?
When a
gas attack in Syria killed more than 70
civilians on 4 April, including babies and
children, Donald Trump ordered a missile attack
on Syria. America applauded. So did its media.
So did much of the world. Trump called Bashar
al-Assad “evil” and “an animal”. The EU
condemned the Syrian regime. Downing Street
called the gas attack “barbaric”. Almost every
western leader demanded that Assad should be
overthrown.
Yet
after this weekend’s suicide bombing of a convoy
of civilian refugees outside Aleppo killed 126
Syrians, more than 80 of them children, the
White House said nothing. Even though the death
toll was far greater, Trump didn’t even Tweet
his grief. The US navy launched not even a
symbolic bullet towards Syria. The EU went all
coy and refused to say a single word. All talk
of “barbarism” from Downing Street was
smothered.
Do they
feel no sense of shame? What callousness. What
disgrace. How outrageous that our compassion
should dry up the moment we realised that this
latest massacre of the innocents wasn’t quite
worth the same amount of tears and fury that the
early massacre had produced. It fact it wasn’t
worth a single tear. For the 126 Syrians –
almost all of them civilians – who have just
been killed outside Aleppo, were Shia Muslims
being evacuated from two government-held (ie
Bashar-held) villages in the north of Syria. And
their killer was obviously from al-Nusra
(al-Qaeda) or one of the Sunni “rebel” groups we
in the West have armed – or quite possibly from
Isis itself – and thus didn’t qualify for our
sorrow.
The UN,
clip-clopping on to the stage-boards as usual,
did speak out. The latest attack was “a new
horror”. And Pope Francis called it “ignoble”
and prayed for “beloved and martyred Syria”. And
having been brought up by a pretty anti-Catholic
dad, I said what I often say when I think the
Pontiff has got it right, especially Francis:
Good old Pope! Why, even the virtually
non-existent anti-Assad “Free Syrian
Army” condemned the attack as “terrorist”.
But that was it. And I recalled all those
maudlin stories about how Ivanka Trump, as a
mother, had been
especially moved
by the videotape from Khan Shaykoun, the site of
the chemical attack on 4 April, and had urged
her father to do something about it. And then it
was Federica Mogherini, the EU’s ‘High
Representative” for foreign affairs and security
policy, who described the attack as “awful” –
but insisted that she spoke “first of all as a
mother”. Quite right, too. But what happened to
all her maternal feelings – and those of Ivanka
– when the pictures came in from northern Syria
this weekend of exploded babies and children
packaged up in black plastic bags? Silence.
There’s
no doubting the flagrant, deliberate, vile
cruelty of Saturday’s attack. The suicide bomber
approached the refugee buses with a cartload of
children’s cookies and potato chips –
approaching, I might add, a population of
fleeing Shia civilians who had been starving
under siege by the anti-Assad rebels (some of
whom, of course, were armed by us). Yet they
didn’t count. Their “beautiful little babies” –
I quote Trump on the earlier gas victims –
didn’t stir us to anger. Because they were
Shias? Because the culprits might have been too
closely associated with us in the West? Or
because – and here’s the point – they were the
victims of the wrong kind of killer.
For
what we want right now is to blame the “evil”,
“animal”, “brutal”, etc, Bashar al-Assad who was
first “suspected” to have carried out the 4
April gas attack (I quote The Wall Street
Journal, no less) and then accused by the entire
West of total and deliberate responsibility of
the gas massacre. No-one should question the
brutality of the regime. Nor its torture. Nor
its history of massive oppression. Yet there
are, in fact, some grave doubts about Bashar’s
responsibility for the 4 April attack – which he
has predictably denied – even among Arabs who
loath his Baathist regime and all it stands for.
Even the leftist but hardly pro-Syrian Israeli
writer Uri Avneri – briefly, in his life, a
detective – has asked
why Assad should commit such a crime
when his army and its allies were winning the
war in Syria, when such an attack would gravely
embarrass the Russian government and military,
and when it would change the softening western
attitude towards him back towards open support
for regime change.
And the regime’s claim that a Syrian air attack
set off explosions in al-Nusra weapons store in
Khan Shaykoun
(an idea which the Russians also adopted) would
be easier to dismiss if the Americans had not
used precisely the same excuse for the killing
of well over a hundred Iraqi civilians in Mosul
in March; they suggested that a US air strike on
an Isis arms lorry may have killed the
civilians.
But
this has nothing to do with the weekend’s far
more bloody assault on the refugee convoys
heading for western Aleppo. They were part of a
now-familiar pattern of mass hostage exchanges
between the Syrian government and its opponents
in which Sunni opponents of the regime in
villages surrounded by the Syrian army or its
allies have been trucked out to Idlib and other
“rebel”-held areas under safe passage in return
for the freedom of Shia villagers surrounded by
al-Nusra, Isis and “our” rebels who have been
allowed to leave their villages for the safety
of government-held cities. Such were the victims
of Saturday’s suicide bombing; they were Shia villagers
of al-Foua and Kfraya, along with several
government fighters, en route to what would be –
for them – the safety of Aleppo.
Whether
or not this constitutes a form of ethnic
cleansing – another of Bashar’s sins, according
to his enemies – is a moot point. Al-Nusra did
not exactly urge the villagers of al-Foua and
Kfraya to stay home since they wanted some of
their own Sunni fighters back from their own
encircled enclaves. Last month, the governor of
Homs pleaded with Sunnis to leave the city on
“rebel” convoys to Idlib to stay in their houses
and remain in the city. But this is a civil war
and such terrifying conflicts divide cities and
towns for generations. Just look at Lebanon 27
years after its civil war ended.
But what ultimately proves our own participation
in this immoral and unjust and frightful civil
war is our reaction to those two massacres of
the innocents. We cried over and lamented and
even went to war for those “beautiful
little babies”
whom we believed to be Sunni victims of the
Assad government. But when Shia babies of equal
humanity were blasted to pieces this weekend,
Trump could not care less. And the mothering
spirit of Ivanka and Federica simply dried up.
And we
claim that Middle East violence has nothing to
do with us.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.