As the world keeps silent in light of Syria massacre, Israel must act
Op-ed: The Jewish state has a moral duty to set up a refugee camp near its border with Syria, to provide shelter for anyone who is incapable of escaping to Turkey or Jordan and is in mortal danger.
On Monday, Belgian parliament members sat down with Syrian President Bashar Assad, who operated the slaughterhouse near Damascus. He has nothing to worry about. Nothing will change. They will sit down with him again next week. Another delegation is on the way.
When there was a fear that he might massacre his people using chemical weapons, he received threats from the president of the world’s strongest power. That would be the red line, Barack Obama warned at the time. The red line was crossed. Obama settled for an agreement on the destruction of the chemical weapons, sponsored by Russia. It was already clear at the time that the agreement was not worth the paper it was written on. A few months went by, and chemical weapons were used again. Not a single response was registered in Washington. Because the world is silent.
The world has been silent for decades. It has been keeping silent since the Holocaust. The world was silent in Biafra. The world was silent in Rwanda. The world was silent and is silent in light of the genocide in Darfur. The world is silent in light of the fact that every year, in the past few years, global jihad murders about 25,000 people on average.
It’s not the same thing. Because this time, near Damascus, it’s the closest thing to a death camp. It’s not a suicide bomber. It’s not a fanatic ideology. It’s not religious insanity. It’s not a war in which civilians are hurt too. This time it’s an annihilation enterprise operated by a secular government.
But Bashar is relaxed. He knows why. The centers of the progressive camp in Europe and the United States will keep quiet. The morality people don’t care whether it’s jihadists massacring tens of thousands of innocent people or an Arab government launching a project to annihilate thousands of opponents. They don’t care because it’s about Arabs and Muslims murdering Arabs and Muslims. So who cares?
The conscience should be left for another campaign against Israel, which is trying to defend itself against the jihad and the insanity. The mass protests must focus on the Palestinians. As anti-Israel philosopher Slavoj Žižek said, an absolute majority of the people of the Middle East and Africa would die to be in the Palestinians' place. A moment later, he went back to inciting against Israel.
Israel can—and maybe even has to morally—set up a refugee camp near the border with Syria, to accommodate anyone who is in real mortal danger. Anyone who is incapable of escaping to Turkey or Jordan, and is in mortal danger, should be provided with a temporary shelter. And there is one more thing we must remember: Anything that the secular or jihadist regimes do to their people, they would do, with greater appetite, to the Jews as well. So we must be humane. It’s a moral duty. At the same time, we must also be strong, very strong.
