Give Syrians a Chance, Give Israelis a Break

The Syrian people have been marginalized over the last five decades in favor of the Assads ruling Syria. Very few people know anything about our inner and true fabric because the Assads have spent a lifetime painting us all as terrorists, extremists, and unreliable savages they must govern with an iron fist.

This is our short story: The Assads lead Syrians into anti-Semitic, anti-western demonstrations, erect casually organizations of Islamic terror to blow-up people and assets part of or central to US interests, provide the Islamists with a measure of freedom to express their horrors, then dispatch their emissaries the world over to show a compliant face of moderation against the savagery of the Syrians they rule. And the smartest people on this planet, from presidents all the way down to recent Georgetown graduates entering the foreign service, lap it up like kittens lap milk. The impertinent ones amongst them think “Better safe than sorry”, yet they cannot measure the word “safe” any better than they understand Syrians.

The last nail in our coffin (Syrians constituting the moderate majority) was hammered after Baschar al-Assad successfully interceded in the Gaza elections by supporting Hamas long-distance.  “See?” he said. “Elections will bring extremists to power”. Since then, Hamas and Hezbollah (Another one of Assads’ creations during his occupation of Lebanon) have both extended his terror’s reach in ways that disturb his critics and fascinate his supporters. Many Israeli analysts of Syrian behavior remain in denial, to this day, over why Assad son is unlike Assad father.

But as Syrians ask the world to give them a chance to show their true colors, we are also asking the world to give Israel and the Jews a break. Especially, when it comes to the hate factor and the intolerance the world has demonstrated towards Israel as she defends herself against Assad and Ahmadinajead.

Jews fighting on their own to stop hate is not enough. We all must stand by them in their fight against intolerance and discrimination. We should do so for two reasons: 1) Hate is inhuman and can affect societies in unpredictable ways (e.g. The burden shouldered by the German youth or lack of burden by Turkey’s history with Armenia) and, 2) After the Jews, come other races and other nations if hate is not controlled by the press and the global political powers. Assad dispensing of hate against Israel will eventually bite him hard. The same goes for every Arab leader.

Hitler would have cleansed the world of my family, my people, and those of my neighboring countries had he survived long enough to exterminate more people because he believed we were Untermenschen (Sub-humans). The Holocaust transpired because of deep hate and intolerance, signs we see today in many Arab Muslims; its excuse started as an Aryan experiment in isolating a diseased organ in an otherwise healthy body from the Untermenschen Jews. Our Arab “Untermenschen” excuse is our obsession with the Palestinian cause, a disease with no easy cure that is driving hate to levels we all should be concerned about.

Almost all of the human rights laws, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Geneva Convention, which first started in 1864, but was fully developed in 1949, occurred as a result of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and WWII. The International Criminal Court Statute, established in 1998, was founded to legally punish those who continue to commit atrocities as a result of hate (i.e. Serbia, Rwanda, Darfur, etc..). All these laws and courts are intended to eradicate hate, the cause of which will lead to mass murders and Genocide. Every time Arabs and Muslims convert to seek justice under these laws or courts, or command the attention of any human rights organization, they owe all the benefits they derive to the sufferings of the Jews during WWII, which started the trend for modern laws of accountability for war and hate crimes.

Did Muslims learn from Serbia, which demonstrated the effects of hate upon us? Not at all. Many Muslims today hate Jews more than they love themselves, other Muslims, their Koran, or their Prophet. That is why our voice is so important. By eradicating hate, we save ourselves. Who can ever forget the method by which Danny Pearl, whom I knew personally, was murdered? If this is Islam, we all have as much right to abandon it, as Mosab Hassan Yusuf did, as to fight it from within.

Tolerance and patience is required given that Israel’s mere existence is resented by millions of people in our region. We should and must understand the Israeli mindset, a country surrounded with hostility by people whose claims are disputed by historical facts. Israel’s unintentional mistakes should be viewed from the prism of survival and not as acts of intolerance or premeditated violence. Ours, on the other hand, should be analyzed for what they are: Contempt for others, and of our own, demonstrated by the numerous acts of terror Muslims commit.

Over 15,500 terror attacks have been perpetrated by Muslims, since 9/11, against our own and others. That’s almost five acts of terror per day. In one week in June, Muslims killed 174 people through terror. That’s almost 20 times more people than the 9 killed, in self-defense, in the Gaza flotilla; yet, the Gaza incident gets more press worldwide than the combined acts of terror committed by Muslims over a one-week period totaling 20 times the number of victims. The impact of which will have far reaching consequences for Europe whose frontiers have become a bottleneck for Muslims escaping tension, wars, and oppression. Fact Course 101: Muslims accepting Israel saves Europe. It is fascinating that one has to point this out like a Kindergarten teacher points out the color red in a crayon box.

If a Jew is hated by anyone, be it Muslims or Christians, be it secular or religious, be it from both spectrums of political extreme, the haters are releasing the very same venom they risk to be boomeranged by if we do not reign-in their shortsightedness; and every time, we, whose vision of the world is based on basic freedoms and universal human rights, do not stand by the Jews to defend their rights against discrimination and hate, we are also risking our own future. It does not take a visionary to see this far off one’s nose.

As simple and pragmatic as this concept is, we, Arabs and Muslims, are known to be emotional beasts. Prophet Mohammad’s cartoons matter more to us, with their harmless expression, than the virus of hate whose detriment is diverting from our own contribution to mankind. Could hate be the reason why we are so backward? A good Doctoral thesis for any Arab or Muslim student reading this Blog.