Darth Omar (01-11-2020), Earl (01-11-2020)
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Assad is targeting schools but the likes of Moonshi'ite will never call him out.
A few hours into the new year, pro-Assad forces targeted a school in southern Idlib with a cluster bomb. The bombing took place at 11am when it was clear the school would have been busy. Five children were killed. Two of those who died were just six years old; the oldest child victim was only thirteen. Four adults were also killed. I will forever be haunted by the faces of Yahya and Hour, the innocent six-year-olds who were amongst the child victims who attended – and died at – the school run by the organisation I work for.
This isn’t the first time one of our schools has been destroyed. In fact, six of our schools have been hit in as many months in Syria. Make no mistake: this is a clear co-ordinated bombing campaign against children.
Yet with the Syrian civil war entering its ninth year, the reaction to these dreadful, evil crimes is muted. Instead, the outrage appears to be directed elsewhere.
Two days after the New Year’s Day attack in Syria, Iran’s Quassem Soleimani was killed by a US airstrike near Baghdad airport. Many of my friends were furious. But why?
Were they concerned about the impact it would have on the region? No, they had never heard the name Soleimani until news of his death broke.
They knew little of his influence in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and further afield. Instead, quite simply, they were furious because his death resulted from a decision made by Donald Trump. Trump is bad and therefore this was bad, the logic seemed to be. Few paid heed to the crimes against humanity Soleimani is accused of. Soon, many of my Facebook friends had turned into foreign policy experts queuing up to predict that “WWIII” was inevitable. It was all Trump’s fault, they said. In the aftermath of Iran’s retaliation against US airbases, this fervour has only increased.
Don’t get me wrong here: I’m no Trump fan. If I had more time, money and fewer commitments, I would hop on a plane to a swing state and be volunteering for Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg’s campaign. I passionately hope Trump loses in November. The world would be a better place without him in the White House.
But let’s not draw any false equivalence between Trump and Soleimani. What angers me is the hypocrisy of those who shout loudly about the injustice of Soleimani’s killing, yet who stay quiet about Assad’s indiscriminate bombing of children. And while Trump’s critics have been busy bemoaning his misdemeanours, what of the actual genocide committed against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar? The mass imprisonment in concentration camps of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang? State-sanctioned violence against pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, Venezuela or Russia?
Yet when Trump comes to visit London – or orders the death of an evil individual – there is no shortage of people queuing up to protest.
Back in Syria, it’s a matter of if, not when, our next school is bombed. When the inevitable happens, it seems more people would get cross if Donald Trump was responsible and not Bashar al-Assad. Syria’s dictator seems to get a free pass from all too many people online, unlike the democratically-elected president of the United States.
This is a sad reflection of the hypocrisy of those (predominately on the British left) who formerly led the way in campaigning against international injustices, from Apartheid, the Ethiopian famine or the Iraq war. Now, it seems, the appetite for campaigning against state-sanctioned murder of innocent civilians with impunity has evaporated. It has been replaced instead with a rage that the likes of Donald Trump have successfully won elections.
Since Yahya and Hour were killed on 1 January, I have had anger bubbling away inside me. In Syria, children are dying. Yet too many turn a blind eye to what is happening there, directing their fury instead at what Jeremy Corbyn condemns as the ‘reckless and lawless killing of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani’.
Let’s not cry for Soleimani. Let’s weep instead for the 370,000 people who have been killed in Syria’s bloody, ongoing civil war.
Charles Lawley works for a humanitarian aid NGO
https://app.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/...i/content.html
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 01-11-2020 at 04:20 AM.
Darth Omar (01-11-2020), Earl (01-11-2020)
From the link:
"Let’s not cry for Soleimani. Let’s weep instead for the 370,000 people who have been killed in Syria’s bloody, ongoing civil war."
Stunning.
terrorist loversWere they concerned about the impact it would have on the region? No, they had never heard the name Soleimani until news of his death broke.
They knew little of his influence in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and further afield. Instead, quite simply, they were furious because his death resulted from a decision made by Donald Trump. Trump is bad and therefore this was bad, the logic seemed to be. Few paid heed to the crimes against humanity Soleimani is accused of. Soon, many of my Facebook friends had turned into foreign policy experts queuing up to predict that “WWIII” was inevitable. It was all Trump’s fault, they said. In the aftermath of Iran’s retaliation against US airbases, this fervour has only increased.
Earl (01-11-2020)
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation...s-track-record
LA Times
"Iran triggered public outrage by killing protesters. Has Suleimani’s death changed everything?"
"...Ever since the disputed 2009 presidential election sparked weeks of protest known as the Green Movement, Iranians’ grievances and dissent toward the Islamic Republic have been simmering. That anger culminated in November, when President Hassan Rouhani announced a sudden 50% increase in gasoline prices.
Protests erupted in cities and towns across the nation. Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets. Soon after, security forces began killing hundreds of protesters and detaining thousands of others, according to international human rights activists."
cancel2 2022 (01-11-2020), Earl (01-11-2020)
StoneByStone (01-12-2020)
It’s easy to blame Trump. But the Iran plane disaster isn’t his fault.
Kathleen Parker
Columnist
Jan. 10, 2020 at 7:07 p.m. EST
"It may be tempting to blame President Trump for the downed passenger jet in Iran this week, but a linear conclusion it is not.
At the least, such a judgment is premature and rigged with the politics of emotion.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who sits on both the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, essentially said the president was at fault for the downing of the plane, while media reports from Canada, which lost at least 63 countrymen in the disaster, featured mourners pointing fingers at the United States.
Officials from the United States, Britain and Canada have all said that intelligence reports strongly suggest that the airliner was hit by an Iranian surface-to-air missile. Iran called that assessment a “big lie,” instead blaming technical issues.
During an interview on Thursday on CNN, Speier insisted that the disaster was “collateral damage” from Trump’s “provocative” actions toward Iran. When pressed during another CNN interview on Friday, she said that, while she wasn’t placing blame on Trump specifically for Iran’s apparent shoot-down of the plane, “it all emanates from the killing of [Maj. Gen Qasem] Soleimani” ordered by Trump. Speier added that, in the wake of the airstrike that targeted the Quds Force commander, Iran is “providing vengeance . . . to the United States,” which, though useful to the narrative dispensary, isn’t supported by logic in the case of the airliner. Never mind the worrisome possibility that Trump’s aphasia-like means of expression may be a contagious tic.
Were Trump a more trustworthy president — and his foreign policy more than just a “series of impulses,” as my colleague Fareed Zakaria so aptly put it recently — then people might be more inclined to wait out an investigation. In times of shock and grief, we humans quickly seek to assign blame, if only in part to designate a target for the anger that follows.
But, even considering Trump’s dubious foreign policy record and the Soleimani assassination, laying even partial blame on the U.S. president for a crime (or accident) that Iran apparently committed doesn’t meet the minimum requirements of fairness or logic.
Consider: Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 took off from Tehran with 82 Iranians on board. By what strain of logic would killing so many of one’s own citizens hurt another nation? No doubt, Iran would love to “provide vengeance,” but Iranian officials announced early on that they would seek reprisal against the United States by striking military targets. Thus, this week, just hours before the airliner exploded midair, Iran fired more than a dozen short-range ballistic missiles at Iraqi military bases that housed U.S. troops."
wapo.com
Only the Democrat Socialist apologists for a terrorist were blaming President Trump.
Assholes that applaud the invasion of countries and then attempt to pontificate on the behavior of the attacked populations are contemptible.
" First they came for the journalists...
We don't know what happened after that . "
Maria Ressa.
Earl (01-11-2020)
Oh, look, the sloths have awakened in time to begin their apology tour for a bloody terrorist.
cancel2 2022 (01-11-2020)
Earl- have you forged any dictionary definitions lately ?
Haw, haw.........................haw.
" First they came for the journalists...
We don't know what happened after that . "
Maria Ressa.
From the link:
"Let’s not cry for Soleimani. Let’s weep instead for the 370,000 people who have been killed in Syria’s bloody, ongoing civil war."
Stunning.
anatta (01-11-2020), Earl (01-11-2020), PostmodernProphet (01-11-2020)
No ones weeping for the bloody terrorist. When you're president how you react in these situations is everything. Going all Yosemite Sam can start a serious international incident, cause innocent casualties, or even start a war. If you want to gnash your teeth without reasoning then go move back into the wilds where you'll be at home.
Frank Apisa (01-11-2020), Phantasmal (01-11-2020)
Our military took the right actions...another bloody terrorist is eliminated. How can that be construed as a bad thing?
anatta (01-11-2020)
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