What’s new with western duplicity?

Nearly 200,000 civilians have died in the Syrian conflict. The world community has watched the tragedy unfold in front of its eyes and let the massacre of unarmed civilians happen unbridled. Even when it was obvious that Syria’s ruthless murderer President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against his own civilian population, nothing was done to punish him or his regime.

In his address to the nation on August 31, 2013, President Obama promised of taking military actions against the hated Assad regime. After the speech the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed an authorization to carry out military action. But instead of securing votes necessary in the House and Senate, Obama abruptly abandoned it. He, instead, opted for a Russian-brokered deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons, which gave Assad the green signal to continue with his murderous campaign.

Many Syrians have lost their entire family in this tragedy. It is not difficult to understand why many Syrians have joined the rebel movements to fight against Assad's criminal, sectarian (Nusayri) regime that has been targeting its Sunni population who comprise nearly eighty percent of the population of 18 million.

It is widely known that as a resistance movement drags on for years some extremist groups would emerge stronger than more moderate rebel groups. And that is precisely what has happened with the emergence of the ISIS or ISIL. The extremist group, representing disgruntled Sunnis, not just inside Syria but also Iraq, has been able to solidify its positions in both the countries and represent a mortal threat to the sectarian regimes in both Syria and Iraq.

The western invaders of Muslim lands have never been their liberators and, bluntly speaking, are responsible for the majority of the problems plaguing those nation states today. Their interest has never been stability of those former colonies but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one would threaten them. Thus, they would rather have murderous criminals like Assad and Sisi rule those former colonies than someone who is perceived as a threat to western interest and hegemony. Period!

The governments of the USA, France and the UK have bombed ISIS positions inside Iraq, which have resulted in the tit-for-tat murder of three western civilians – two Americans and a Brit – by the ISIS. The YouTube videos of the beheadings of those unfortunate civilians — and the government and the media propaganda that ISIS is coming to attack them in their malls – a reminder to 9/11 with al-Qaeda – have created the backdrop for western military re-engagement.

Last week, in his speech to the nation, President Obama made a case to the American people that his government is serious about degrading ISIS. After ignoring the Syrian opposition for years and claiming that it was a ‘fantasy’ to believe that they could have made a difference against Assad’s regime, he is now calling for Congress to provide necessary resources to do just that when its efficacy has become weaker with the emergence of the ISIS.

Such NATO-led attacks, of course, against the ISIS are bound to help the criminal Assad regime, which in recent weeks has bombed civilians living in territories under the ISIS control. In recent weeks, the western attacks have also killed dozens of civilians. Life of ordinary civilians in war-torn countries seems always so cheap and expendable!

A U.N. human rights commission has recently emphasized that the Syrian President Bashar Assad's government has committed the bulk of atrocities in the civil war. The head of the commission, Brazilian diplomat and scholar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, told the U.N.'s top human rights body that the Syrian government's killing of civilians — often through the use of ubiquitous checkpoints — exceeds the crimes against civilians perpetrated by the militants and other anti-government armed groups.

Pinheiro told the 47-nation UNHRC in Geneva, "The Syrian government remains responsible for the majority of the civilian casualties, killing and maiming scores of civilians daily — both from a distance using shelling and aerial bombardment and up close, at its checkpoints and in its interrogation rooms." Pinheiro said, "Checkpoints are often the starting point of a horrific journey of disappearance, torture, sexual abuse and, for many, death. Checkpoints are used to enforce sieges and to trap civilians in areas under indiscriminate bombardment."

Pinheiro expressed the commission's deep frustration that the international community has not found a political solution to end Syria's civil war, which has killed over 190,000 people. "We have charted the descent of the conflict into the madness where it now resides. ... But we have been faced with inaction," he said.

Truly, our world leaders with their selfish interests – which have very little, if any, to do with well-being of the world citizenry – have let us all down. They have led us into a world that is increasingly becoming chaotic and seemingly radar-less. The emergence of ISIS owes it to their monumental hypocrisy in world affairs. They simply cannot have double-standards on matters that affect us all.

Consider, e.g., Israel’s bombing of Gaza in which more than 2,000 unarmed civilians were murdered in a barbaric, murderous campaign. Hundreds of elderly Palestinians and infants were killed whose decapitated, blown out and crushed bodies looked ghastlier than those YouTube videos of the 3 westerners. The UN compounds and schools were deliberately bombed. Children playing in the sea-beach of Gaza were not spared either.

And yet, what have the UN Brahmins done to punish the Israeli war criminals for their heinous crimes against humanity? Nothing! Audaciously, some of them actually resupplied weapons to Israel to prolong its murderous orgy against Palestinian civilians. The UNHRC’s condemnation of Israeli barbarity was simply ignored by these powerful nations of our time. They behaved as if those Palestinians have no right to live normal lives in dignity, free from the infringements to their rights caused by the Israeli occupation of their land.

During NATO’s post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands of civilians were deliberately killed by the occupation forces. Even the journalists covering the stories in the ground were not spared by Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld’s trigger-happy soldiers. To this date, many civilians are dying in American drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Was their life less valuable than the life of our American fallen victims?

So, when the same USA and her NATO partners condemn the brutality of the ISIS and its highly deplorable and condemnable treatment of others, people are not amused. They see hypocrisy. What they desire is justice for all crimes – small and big, and not just against some tiny Sudra while the mighty Brahmin criminals go Scott-free. They don’t want to hear that ‘mistakes’ were made by the nuclear Brahmins and their rogue friends or partners while punishable ‘crimes’ were committed by the have-nots. No oops, please.

Once we have fairness and order built into our system that we have created, disorder will go away.