‘Anti-genocide’ crowd falls silent as Islamists massacre minorities in Syria
Political commentators and activists who have been loudly accusing Israel of committing a “genocide” against Gazans are silent amid reports of Druze and Christians being massacred by Muslims in Syria.
The attacks on by Bedouin tribes on the Druze communities that began last week in the Sweida province come just weeks after Islamic jihadists massacred Christians at the Greek Orthodox Mar Elias Church in Damascus on June 22nd. The suicide bombing and shooting attack killed at least 25 Christian worshippers and wounded 63 others.
The Syrian government has officially been pushing for a ceasefire between the Druze and Bedouin factions, but reports from the region say the government’s Islamic forces are themselves attacking Druze and Christian communities. Islamists view both Christianity and the Druze faith, fellow Abrahamic religions, as heretical.
“Your fight isn’t just with Syrians, it’s with the entire Muslim world,” a masked jihadi said in a video seen by The Telegraph. “We’ll hunt you down wherever you are, just like the Jews.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), 326 Druze fighters and 262 Druze civilians were killed, mainly by government forces, as of last week. Of the civilians, 182 were executed. Druze women have been raped by the Islamist forces and many are still being held captive.
Also last week, perpetrators set fire to the Greek Melkite Church of St. Michael in the Sweida village of Al-Sura.
A priest begs the world: ‘Look at the massacres’
On Friday, Father Tony Boutros, a representative of the Melkite-Catholic Church in Sweida, issued a desperate call for help from the international community to protect Druze and Christians from Islamic massacres.
“We are not ‘minorities,” he began in a video. “We are components of this Syrian country, and we have been living together for hundreds of years. We are the people of this land. We and our Druze brothers here, and we live with them. We ask the U.S., Europe, the Vatican, and the whole world for international protection for this region of Sweida, all of it, for us and for our Druze brothers, my dear ones, and we condemn every criminal act.”
“We are advocates of peace, my dear ones, we reject excommunication and we reject killing,” he continued. “All of this is condemned for us. And we want international protection from you. We want to stay in our homes. We want to stay with our Druze brothers, with our people, us and them. Not just neighbors; we are brothers, and we coexist. Not just coexist; we are one, living together for hundreds of years, and we will not leave our homes and our land. We demand international protection from the whole world. Look at us. Look at Sweida. Look at the massacres that happened to us in Sweida.”
Father Boutros was kidnapped in 2015 while driving to Mass, one of several Catholic leaders who were targeted with abductions. He was subsequently released.
Deaf ears
But the priest’s pleas have fallen on deaf ears among those who have built large social media followings by regularly accusing Israel of “genocide” and “targeting innocent civilians.” Pro-Palestinian influencers like Dave Smith, Candace Owens, Greta Thunberg, Andrew Tate, and others have yet to condemn Syria’s jihadist government for the mass killings or even express sympathy for the targeted civilians.
The United Nations, which is allied with Hamas, went so far as to blame Israel for conducting surgical air strikes in defense of the Druze. Israel’s Druze community is one of the largest in the Middle East, and many Israeli Druze have been crossing into Syria—against Israeli government orders—to fight protect Syrian Druze from the Islamists.
“Attacks such as the one on Damascus on Wednesday [by Israel] pose great risks to civilians and civilian objects,” the UN’s OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement. She did not condemn the Syrian forces carrying out the massacres, nor did she praise Jerusalem’s distribution of humanitarian aid to the civilians affected by the fighting.
The repeated Islamic targeting of Christians in the Middle East has historically sparked little outrage among the West’s “human rights” brigade. Over the last century, the Christian population in the Islam-dominated Middle East has dwindled from 20% to just 3%.
