by Giulio Meotti
Forget the Formula One World Constructors’ Championship and the Qatar Grand Prix. The real race right now is the race to Damascus and, as Erdogan puts it, “there is no moderate Islam”.
It’s Black Friday in Syria and in the West we sit at home watching the race, wondering who will win, the bearded Salafists, the bearded “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood or the bearded Iranian Shiites.
Iran, the regent of the Assad clan, committed so many resources to its assault on Israel on October 7 that Erdogan’s Turkey and the Emir of Qatar have discerned an opportunity. And Hezbollah, Iran’s main asset for controlling Syria, is bleeding. So the Iranian militias are coming from Iraq.
Figuring out who is on whose side in Syria is almost like a college exam in logic (or maybe Chaos Theory?) .
Hamas is Sunni but is on the side of the Shiite axis of evil; Erdogan is Sunni and is with both the Shiite axis of evil and the West and with both Hamas and the anti-Assad Syrian jihadists who in Ukraine are against Putin’s Russia which is with the Assad clan and which uses the Chechens against the Ukrainians who have come to Syria to help the Muslim brothers against the dictator aligned with Putin.
In Syria there is not only a battle between the people and the dictator; it is also a religious war.
In his book “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State”, William McCants quotes a fighter in Aleppo:
“If you think that all these mujahideen have come from all over the world to fight Assad, you are wrong. They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised, it is the Great Battle.”
In the race to Damascus, the cleanest has the itch, or in this case, the shortest beard. Or as the Dutch-based Iranian academic Afshin Ellian put it, “all the jihadist terrorist groups in Syria will return to fight against each other, against Assad, against the Kurds and the Americans, and it will be a bloody battle between Islamic barbarians.”
During the first two centuries of Islam, Muslim armies faced the most prolonged fighting on the Syrian front, since it was here that Islam faced its most formidable enemy, the Byzantine Empire. Syria, therefore, is the key area for Islamic apocalyptic speculation. And the videos that are coming in prove it.
Syrian rebels in pick-ups with machine guns, carrying weapons supplied by Turkey, after having conquered Aleppo in a few hours, are on the road to Homs and Damascus. Alongside them ride British jihadists who converted to Islam after a privileged childhood spent in the Anglican Church.
The jihadists began kidnapping Kurdish girls, like the little Yazidi sex slave in Gaza.
A war of all with and against all for the sole glory of Islam.
Never has a book been so direct about Islam as “The Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel Huntington: “Islam has bloody borders”.
In Gaza, the barbarity of Hamas. In Lebanon, the barbarity of Hezbollah. In Syria, barbarians against barbarians. And in the midst of all this there is a small blue enclave, a land of Western civilization and culture: Israel.
In Syria there are the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Hezbollah militias in crisis who are shooting at the militias of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Syrian rebels are Sunni. The Syrian regime is Alawite, a small and heretical syncretistic minority that makes them natural allies of Tehran, which cannot afford the collapse of Damascus. Assad has an ostrich neck and shifty eyes, but he is cunning and brutal. And he will do practically anything to survive.
Meanwhile the barbarians have already started cutting off heads again.
The Christians, as usual, will pay. My thoughts are with them, with the women and with the Christians.
And since Qatar and Turkey and Saudis arm Sunni Muslims and Russia arms Shiites in a new Great Game, European countries should have armed Christians, like the Christian militias that fought against ISIS in Iraq.
America is historically in the Sunni axis (the Turks who send the jihadists are actually the second largest army in NATO) and the Eurocrats just hope only to calm their internal Sunni populations who are on everyone’s side, with Iran but also with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Distinguishing the right Syrian rebels from the wrong ones is a bit complicated.
Considered the greatest living Arab poet and a major figure in world poetry, the Syrian Adonis is one of the favorites for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year. He will not win it because he is “Islamophobic”. Adonis told Libération: “In more than sixty years, we see whether the life of the Arabs has progressed or declined. Where was Iraq and where is it today? The same goes for Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt… All are in continuous decline. Why have all the peoples of the world made progress in knowledge and the Arabs nothing? They lack nothing and yet they continue to decline. Because we live in the past and fourteen centuries later, the references remain the caliphs.”
And it is a religious problem, says Adonis. “My position is that the Arabs will never advance as long as religion is their political reference point. The relationship between Islam and man must be based on law and freedoms, while Islam gives more rights to Muslims than to non-Muslims. Syria, for example, is full of non-Muslims. But the non-Muslim will always be second class, without the same rights as the Muslim.”
The violence in the Middle East is not caused by Israel, it is caused by Islam.
And it should concern us, as the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal said in 2016:
“The only force deeply rooted in Arab-Muslim society is religion. The Islamist movement occupies space and prevents the emergence of any other ideology. There is, of course, a competition between Salafi Islam and traditional Islam, between Shiites and Sunnis. However, today we see that the differences are fading within the Sunni world, while the confrontation between Shiites and Sunnis is taking place. But here too, strategic alliances are being formed. Little by little, the Muslim world is rebuilding itself and regaining its original ambitions and its hegemonic will. The frontier with the West is beginning to be abolished because political Islam is opening up spaces in London, Paris and Brussels. We can imagine that in thirty years Islam will govern the entire Muslim world that it will have unified. In sixty years it will set out to conquer Western civilization.”
We have already lived it, barely ten years ago.
François Hollande, called to testify at the trial for the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris, confessed that the government “knew that operations were being prepared.” The former president revealed in court that the socialist government of the time knew that “operations were being prepared and that individuals had put themselves in the river of refugees to deceive the surveillance.”
“All the members of the commandos, foreigners or French who remained in Syria, took the migratory route from Eastern Europe,” confirmed Jean-Charles Brisard, president of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, to Le Figaro. “They took the Balkan route, after Kosovo opened the passage in 2015, to get to Hungary.”
The list of terrorists in Paris and Brussels and the borders through which they entered Europe a few weeks before the massacres: Ten members of the terrorist cell responsible for the attacks in Paris and Brussels stayed or transited in Hungary between July and November 2015, taking advantage of the flow of migrants. They will all pass through Budapest’s Keleti station, which in those days was full of journalists there to tell us how bad Viktor Orban’s government was in wanting to stop the flow of migrants. In those days Hollande was busy announcing that France would welcome migrants.
Here we go again. At this very moment, future massacres in Europe are being prepared.