by Giulio Meotti
1971-2024: the Assad dynasty in Syria has ended.
Dictatorships never end well and no matter how resistant (like Soviet communism for 80 years) they always have an expiration date, let alone family dictatorships with 10 percent of Alawites tyrannizing over 80 percent of Sunnis.
It is incredible that Damascus fell in a week without a fight. Like Iraq under the advance of ISIS and “Western” Kabul before the Taliban.
The Syrian civil war had transformed Syria into a puppet regime controlled by Iran and Russia.
After the fall, Syria will follow demographic lines. Demography, in the Middle East but also in Europe, is always in favor of Islam. Perhaps the country will divide into ethnic-religious enclaves or perhaps it could turn into a real civil war or, most likely, into a terrible combination of the two. The only thing the Middle East is not known for is stability. And chaos is the only thing you can bet on in the Middle East. And only Westerners rotten to the core do not see that Israel is our only rock in that part of the world, so decisive for history, religion, energy and terrorism.
Who wins and who loses from this watershed moment? There are more losers and even those who win have a lot to lose.
The Iranians lose, they who used Syria as a base and passage. Whether the fall of Damascus will be the “Kabul moment” of the Islamic Revolution remains to be seen.
The Russians lose, not only their bases on the Mediterranean, but a historic ally after 1991.
The Kurds lose, they are the ones who have everything to fear from the advent of an Islamic regime and who were our only true allies in this war between barbarians. Erdogan and Islam cannot stand this small people who arm women, who have their hair in the wind, who leave religion in the private sphere and who helped us destroy ISIS.
An appeal in Le Figaro signed by French intellectuals Pascal Bruckner, Bernard Kouchner and Stephane Breton states: “The Kurds of Syria have defeated the Islamists who have caused the worst attacks in our history. When young Kurdish fighters with admirable courage are captured by jihadists, they are tortured, disemboweled and torn to pieces. This barbarity is unsustainable. The Kurds are our only allies in the region and have proven their effectiveness on the ground. If we abandon them, there will be no one to help us contain new terrorist explosions against us. Finally, the Kurds of Syria are building a democratic society that respects ethnic and religious pluralism and equality between men and women”.
Christians and all those who do not want to live under Sunni and Sharia rule also lose: women without veils, religious minorities, free and secular people. The motto of the winners of the revolution is “the Alawites in the grave, the Christians in Lebanon”.
Europe loses, a Europe which cannot say anything and which will welcome not only refugees, but terrorists who will then use Syria as a base for Jihad. It is shocking that Europe no longer has any foreign policy.
Erdogan wins, the figure who finances the Islamic insurrection and can add a piece to the puzzle of his “Erdoganistan”.
Qatar wins, as it has always armed the Syrian Islamic rebels.
ISIS wins, and is already exploiting the situation to reconstitute itself (at the height of its power it controlled a third of Syria).
America wins and loses. It is far away and not affected by any Middle Eastern geopolitical shocks, which wins in the short term due to the fall of a piece of the “axis of evil” but which could soon be forced to intervene again against a terrorist army.
Israel wins and loses: it wins because, after the blow dealt to Hezbollah, a historic ally of Khomeinism is no longer there. It loses, because for the Jewish enclave the best outcome would have been a weakened Assad. No one knows what can come out of an Islamic regime. In the short term, divide and conquer.
Above all, political Islam wins. We are witnessing the greatest Islamic flare-up since 2011, when the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power in Egypt. In the streets of Syria, a revolution is taking place to the cry of “Allahu Akbar” led by former lieutenants of Al Qaeda and ISIS, whose leader still has a $10 million bounty on his head from the United States. If they build a sort of Caliphate on the Mediterranean, they will go down in history.
“In the ruins of cities like Aleppo, Christians who refuse to convert to Islam were kidnapped, executed and beheaded by Islamist rebels.” This is what the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, wrote ten years ago.
In the Middle East, history always repeats itself. But worse than before.
“They want to restore the Caliphate,” explains Le Figaro. “They consider the Kurds and Christians as an extension of the West into Muslim lands.”
But who are these rebels? Who is their leader, Al Golani, so called because he claims the Israeli Golan?
Yesterday it was called Al Nusra, today it is called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of Al Qaeda. Kurds and Christians have everything to fear from the advancing Islamists, whose online communications advocate the systematic looting and destruction of Christian villages and the enslavement of Kurdish women.
Mark Dubowitz writes: “America and Israel’s only true allies in the Syrian conflict are the Kurds. The others are adversaries: Erdogan, Assad, Putin, Khamenei, Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shia militias, and Golani. Our failure to support the Kurds over the years has been a grave mistake.”
But let’s look at who has taken power.
“Christians are pigs. They do not deserve to live.” These are the words of an Islamist rebel to a Christian, Elia Gargous, one of those kidnapped by the Al Nusra militia, outside of Rableh in western Syria. They were taken to the convent of St. Elias, two miles from Rableh. There, Christians watched helplessly as icons were smashed in front of them. Gargous said: “They told us to convert, but we refused. They killed people in front of us.”
In an interview with Al Jazeera, then-head of Al Nusra, Al Golani, explained what the future would be for Syria’s religious minorities. The Alawites would have to “correct their doctrinal errors and embrace Islam.” But it’s not just the Alawites, whom Golani referred to by using the Islamist term “Nusayris.” The Druze also need to be reformed from the “doctrinal pitfalls they fell into.”
Jihadists massacred entire families: “Al Nusra attacked Christian villages, killing only people who were in the army and Christians; one woman was massacred and a cross was put in her mouth.”
Today Golani declares that “diversity is our strength,” a phrase that sounds more like Western human resources departments than jihadist warlords. Like the “inclusive Taliban,” the jihadists know how to sell themselves to the West.
Wherever it governs, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham imposes sharia patrols, “Hisbah,” that beat and imprison women who violate Islamic dress or are caught traveling without a man. In Idlib, the Syrian city they governed for ten years, they stone women. Then there are the beheadings of children.
A new fatwa has just been launched by Islamic ideologists:
“The policy of Sharia and neutralizing enemies is in line with what Muhammad did when he neutralized the Jews”.
As soon as they took control of the Aleppo airport, the Islamists destroyed all the bottles of alcohol.
The village of Kanayé, on the Orontes River, in the governorate of Idlib, was invaded by Islamist militiamen who are now marching on Syria. What they did was revealed by Giuseppe Nazzaro, the vicar emeritus of Aleppo:
“In Kanayé, the Salafi militiamen and the jihadists of ‘Jabhat al-Nousra’ have ordered the parish priest to stop ringing the bells. Women must no longer go out into the streets with their heads uncovered, but must be veiled. And if they do not obey these orders, the threat is massacre. We are faced with what they have already done in the nearby village of Ghassanieh for over a year. In Ghassanieh they ordered the inhabitants to leave the village immediately, otherwise they would massacre them, and they obtained the desired result: to occupy the village with all the Christians dispossessed. In Kanayé, they did not force the population to leave but to live according to Islamic law”.
The Islamist program has a simple and effective slogan: “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people”.
Jews had lived in Arab countries for 2,500 years, starting with the “Babylonian Captivity.” In 1948, they represented 3.6 percent of the population in Libya, 2.8 percent in Morocco, and 2.6 percent in Iraq. Their social position varied in different countries.
In Iraq and Egypt, some Jews were successful in their occupations and professions and played a certain role in their societies; in Yemen and Morocco, they were generally poor. Pogroms occurred in Libya, Syria, Morocco, and especially Iraq, where in the space of two days in June 1941, a pogrom, known as “Farhud,” occurred in Baghdad: under the pro-Nazi regime of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, 179 Jews were murdered and 600 wounded. In Libya, in 1945, Islamists in Tripoli killed more than 140 Jews.
In several other Arab countries, Jews were murdered, kidnapped and persecuted. Arab League countries decided to strip their Jews of their citizenship. Iraq stripped its Jews of their citizenship in 1950 and their property in 1951. Egypt and Libya passed laws that “Zionists” were not citizens. They ignored the Jews who had lived in those countries for more than a thousand years and certainly before the birth of Muhammad.
With the creation of Israel in 1948, Jews in Arab and Islamic countries in the Middle East faced dispossession, organized discrimination, violence, attacks and pogroms. By the mid-1970s, nearly all Jews, more than 850,000, had left those countries. The largest numbers came from Morocco (265,000); Algeria (140,000), Iraq (135,000) and Tunisia (105,000). Nearly all 55,000 Jews living in Yemen were taken to Israel. 130,000 Jews were airlifted from Iraq to Israel. 600,000 of the more than 850,000 Jews of Islam went to Israel.
A story that no one teaches in schools or newspapers.
An Arab revolt in Aleppo in 1947 killed dozens of Jews and destroyed hundreds of homes, shops and synagogues. It was the beginning of the mass Jewish emigration from Syria to Israel. At the time of the war in 1967, 1,000 Jews remained.
Officially, Jews were considered “Syrian citizens,” but on their identity cards there was a red embossed mark: “Jew.” They could move freely only within a radius of five kilometers from their homes and were forbidden to sell real estate. If a Jew died, his property passed to the “government agency for Palestinian affairs.” Jews were frequently registered and subjected to checks: raids on their homes even at night, searches, torture.
Judy Feld Carr, a Toronto Jew born in 1939, a music teacher, is the woman who organized the escape of over 3,000 Jews from Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli to Israel and America, in one of the most incredible rescue operations after the Holocaust, beginning in the mid-1970s. A Jewish woman originally from Aleppo who was living in Toronto decided to return to her homeland to visit her brother who was still there. She returned with a letter, which she gave to Feld Carr. “It was a letter that I would have expected at the time of the Holocaust,” recalls the professor. “It was written by three rabbis of the community: ‘Our children are your children. Get us out of here,’ I remember it saying.”
At the time, the Syrian regime did not allow Jews to emigrate and tortured those captured who tried to escape. It took two years to get the first person to escape, for a ransom. Canada did not have an embassy in Damascus, so it was difficult to find a way to bribe Syrian officials. That first Syrian rabbi to escape had already been imprisoned and tortured and was terminally ill with cancer. Thanks to Judy, he realized his dream of drinking coffee in Israel with his mother. Then she made a wish: “Take my daughter out of Syria.”
And so the Canadian took action for the girl, who was 19 at the time (she now lives in Bat Yam and is a grandmother). One by one, with the financial support of the Canadian community, without ever setting foot in Syria, Judy helped 3,328 Jews out of the 4,600 who lived there escape (almost all of the rest managed to escape by their own means or with the help of Israel). Observing the news that came from Syria after the outbreak of the civil war, the massacres, the disappearance of minorities, Carr said: “I don’t think the Jews would be alive today if that community of over 3,000 were still there. I can tell you that.”
If the Jews had remained in Syria, they would have met the same fate as the Christian Ninar Odisho, who was in the city of al-Tabqah, which had been in the hands of Islamic rebels for over a year, when he was approached by some jihadists. After pointing guns at him, they let his two friends go because they were Muslims, while they beat Ninar to death, after learning that he was a Christian.
They can blame Israel all they want: Christians will not be spared. “In February 2014, I met with the head of the Jewish community in Egypt, Magda Haroun,” wrote Coptic Samuel Tadros in the New York Times. “Today, she told me, there are 15 Jews left in the country, out of a population that once numbered 100,000. Ms. Haroun said she feared the Copts would soon follow. At the time, I thought the prospect was exaggerated. But I myself had left the country, and so had hundreds of thousands of Copts. Ms. Haroun was right.”
Yes, she was right.
Like Mosab Hassan Yousef, at this point I only hope that those in charge have destroyed in time the chemical and biological weapons that Assad has in his arsenals. Because the idea of a bearded Islamist who believes in the invincibility of Allah and in the conquest of Rome with his fingers on a barrel of gas does not leave me at all calm. I would not like to witness live the scene from the TV series Jack Ryan in which a Syrian Islamist spreads sarin in a church in Paris.
Notre Dame is well worth an attack. Stand guard, Europe.
Assad is gone. The “inclusive” Caliph rises | Israel National News – Arutz Sheva