"The terrorists are killing everyone. Children, women, teenagers, old people — just killing," a Syrian Christian said in a video posted to X today. "Please, please, please — the media is not showing you anything." The slaughter isn't limited to Christians, as members of the Alawite faith are also being murdered by the forces in control of most of post-Assad Syria.
To be fair, the whole sordid mess seems to have kicked off last week as Assad regime dead-enders (the Assad family is Alawite, a syncretic religion with Muslim, Christian, and other elements) with attacks that "included killings and mass displacement of civilians along the country’s Mediterranean coast," according to a Wall Street Journal report today.
Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser at International Crisis Group, claimed that the Alawite forces were "baited into" last week's attacks, "and they definitely walked into the trap and acted in the worst possible way." The new Syrian regime, established after the fall of Bashar al-Assad last year, is led by former al Qaeda terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa. I always wonder how "former" he actually is.
Due to the ongoing digital assault against X, I'm unable to embed posts in this column like I usually would. But you can still watch the video here.
Reliable estimates are difficult, maybe even impossible to come by. The ones I've found so far indicate that anywhere between 1,200 and 7,000 Christians and Alawites have been murdered over the last two days.
The saddest part is that today's news is hardly news at all.
It isn't often appreciated — certainly not by the Muslim Middle East or their enablers in the Western press and academia — that Jews have long been subject to the same treatment.
About 700,000 Muslims fled the Jewish-controlled parts of British Mandate Palestine when Israel declared independence. The reason? Arab nations promised the Jews would be quickly defeated and they could soon return to their homes. Several wars and eight decades later, Israel is still there, and the so-called Palestinians are still "refugees."
But similar numbers of Jews were expelled from their ancient homes throughout the Muslim Middle East, with most finding their way to Israel. The descendants of those 1947 Jewish refugees have something important in common with the descendants of the Muslim Arabs who stayed in Israel: they're all Israeli citizens.
Tangents aside, the point is that to one degree or another, Muslims have for decades — centuries, really — been "purifying" the Dar al-Salam (House of Peace) of the unfaithful, from West Africa through the lands of the Nile and across the Levant through Iran and Pakistan.
When Syria achieved formal independence from France in 1946, a quarter of the population was Alawite or Christian, with nearly identical numbers representing each faith. Another 1% was Jewish. Today, there are virtually no Jews remaining in Syria, and war and emigration drastically reduced the Christian share of the population to barely 3%.
Call it a "soft genocide," the slow cleansing of majority-Muslim lands of the Christians and Jews who predate them by hundreds or thousands of years, by whatever means are at hand.
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