Apocalypse ignored: As Gaza grabs the headlines, epic slaughter engulfs the rest of the region. But where are the protests?
The fragile ceasefire in Gaza was still holding last night after three days, offering a glimmer of hope that the brutal conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas might be at an end.
Israel believes it has killed more than 700 Hamas fighters in the past four weeks and destroyed at least 32 of the underground passages through which Hamas smuggles weaponry and launches terrorist attacks on the country.
In their cold-blooded parlance, Israel’s military leaders say they have ‘mown the grass’ sufficiently to enable a withdrawal of troops from Gaza. In other words, they have degraded Hamas’s military capacity to the extent that they believe it will take three or four years before the terrorist organisation can become truly belligerent again; before the gruesome cycle of Hamas provocation and ruthless Israeli retaliation begins once more.
Scroll down for video
Militant: Palestinian fighters from Islamic Jihad hold their weapons at the funeral of a fellow militant in Gaza
Aftermath: A Palestinian rides past residential buildings in Beit Lahiya town, all but obliterated by Israeli shelling and air strikes, in the northern Gaza Strip
Destruction: A boy sits among the ruins of a destroyed house in Beit Lahiya, hours before the 72-hour ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came to an end
Cost: Mohammed Ali Wahdan, a two-year-old Palestnian boy, lies on his bed at the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, as he receives treatment for burns and other injuries
Recovering: Wala Abu Zaid, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl injured in an Israeli military strike on Gaza, lies in a bed at the the Makassed hospital in East Jerusalem, where she was transferred by the Red Cross during the ceasefire which has endured since Tuesday
Hanan Abu Leil, a six-year-old Palestinian girl injured by an Israeli airstrike, recovering in the Makassed hospital in East Jerusalem. Doctors and aid agencies are trying to capitalise on a truce in Gaza to evacuate more wounded Palestinians for life-saving medical treatment in east Jerusalem, Israel and Jordan
The battle raging in the Gaza Strip has transfixed the world. Relentless TV and media coverage has concentrated on the appalling death toll of 1,900 Palestinians, hundreds of them children.
Protest marches sprung up across the globe as the conflict caused widespread outrage and some of the worst manifestations of anti-semitism the West has witnessed since the Thirties.
At Westminster, Foreign Office minister Baroness Warsi — who was passed over for promotion in David Cameron’s latest reshuffle — resigned allegedly as a matter of conscience, while the Tricycle Theatre in North London cancelled its annual Jewish film festival.
Horrific though events in Gaza have been, they were actually a sideshow to the appalling slaughter now raging across much of the Middle East as well as Libya in North Africa.
What is so extraordinary is that the voices protesting so vehemently against Israel’s actions remain resolutely silent over this bloodshed which is on a far greater scale than ever took place in Gaza.
Despite the indignation of so many at Israel’s ruthless display of power, the country has gone to great lengths to prevent civilian casualties by using leaflets, text messages and phone calls in Arabic to warn people to leave targeted buildings.
No such niceties were afforded the hundreds of innocent victims of armed militia groups running rampant in Libya and battling for control of its major cities Tripoli and Benghazi. There were a staggering 1,700 of these groups at the last count.
Meanwhile... Libyan citizens look at the damage caused by a missile that struck a building in Tripoli on Monday. At least 200 people have been killed in the violence as rival militias fighting for two weeks for control of the city's main airport
A city at war with itself: Smoke fills the sky over Tripoli following a rocket attack which struck and ignited a tank in the city's main fuel depot on Sunday
Inferno: A closer view of the fuel depot shows flames licking upward as thousands of tons of oil burn
Country in the grip of extremists: An Islamic militiaman is seen during a clash near Tripoli International Airport
Battle: Militiamen take cover as they fight for control of the airport
Libya is now a country in meltdown. The government has disintegrated, law and order has been abandoned, violence is endemic, thousands have been killed, airports are in flames and high-grade weaponry is available on every street corner, able to find its way to Islamist militia groups in countries such as Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger.
Libya has become an open door for illegal migrants from all over Africa seeking to reach southern Europe and eventually Britain’s generous welfare system.
The Italian navy cannot expect cooperation from its Libyan counterpart, which used to help it stem the flood of refugees in Gaddafi’s day, since that navy is now in the hands of five rival militias.
Last Saturday the United States shut down its embassy and evacuated its diplomats to neighbouring Tunisia under U.S. military escort.
On Monday the Royal Navy was sent in to help Britons leave Libya, while the Foreign Office has advised people not to visit the country.
The fact is that while the world protests over Gaza, it has given up on Libya.
Just three years since Gaddafi, its despotic ruler of 40 years, was deposed — and David Cameron made that hubristic visit with President Sarkozy of France to congratulate the Libyans on their new-found freedom — the country is no longer functioning, as warring tribes and sects slug it out for supremacy.
There is an old Libyan saying: ‘Within Libya, it is region against region; within regions, tribe against tribe; within tribes, family against family.’
Meanwhile the situation in Syria and Iraq is as bad, if not worse.
Ready to fight: Kurdish Peshmerga troops and Shiite volunteers take position during fighting with Islamic State (IS) fighters, in Amerly town, north east of Baghdad, Iraq
Wreckage: A burnt vehicle of the Iraqi security forces is seen in Udhaim district, north of Baghdad, where they repelled repeated attacks from Islamic State militants
Bodies of Islamic State militants lie on the ground after fighting with Iraqi security forces, backed by Iraqi Turkmen Shiites, on Monday, in Amerli, some 100 miles north of Baghdad, as the city has been completely surrounded by IS fighters for more than six weeks. Residents say a humanitarian disaster is imminent in the town
Syrian People's Protection Units (YPG) members fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Rabia town, Mosul, Iraq on Wednesday
Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee Hamdaniyah town of Mosul to Erbil yesterday after the latest wave of Islamic State advances that began on Sunday
Yesterday, it emerged that 40,000 members of one of Iraq’s oldest minorities have been stranded for days on a mountain in the north-west of the country without food or water.
These people from the Yazidi sect were driven there by Islamist militant group the Islamic State, formerly ISIS. They now have to choose between slaughter at the hands of the Islamic State jihadists waiting for them below, or death by dehydration if they stay on the mountain.
Where are the protests in the West for action to stop their suffering?
Last week the Islamic State released a 36-minute video to mark Eid, an important Muslim festival celebrating the end of Ramadam.
Eid should be a time of happiness, a holiday known as the Sweet Festival to end a month of fasting. Instead, the Islamic State chose to signify its arrival with a shockingly violent video which revels in the carnage in Iraq and Syria as Islamic State militants conquer vast swathes of the country. (Only this week, Islamic State fighters seized control of Iraq’s biggest dam, as well as an oilfield and three towns.)
The video showed men crammed into the back of an open-topped truck, weeping in fear before being driven off to be executed. In another sequence, hundreds sit on the ground in the desert, their hands bound, waiting to be shot. Still more men are shown being hit with rifle butts as they march, bent and blindfolded, one behind the other. When they reach their destination, the blood-soaked edge of a small jetty, each of them is shot dead and tossed into the water.
Thousands upon thousands of innocent people — Muslims and Christians — have been murdered by the Islamic State since it captured the country’s second largest city of Mosul. Last month it declared its own Islamic caliphate, or kingdom, across northern Iraq and Syria.
In a development with overtones of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, Christian families have had their doors ominously marked to inform them they face the bleak alternatives of conversion to an extreme version of Islam or death. In the past 24 hours, 200,000 Assyrian Christians have fled the Islamic State into Kurdistan where there are already 1.56 million refugees.
Crucifixions and beheadings are commonplace, while the Islamic State runs extortion rackets in every town it conquers and has looted hundreds of millions from banks.
Amid this brutality, the flight of refugees is destabilising the entire region still further and reviving ancient rivalries between Sunni and Shia Muslims — rivalries dating back to the 7th century which concern divergent beliefs in who was the successor to Mohammed.
Nine million people have had been displaced within Syria as the civil war rages, but millions more are fleeing to neighbouring countries. Lebanon’s population of 4.8 million, for example, has been forced to cope with an extra 1.1 million people from Syria.
Syrian refugees ride a truck towards Syria through the Masnaa checkpoint from the Lebanese town of Arsal near the Syrian border, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, yesterday, after a truce was announced to end fighting between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants on the Syrian border
More Syrian refugees stream towards the border back to their home country: Islamic State militants tried to seize control of a Lebanese town this week
Syrian refugees flee from the Lebanese eastern town of Arsal on their way to cross back into Syria, as they ride in the back of a pickup truck with their belongings at the Lebanese border crossing point of Masnaa, eastern Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, Thursday
A Syrian refugee girl sits on cement blocks amid damage and burnt tents from the fighting between Lebanese army soldiers and Islamist militants in the Sunni Muslim border town of Arsal, in eastern Bekaa Valley yesterday. Militant Islamists have mostly withdrawn from the Lebanese border town of Arsal, which they seized at the weekend, taking with them captive Lebanese soldiers, militant and security sources said on Thursday, as a truce to end the deadly battle appeared to hold
Most of these refugees are Sunni Muslims, which upsets a potentially explosive balance in Lebanon, in which Christians, Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims share power. The Islamic State has now tried to seize a town in northern Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the influx of one million Sunnis to Jordan — a country of just 6.6 million people — is boosting the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood, a political organisation which seeks to overthrow the monarchy of King Abdullah II, a staunch ally of the West.
Within Jordan, there have been growing signs of support for the Islamic State — last month there were anti-poverty marches in which protestors unfurled the group’s black flag — which is threatening the border from Iraq in the east.
As we witness the disintegration of entire states in Syria and Iraq, some observers have been claiming that erasing their borders, cooked up by British and French colonial rulers in the Twenties, would be a good thing.
But if we allow such countries to disappear, whole communities would be caught on the ‘wrong’ side of newly-drawn borders.
This is already the fate of Christian and Shia people in the Iraq city of Mosul (regarded as heretics by the Islamic State, who are all Sunnis) or the Sunni population in Baghdad (where the ruling class and the country’s Prime Minister are Shia).
It would be a licence for wholesale slaughter by religious maniacs.
Yet even this would not be the end of it. Because the rival religious factions carving up Syria and Iraq are supported by their own local superpowers, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey among them. And as Sunni battle Shia, these countries are now being drawn into the conflict. Syria’s President Assad and his ruling party are Alawite Muslims, which is a form of Shia. Lebanon’s Hizbollah militia are also Shia. They are both supported financially and militarily by Iran, the main Shia power.
The jihadist groups, on the other hand, are puppets of Qatar and Saudi Arabia which are Sunni — and determined to fight President Assad of Syria to the death. The Islamic State is partly funded from private Qatari and Saudi sources.
Mad men: Power struggles were kept in check when when dictators such as Saddam, left, in Iraq, and Gaddafi, centre in Libya, were in power. Absurdly, Britain’s Middle East envoy Tony Blair, right, claims that this chaos has nothing to do with Western intervention in Iraq and Libya.
This age-old power struggle was kept in check when dictators such as Saddam in Iraq, and Gaddafi in Libya, were in power.
But now it has been unleashed, many ordinary people in the region yearn for the restoration of the kind of strongmen in whose overthrow the West naively connived. As the Arabic proverb says: ‘Better a thousand years of tyranny than one of anarchy.’
Absurdly, Britain’s Middle East envoy Tony Blair claims that this chaos has nothing to do with Western intervention in Iraq and Libya.
The truth is that, by displacing their dictators, we have caused carnage. And this descent into chaos has coincided, like a perfect storm, with America’s weariness of overseas conflicts and mischief-making by Russia which supports President Assad of Syria, where it wants to keep a naval base.
But make no mistake, key allies of the West are now under threat from the Islamic State, and the crisis is lapping at our own shores. The so-called ‘blowback’ threat from jihadi terrorists on the streets of Britain, for instance, is growing by the day as disenchanted British Muslims are sucked into the ‘holy war’ in Syria and Iraq.
For sure, we should grieve for the children in Gaza. But we cannot afford to ignore how many more innocents will die in the infinitely more dangerous conflicts in the Middle East, in a cycle of murder that could last for decades rather than just four weeks.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2719460/Apocalypse-ignored-As-Gaza-grabs-headlines-epic-slaughter-engulfs-rest-region-But-protests.html#ixzz39pHMDGzV
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.