You may have read about the sickening suppression of protesters in the Middle Eastern nation of Syria by President Bashar Assad’s military. Nearly 2,000 civilians are believed to have been killed by government forces in the five-month uprising to end Syria’s longtime oppression of its people. Assad even launched bomb attacks on a Syrian city recently to try to crush the rebellion.
In addition, Syria is a state sponsor of terrorism and freely acknowledges that it is home to the Hamas terrorist organization.
Considering all that, you might think there would be a massive outcry among other Muslim nations of the Middle East in response to Syria’s vicious crackdown against its Muslim people. But any such criticism is dwarfed by Middle Eastern nations’ continued denunciations of Israel.
That’s ironic. When repeated radical Muslim terrorist attacks force Israel to defend itself, Israel goes to great lengths to try to target only terrorist and military targets, not civilians. And yet Israel is condemned, while Syria’s deliberate attacks on civilians are largely ignored.
Israel’s relationship with its hostile neighbors is complicated – to say the least. But given many of those neighbors’ history of internal strife, brutality and terrorism, it is absurd to believe their assertion that Israel is the source of the Middle East’s problems.
Israel is used as a scapegoat to allow other countries to keep attention off their oppressive acts, but Israel is not the cause of that troubled region’s woes.