To the brave people of Syria fighting for its freedom.
Today we learned that Venezuela, has decided to send a third shipment of fuel to your government, the type of fuel that allows army tanks and trucks to run. The government of your country is massacring the people that oppose the dictatorship. Everyday we are getting new evidence of these massacres that my government seems to be among the rare ones to ignore. Such as the one in the village of Rankous. Massacres helped along by the fuel from Venezuela. The rulers of my country are associated with the devastation and the crimes of Assad and his acolytes.
I want you to know, with all my personal sentiment, that many of us in Venezuela condemn with all our heart the foul actions of our regime en Venezuela. It is our hope that some day we will bring to account the direct responsible of those shipments to Syria, Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro and Rafael Ramírez, so that they will stand trial for crimes against humanity. I personally promise you to make all possible efforts so that those crimes will never be forgotten.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
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yeah, poor people of syria, they just want a teocratic islamic government so they could be free to rob, rape and murder Christians, just as the poor people of Tunisia, Lybia, Egypt, et al, did.
ReplyDeletethe good christians of Syria and the supposedly not so good alawis of Syria together held about 20% of the population and oppressed the other 80% for soon a century.
Deleteand you expect that this would never change?
for your info, good christians invented inquisition, burning witches and all sorts of stuff that is still going on more or less toned down, the least catholic the more likely to happen.
live by the sword, die by the sword. too bad for the christians in Syria, they got their chance to break with Assad long ago but now they can start packing indeed.
Daniel: For decades, military despots in the Middle East have garnered the support of the West by accusing their enemies of threatening genocide against the Christian hostage population. Mubarak's regime got help from the West by arguing that the military were the only protectors of the Copts. Meanwhile, for as long as Mubarak was in power, he garnered the support of Sunni conservatives by allowing the Copts to become fair game for islamists and opportunists and by treating them institutionally as third class subjects. He never bothered to cultivate the support of the Copts, he had them by their beards. Similarly, to keep the West from taking sides, Assad is propagating false reports of persecution of Christians by the people of Syria and the free army. See a number of articles on this subject by http://www.aymennjawad.org/articles/
DeleteLike the Copts in Egypt, Christians in Syria do not participate actively in the repression of Sunnis but they do not support militant Sunnis either, at least not anymore. The Copts in Egypt joined the demonstrations against Mubarak even if timidly, and look what it brought them: more persecution than ever. The Syrian Christians are not blind, they see in the fate of the Copts their own future. By the way, you might want to do some research about the Muslim Inquisition in Southern Spain, the first of its kind in Europe. The Muslims, not the Christians, invented this horrible institution to weed out false converts seeking to avoid death or jizya. And it was the Muslims, too, who taught Europeans about mass deportations and progroms, especially after the second and third invasions.
The Romans carried out deportations of all kinds of people in one area or the other. Two cases that come to my mind are the deportation of certain Germanic populations at some times to the West of the Rhine and the limes and the deportation of the high classes of Jews from Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Curiously, most Jews in the countryside would remain there and later convert to Christianity and Islam - the Palestinians are mostly that, people who were Canaanites first and Jewish later on, not Islam settlers- and later be expelled by European Jews in 1948.
DeleteThere were what amounts to pogroms (not progroms, as progroms are the ones favouring groms) against Christians during different times of the Roman Empire, even if there was a lot of tolerance otherwise.
I think it is clear Islam had from the start a more violent trait as Mohammed actually carried out pretty violent acts (tiny detail: after he killed a lot of Jews he "took for wife" Safiyya bint Huyayy, a Jewish woman whose husband and parents had just been killed by him.
Still, let's not fool ourselves. Christian leaders didn't have to learn anything from Islam.
In fact: deportations are as old as mankind.
Pogroms have happened before.
But yeah, it's probable that after the Syrian dictatorship falls, Christians will be attacked by increasing Sunni fundamentalism and Christians will have to flee massively, like they did once dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled.
The region is a whole mess.
Anyway, it's a shame for Venezuela that our regime is supporting Assad.
It will only make things worse.
Thanks, Daniel, for writing this balanced post.
When dogma becomes steadfast, abominable mistakes occur. And so when Chavez authorizes his country's complicity in Syrian government massacres he is unfortunately preparing his own fiefdom for the same.
ReplyDeleteStu
"Currently, the Department of State designates Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria as State Sponsors of Terrorism."-Quote from an article in Miami Herald yesterday.
ReplyDeleteWhy is Venezuela NOT on the list also, I ask?
VZ is not on the list because of MERCANTILISM.
DeleteNon Muslims in the Middle East have been traditionally second class citizens.For the Christians to have survived and prospered in Egypt and Syria they had to seek protection of the powerful groups that were in power.Sometimes those in power themselves would stoke up anger against Christians as a way of making their protection indispensable.Over the years an alliance is then created but ultimately a price is paid once there is a change where the majority of the people overthrow those in power.
ReplyDeleteThis ( in principle) is not that different from the situation where Democratic countries feel they have to give in to practical considerations when faced with economic blackmail.
Practicality usually wins in all circumstances, everywhere.
Chavez did everything he could to get sanctions against Venezuela-but, it didn't happen. Chavez wanted to use sanctions as an excuse to do what?
ReplyDeleteSpeed up his 'robolution'.Everybody knows this is the game Chavez wanted to play-and just look
it would have involved maybe getting huge numbers of people killed...
Incidentally, war also includes propaganda, misinformation, and stealthy, behind-the-scenes political maneuvering. Take a good look at the chavistas and cubans in Venezuela, FARC in Venezuela, narcotrafficking, etc., and tell me they aren’t waging war.
ReplyDelete