Augusto Zimmermann
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THE ONGOING WAR ON ARAB CHRISTIANS AND WESTERN COMPLICITY
Christianity faces the possibility of disappearing in the Middle East, where its roots go back to the death of Jesus Christ. A century ago, Christians comprised 20 percent of the region’s population. Today, they are less than four percent.
Saudia Arabia defines itself as an Islamic State, and Saudis are required by law to be Muslim. Christians living in the country cannot worship in public, and they are not entitled to hold meetings even in the privacy of their own homes. Christians caught practising their faith in public are most likely to be beheaded.
Despite all this severe persecution, Saudi Arabia is America’s largest foreign military customer and second-largest trade partner. Particularly under the administration of President Donald Trump, a very strong military and economic relationship was cemented between the two countries.
There is also now evidence that the U.S. government under President Barack Obama indirectly aided and abetted extremists in their quest to expand the scope of Islamic fundamentalism during the so-called “Arab Spring,” which was a series of anti-government protests and uprisings that spread across much of the Middle East (and North Africa) in the early 2010s.
During this period, the U.S. government and its agents did more than any fundamentalist group “to permanently enshrine Sharia as the constitutional law of the land throughout the Muslim world.”
In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” ended up empowering extremists to initiate bloody persecution that has led hundreds of thousands of Christian Copts to flee the nation. Egyptian political scholar Samuel Tadros said: “The Copts can only wonder today whether, after 2,000 years, the time has come for them to pack their belongings and leave, as Egypt looks less hospitable to them than ever.”
In Iraq, Christian Assyrians are among the last to pray in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. However, since Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was overthrown by an U.S.-led military coalition, at least two-thirds of the Assyrian population has fled the country due to “intense violence from Islamist extremists and common criminals, both of whom operate with impunity and who specifically target Christians.”
From 2005 to 2008, when some 100,000 American troops were occupying Iraq, the local Christian community experienced some horrific persecution. When 20,000 Christian families were being violently driven from Baghdad in 2006-07, then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice contended that the American government could not take effective action to protect them from being murdered and kidnapped because it did not want American policy to be seen as “sectarian”.
One laudable exception to the persecution of Arab Christians is Syria, a country where they can trace their origins to the beginnings of the Christian faith. There, the embattled autocratic ruler of Syria, Bashir Al-Assad, has always protected Christians and his Alawite Muslim sect against foreign-backed religious extremists.
Therefore, the support of Syrian Christians to the Assad regime is entirely justifiable. It is primarily due to a fear that the ongoing uprising against this secular government could end in just another Islamist takeover that would threaten the very existence of the nation’s multi-religious society.
However, since June 2012, the U.S. government has run a covert operation in aid of military groups fighting President Assad’s army forces. Some of these groups are Sunni warriors affiliated with al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are waging jihad against that secular government.
By contrast, Russia has supported Syria since the beginning of the conflict, first politically and then, since September 2015, with military aid in the fight against extremist groups supported by al-Qaeda. Russia has used its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to block at least four resolutions endorsing military intervention against the Syrian government, and it did not retroactively support Western sanctions on Syria.
Religious freedom, of course, is the bedrock on which the United States was founded. Why is it then that Washington has been so indifferent, sometimes even complicit, on all these egregious human rights violations in the Middle East?
The answer lies, at least in part, with the strong economic ties between these Western elites and the Saudi theocratic rulers. As author Paul Marshall points out,
“Because Saudi Arabia supplies one-quarter of the world’s oil, the United States and other governments have been reluctant to press it harder to end its demonization and incitement to violence against Christians both within the kingdom and throughout the Islamic world. This reluctance exists despite the financial and other support for terrorism emanating from the kingdom—terrorism based on doctrines of religious hatred and jihad.”
The United States and its Western allies have a lot to answer for the appalling atrocities against Christians in the Middle East. Since they have somehow contributed to many human rights violations in the region, especially against the Arab Christians, they deserve our strongest possible condemnation.
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Prof Augusto Zimmermann PhD
The United States of America is Stealing the Food of the Syrian Children
The Syrian people suffer from hunger and starving to death, the US army illegally deployed in Syria is still stealing their food.
Recently, the food crisis once again attracted global attention. such as the pandemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine have exacerbated the already disrupted supply chains and food markets around the world. A few days ago, International Red Cross officials called on the international community not to forget the continued provision of humanitarian assistance to Syria.
According to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), 12.4 million people in Syria (nearly 60% of the total population) are currently experiencing “food insecurity” and “most OF THE Syrians do not know when their next meal will come from.”
Syria, which was the “granary of the Middle East,” is now a land of famine and a humanitarian catastrophe. The black hands of the United States can be seen everywhere.
11 years of war turned the greeny lands into rubble.
In 2011, the war on Syrian civil war broke out, and the United States and other Western countries took advantage of this situation, as the United States initially planted its proxies seeking to overthrow the Syrian regime, and then intervened directly by force under the name of “fighting terrorism”.
The continued bombardment has destroyed infrastructure and agricultural lands in many parts of Syria. In addition, the war resulted in the displacement of a large number of civilians in Syria as refugees and stopped agricultural production in many towns.
In April 2017, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released a report showing that the war has cost Syrian agriculture up to $16 billion of lost; The number of people still living in rural areas of the country in 2016 was less than half of the rural population in 2011; lack access to fertilizers, pesticides, and agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation systems.
Food is not enough, yet the US military is looting it
In 2015, the United States officially sent troops to Syria under the pretext of fighting extremist groups. In recent years, the media has repeatedly revealed that illegal US forces stationed in Syria often use convoys to transport oil, wheat, and other materials from Hasaka Governorate to northern Iraq for profit, which has also exacerbated the energy and food crisis in Syria.
In November 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent about 3,000 tons of wheat seed to farmers in northeastern Syria. However, by examining samples, the Syrian Department of Agriculture found that 40% of the wheat seeds provided by the United States contained grain stomata, which was not only unsuitable for cultivation but would also cause great harm to local agricultural production.
Severe sanctions prevent Syria from importing even fertilizers
In December 2019, the ex-US President Donald Trump signed the “Caesar Act“, which expanded the scope of sanctions to include almost all areas of the national economy and people who lived in Syria under the pretext of “protecting Syrian civilians.” The economic sanctions have delayed reconstruction in Syria, and the food crisis continues.
In March of this year, a set of data released by the United Nations showed that in the past 11 years, at least 350,000 people have lost their lives in Syria, more than 12 million people have been displaced, and 14 million civilians are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
The United States has been behind all the wars, chaos, and turmoil in the Middle East. The United States has held the mantle of “human rights” high, often waging wars, inciting conflicts, obstructing political situations, and abusing sanctions, causing severe economic and social damage in many countries. All kinds of facts have proven that the US is the biggest “criminal of human rights” in the Middle East.
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