Those Dying Syrians Are Making Us Look Like A Bunch Of Crybabies

By Mahmoud Abbas, President, Palestinian National Authority

Under many circumstances I’d feel sorry for our Syrian brothers being subjected to barbaric cruelty at the hands of Assad’s air force and Russian warplanes, but these are not those circumstances. Not when their suffering dwarfs ours to the point that our yelling at every turn about Israeli actions just makes us look like whiners by comparison.

That dynamic is the main reason my government and political faction supports Assad in this conflict. His characterization of all his opponents as “terrorists” aside, the real enemy here is the Palestinian position as the ultimate victims. If other people’s suffering displaces us from the center of world attention, all people of conscience must oppose them. What right have they to divert international focus from our struggle against the Occupation?

It also helps explain our continued support for the Syrian regime – the same one responsible for the bulk of the more than 300,000 deaths since the civil war began – despite the killings and torture of Palestinians by regime forces. Several Palestinian refugee camps in Syria have been under siege for years – not the fake Israeli “siege” of the Gaza Strip we love to go on and on about – and their population has plummeted. But objecting to those policies of the Assad regime would put us on the same side as the people in, for example, Aleppo, who have committed the unforgivable sin of suffering more than us, and having that suffering gain international attention.

Understand that we have no problem with other people suffering more. The sub-Saharan peoples facing every kind of inhumanity, and the Tibetans being crushed under Chinese oppression can go ahead and keep at it. We’re behind that all the way. But the moment the international community starts paying sustained attention to those people, that means we’re not in the center of it all, and those suffering people must be made to pay for such insolence. We oppose them.

In that vein, I’m gratified that we got in early on hijacking the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. It would simply not do to have a grassroots social movement with real political potential, and a real grip on the world’s consciousness, focus on some cause that does not involve the Palestinians.

So I ask of the world media to stop reporting on the fighting in Aleppo, or at least to stop reporting on it in such a way that the victims of brutality are portrayed as victims.

Only Palestinians are allowed to be victims.

 

h/t @JudgeDan48

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