The Normalization of Abnormal

The Shia Alawate Ba'ath regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria now shares the international opprobrium that was once meted out to the Ba'ath regime of Iraq's tyrant, Saddam Hussein.  Both were equally guilty of representing vitriolic dictatorships that brooked no dissent from the majority populations that their minority-representative governments represented.

Each in their own way presented as volatile and problematical regimes whose activities impinged deleteriously on their neighbours in the Middle East.  On the other hand, the various regimes of the Middle East, the kingdoms and theocracies, the oil sheikhdoms and the dictatorships have always engaged in threats against one another, and often enough gone to war against one another.

What does bring them together, to overlook their tribal and sectarian antipathies, is their mutual hatred of the interloper in their midst, the Israel-come-lately that they will not recognize has any legitimate presence born of heritage, traditions, culture and history in the part of the world they all share.  Israel is accused of blood-letting of Muslim children for traditional ceremonies.

Israel, the sole, small and isolated country, an island of defence in a sea of offense, is accused of apartheid for claiming itself to be a country dedicated to the survival of Jewry.  That Arab Muslim countries consider themselves Arab-specific-and-dominated nations is no contradiction to them at all.  Nor is the fact that Israel has among its six million Jews another two million comprised of Christians and Muslims.

Yet it is Israel that dominates the agenda of vexing pan-Arab problems.  Because of course, Israel is committed to the eradication of Arabs, particularly Palestinians who present as such an irritating presence to Israel.  Bent on genocidal activities in keeping Palestinians from claiming their rightful place in a sovereign Palestine, Israel is also accused of targeting Arab children for extinction.

One might imagine, in a logical world that Arabs would be aghast at the spectacle of the Syrian regime apprehending and torturing and murdering their own. Particularly children.  But this is a device particularly loved of Iran, the neighbourhood Aryan Muslim exponent of triumphalist Islamism, so the two states share much in common, aside from their common hatred of Israel.

Syria has now been accused of dropping cluster bombs on a schoolyard, killing a number of children.  Syria also targets bakeries where people are lined up to procure the staff of life, making perfect targets of themselves.  Syrian rebel forces have published a video showing nine dead children under 15 after an air strike east of Damascus.

"Families had left their homes and taken shelter in the school.  This is why there were many children in one place.  There was a break in the fighting and the children were outside playing."  It is not only the regime that engages in human rights atrocities, but the rebel forces as well, reverting to the stone-age mentality of meting out justice outside a courtroom by firing squad.

Since expectations of humane and conscionable behaviour is always low for people living so close to their heritage of tribalism and viral Islamism, there is not too much for them to be ashamed of, for this is who they are and how they are.  All their faults in the sphere of humane relationships with one another, however, are picked out carefully and ascribed to the only civil country in the region: Israel.