Al-Khaleej al-Jadid, UAE, August 23
The decision to allow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stay in power signifies a much greater failure than that of the international community to end the Syrian Civil War. In fact, it is part of a wider stance taken by the international community towards the Arab world, which can be traced back to the formation of Israel. Ever since 1948, Western powers have turned a blind eye to Israel’s violation of human rights. At first, they accepted Israel’s cleansing of the Palestinian people. Then they embraced its annexation of Palestinian lands. All of this was done under the guise of Israel’s “security concerns.” Not a single country acted against Israel as millions of Palestinians were either displaced or killed. This attitude set up a dangerous precedent in the world. It allowed Western powers — the very same ones that speak so highly of international human rights — to accept almost any brutal oppressor, so long as his or her acts of killing could be rationalized by an impeding security threat to the West. Now, countries like the United States and Russia speak of Assad as the lesser of two evils. They have pardoned him from the atrocities he committed against his people, simply because they fear ISIL more than they fear his regime. They ignored the plea of the Syrian people for a free and democratic society. Assad’s state-sponsored terrorism against the Syrian people is no different than Israel’s state-sponsored terrorism against the Palestinian people. The fact that world powers have come to embrace both of these realities as a given suggests that Arab lives have no value in the eyes of the West. What started out as an exception in the case of Israel ended up as a norm regarding any human rights abuses occurring in the Arab world. We now live in a world where criminals are being rewarded while their victims are being punished. – Abd al-Wahab Badran