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Can the Boston Bombings increase our Sympathy for Iraq and Syria, for all such Victims?

Posted on 04/16/2013 by Juan Cole

The horrific bombings of the Boston Marathon produced inspiring images of a spirited, brave Boston refusing to be cowed. Some spectators surged forward toward the danger to apply tourniquets, offer first aid, share blankets, and later to give blood, for the victims.

President Obama followed the crisis from its first moments and came out promptly to caution against fruitless speculation as to the perpetrators as well as solemnly to vow that they will be held accountable. (He has a certain track record in that regard.)

The idea of three dead, several more critically wounded, and over a 100 injured, merely for running in a marathon (often running for charities or victims of other tragedies) is terrible to contemplate. Our hearts are broken for the victims and their family and friends, for the runners who will not run again.

There is negative energy implicit in such a violent event, and there is potential positive energy to be had from the way that we respond to it. To fight our contemporary pathologies, the tragedy has to be turned to empathy and universal compassion rather than to anger and racial profiling. Whatever sick mind dreamed up this act did not manifest the essence of any large group of people. Terrorists and supremacists represent only themselves, and always harm their own ethnic or religious group along with everyone else.

The negative energies were palpable. Fox News contributor Erik Rush tweeted .. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/04/boston-marathon-bombings-erik-rush-fox-news-muslims-death/ , “Everybody do the National Security Ankle Grab! Let’s bring more Saudis in without screening them! C’mon!” When asked if he was already scapegoating Muslims, he replied, ““Yes, they’re evil. Let’s kill them all.” Challenged on that, he replied, “Sarcasm, idiot!” What would happen, I wonder, if someone sarcastically asked on Twitter why, whenever there is a bombing in the US, one of the suspects everyone has to consider is white people? I did, mischievously and with Mr. Rush in mind, and was told repeatedly that it wasn’t right to tar all members of a group with the brush of a few. They were so unselfconscious that they didn’t seem to realize that this was what was being done to Muslims!

It was easy for jingoists to find Chinese or Arabs on twitter gloating. But I saw much more of this kind of message:

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Zaynab AlAlawi @ZaynabDAlAlawi

#??????_????? Our religion doesn't teach us to be happy on people's' miseries.
12:41 PM - 16 Apr 2013
16 Retweets 4 favorites
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or there was this:

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Osama Alharthi @osamahr

#??????_????? Terrorism has no religion whether it is in Boston or in Syria
2:32 PM - 16 Apr 2013
34 Retweets 9 favorites
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But there were positive energies as well. The Egyptian woman activist Asma’ Mahfouz, who was important in calling for the Tahrir demonstrations that kicked off the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, said that she admired .. http://www1.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=1021162&SecID=97 .. the American sense of deep concern for the welfare of citizens, and the way authorities came out promptly to speak to the incident. She contrasted this situation to that in Egypt, where, she alleged, the authorities have less respect for the value of citizens’ lives. For a young Egyptian revolutionary, America is still an exemplary nation in some regards, and many in the world admire it even in the way it deals with adversity.

Similar sentiments were voiced by the journalist Fatima Naout .. http://tiny.cc/hm4uvw , who said that when dozens of Egyptians died in a train accident, it took President Morsi 12 hours to come on television, and then he made only a brief statement of less than a minute. She also complained of innocents being arrested for sabotage and ultimately released, while what she called Muslim Brotherhood gangs attacked demonstrators with impunity. She said that the US is a nation of laws and upright judicial procedure, and Egypt still is not.

On the other side of the aisle in Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood members of the Senate (Majlis al-Shura) unhesitatingly condemned the bombings .. http://www1.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=1021049&SecID=65&IssueID=0 . MP Izz al-Din al-Kumi condemned all violence that harmed individuals of any nationality. He discounted a return to the ‘war on terror’ atmosphere of 9/11, saying that al-Qaeda had suffered too many blows any longer to be a viable organization. Dr. Farid al-Bayyad, another parliamentarian said, “Regardless of our differences with American policy, we roundly condemn these attacks.”

Some Syrians and Iraqis pointed out that many more people died from bombings and other violence in their countries on Monday than did Americans, and that they felt slighted because the major news networks in the West (which are actually global media) more or less ignored their carnage but gave wall to wall coverage of Boston.

Aljazeera English reported .. http://youtu.be/fDkhBdr83pU .. on the Iraq bombings, which killed some 46 in several cities, and were likely intended to disrupt next week’s provincial election.

Over the weekend, Syrian regime fighter jets bombed Syrian cities .. http://youtu.be/pyc2wua9TG0 , killing two dozen people, including non-combatants:

What happened in Boston is undeniably important and newsworthy. But so is what happened in Iraq and Syria. It is not the American people’s fault that they have a capitalist news model, where news is often carried on television to sell advertising. The corporations have decided that for the most part, Iraq and Syria aren’t what will attract Nielsen viewers and therefore advertising dollars. Given the global dominance by US news corporations, this decision has an impact on coverage in much of the world.

Here is a video by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) on the dilemma of the over one million displaced Syrians .. http://youtu.be/tP_AMfOMxmQ , half of them children:

So I’d like to turn the complaint on its head. Having experienced the shock and grief of the Boston bombings, cannot we in the US empathize more with Iraqi victims and Syrian victims? Compassion for all is the only way to turn such tragedies toward positive energy.

Perhaps some Americans, in this moment of distress, will be willing to be also distressed over the dreadful conditions in which Syrian refugees are living, and will be willing to go to the aid of Oxfam’s Syria appeal .. https://secure.oxfamamerica.org/site/Donation2?df_id=7100&7100.donation=form1 . Some of those Syrians living in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey were also hit by shrapnel or lost limbs. Perhaps some of us will donate to them in the name of our own Boston Marathon victims of senseless violence.

Terrorism has no nation or religion. But likewise its victims are human beings, precious human beings, who must be the objects of compassion for us all.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/bombings-increase-sympathy.html

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In Syria, the Islamist terror organizations of al Qaeda and the Nusra Front have come to a working agreement.
For the new partners, Damascus could be just a stopover on the way to a completely different goal.

Cooperation yes, but not joining together: that was the agreement between al Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front, in Syria. On Tuesday (09.04.2013) Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, declared that the Nusra Front was "a branch of the Islamic State of Iraq."


Nusra Front militants are now officially working with al Qaeda

The leader of the Nusra Front, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, only conditionally agreed to that statement a day later. Yes, Golani's response went, we'll take instruction from al Qaeda, but there will be no fusion of the two groups. The banner of Nusra would continue to fly over Syria without an al Qaeda insignia.

No matter how the terrorist groups in Syria decide to carry out their cooperation, their clout is already considerable. There aren't any official numbers, but Syrian terror expert Yassim Mohamad estimated in an interview with DW that there are around 10,000 Islamist fighters in Syria. He says around 7,000 are fighters with the Nusra Front.

According to Mohamad, most of these fighters came from abroad after the Syrian revolution got underway. But according to a study of the US Institute for the Study of War, some of the jihadists are also from within Syria itself. In most cases they emerged from the terror networks that the Syrian regime had built up over the past three decades.

Their own agenda

Some of these groups went over to the Syrian opposition forces in 2012, where they helped build up a logistics network. The Syrian intelligence service also used its strategic and military experience. But for the most part, the Syrian members of the terror organizations recruited fighters from other countries.

"These networks enabled the radical groups to penetrate the Syrian opposition and use it as a platform for their own ideological purposes," the study read.

Yassim Mohamad says the foreign jihadists have their own goals when it comes to the fight.

"They didn't come to Syria to fight Bashar al-Assad," he said. "They come to create an Islamic state in Syria."

This means that if al-Assad were to fall, they wouldn't leave Syria either.

"They are interested in presenting themselves as the avantgarde of the Islamic Jihad against Israel."

Between a rock and a hard place

The German foreign ministry sees the situation similarly. In an interview Wednesday with the newspaper, Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle discussed the difficulties facing German foreign policy through the presence of the jihadists.


LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images)

Westerwelle is one of the Western leaders pondering the situation in Syria

"On the one side, we want to support the moderate forces of the opposition," Westerwelle said. "On the other side, we want to avoid a wildfire that could have huge effects on Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and even Israel. I fear that some Islamists consider Damascus just a stopover on the way to Jerusalem."

This makes the Syrian opposition's request for support via weapons deliveries problematic, says Roderich Kiesewetter, a CDU member of the foreign affairs committee of the German parliament. He observes that in Afghanistan and other wars that dealt with religious questions, weapons could be turned very quickly against non-Muslim forces and also against Western forces.

"That's why, if you deliver weapons, you better carefully consider to whom," Kiesewetter told DW.

Yassim Mohamad agrees. He says if the West wanted to contribute to the fall of the Assad regime, the West has its own troops to do so. Arming the opposition would be a mistake. According to Mohamad's sources, the jihadists are already hoarding weapons to be used against another enemy once Assad has fallen.

"It could be against the Syrian army, against NATO, or America," he said.


Syria's civilians are caught between the fronts

Holding back on weapons deliveries comes with a price, however. The Syrian people get the impression that the jihadists are the only ones standing by them. That could lead to Syria's citizens identifying with their extremists ideologies.

Political dilemma

The extremists in Syria present a political dilemma for Western powers: If they deliver weapons, they could land in the wrong hands. If they don't deliver weapons, they risk being accused of complacency in the humanitarian disaster that has been going on now for two years in Syria.

This difficult position can only lead to one thing, according to Roderich Kiesewetter: al Assad's departure from power. Kiesewetter is convinced that will happen this year.

But that still doesn't solve the problem.

"Then the resentment of the opposition will turn to the minorities that have so far been supportive of al Assad, such as Christians and Druse," Kiesewetter speculates. "I think we need to be ready for that day."

DW.DE

Syria's unprecedented unrest - http://www.dw.de/syrias-unprecedented-unrest/a-6514021
What began as protests to topple Syria's regime in March 2011 has developed into a civil war. The UN says some 70,000 people have been killed. Read DW's multimedia coverage and analysis of the conflict in Syria. (11.04.2013)

War photographer sets focus on daily life - http://www.dw.de/war-photographer-sets-focus-on-daily-life/a-16652490
When the first US tanks entered Baghdad, architect Ghaith Abdul-Ahad grabbed his camera and took to the streets to document the fighting. Ten years later, he's one of the world's most prestigious war photographers. (09.04.2013)

http://www.dw.de/murky-allegiances-for-jihadists-in-syria/a-16739076