Children of a lesser cause
November 29, 2012
On Sunday November 25, 10 little children were killed by a cluster bomb dropped on them from a Syrian regime warplane, as they played outdoors in the town of Deir Asafeer ("cloister of sparrows"), in greater Damascus.
Video clips and photos of this devastating crime, one of tens of thousands of similar acts of terror committed by the Assad regime, were widely shared on social media by most supporters of the Syrian revolution, by various observers and by many others who felt this horrific event merited condemnation, with comments expressing grief, outrage and appeals for action.
It was logical to assume that the same people who had just raised hell about the murder of other precious children mere days ago by other criminal regimes - as we all did! - would for once do the same for these little angels. But our little Syrian sparrows were not killed by Israeli missiles, by American drones or by British bombs, so the self-annointed resistance against imperialism and capitalism once again ignored our children, killed by mere old Russian bomblets dropped from aging Russian MIGs flown by loyal servants of the Assad regime.
On Thursday, those same Russian planes again dropped enormous TNT-stuffed barrel bombs over several areas in Syria, as they do nearly daily; the morning included Aleppo's Ansari neighborhood, the previous night had been Assafira's turn. The clips of babies, toddlers and young children's bloodied corpses lying on top of each other, or being dug out of the rubble with bare hands, continue to fill our social media walls - but the anti-imperialists didn't deign noticing, as usual.
They ignored them just as they have ignored all our other child victims (let alone the remainder of Syrian martyrs), from the jailing and torture of the children of Deraa, to the torture until death of 13-year old Hamza Khatib, to little ones shot by Assad snipers even in their parents' arms, to the children slaughtered with knives in the Houla massacre, to infants shot in their mother's womb, to kids bombed as they stood in breadlines, to Sunday's playground massacre, and every other massacre before and after that.
They have ignored our martyrs, our maimed, our wounded, our prisoners of conscience, our hunger strikers, our homes, shops and fields' demolitions, our refugees, our raped women, our tortured souls, our displaced, our hungry, our cold, our terrified and our desperate people - all invisible victims for these strange activists who seldom miss an opportunity to spread condescending sarcasm about various Syrian opposition groups.
We waited for solidarity for nearly two years, as we watched the savage destruction of our entire country under our own army's shells and bombs; we waited in vain - that is until they merely added insult to our injury by circulating numerous photos of our child martyrs and victims under different labels, attributing them to different murderers!
All these months, as we posted and documented our victims, they averted their eyes and didn't deign empathize; these martyrs, these little child victims, were only deemed worthy of compassion when their murder was blamed on the criminal Israeli war machine. An incomprehensible and reprehensible attitude denounced by many, but made even worse by stale, contrived indignant reactions, including the generic weasel statement that "I never said I supported Assad".
Indeed, it is not what they said, it is what they did not say.
The Syrian regime's savage repression of the popular uprising has served to expose many as hypocrites and faux-humanists, chattering classes and fake leftists. We all know who they are - and they know who they are. Some people consider them to be useful idiots; I disagree, they are not useful. The regime couldn't care less about the silent indirect support of this "resistance camp" which, like Hezbollah, decided that all Arabs desperately wanted freedom and dignity, with the exception of Syrians who were manipulated by puppets and led astray by a universal conspiracy which diverted Bashar Assad from his reform.
We thought we knew them when Palestine brought us together in the first place; we know them even better now that Syria provided the ultimate litmus test. Those activists are merely the mirror opposite of the imperialists and Zionists who pretend caring for Syrians while continuing to ignore Palestinians’ suffering and aspirations.
Both sets of hypocrites should go preach about human and national rights to others just like them and spare us the nauseating double standards; they should stick to audiences which also differentiate between victims, which also sympathize with some murderers pretending to act within extenuating circumstances, which are also selective about what is a "two sides" conflict and what is only a case of victims and executioners, and which also think that some liberation movements are mere conspiracies while all the rest are blessed, legitimate uprisings.
Our children are not the children of a lesser cause. Whether they are from Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or anywhere else in the world, children have a right to defense, and we have a duty to protect them.
Hypocrites can ignore our tiny sparrows and our small angels, but they will never honor the causes they think they serve. Rest in peace, all our little children.
