The ‘Arab Spring’ was supposed to wring all the evil from the Middle East, install generous and brilliant new leaders to the ‘rogue’ nations that seemed to spark descent and unrest. The Arab Spring was ignited when a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight on December 17, 2010 after authorities associated with the Tunisian autocracy beat him and confiscated his inventory. Protests among ordinary citizens erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. As the turmoil spread over the region, the UN, the US, Russia and nations of the EU became interested spectators of the brawl and started picking winners and losers.
Overall, the Middle East is comprised of 17 nations with a total population of more than 400 million. Egypt is the largest with 90 million and Cyprus is the least populous at less than one million citizens. Iran and Turkey are nearly tied at 78 million; Saudi Arabia is home to about 31 million and Israel has just over eight million.
As most politicians have forgotten, when you pick winners and losers, you should be at the horse races where you have the probability of win, place or show; not politics and government. As we all know, Syria hasn’t turned out well with 250,000 victims exploded and exterminated and four million refugees seeking asylum or some form of relative safety. Because of the nature of the ‘refugees’, uncertainty exists as to who might be a Syrian sympathizer, a Syrian revolutionary or at worst a committed terrorist. Things haven’t turned out too well in Egypt, Yemen and Libya. The dreams of the Western World were that following the Arab Spring, these nations would turn into meritocracies of tolerance for gay people, equality of women would magically emerge and formerly blasphemous cartoons would be frowned upon and ignored. Those dreams turned into nightmares beyond our imagination.
Dr. Kizilhan, by birth a Turkish Yazidi (Kurdish) Muslim immigrated to Germany at age six and is working in an Iraq village with survivors of unspeakable crimes by ISIS. One of his patients is a 26-year-old mother of three who lived in a northern Iraqi village that was overrun by ISIS in August 2014. The mother and her children were transferred to Raqqa, Syria where they were enslaved by ISIS. Because the mother was unable to say Islamic prayers correctly, her 2-year old was placed in a locked box in the scorching heat for seven days. The box was opened and the baby, near death, was removed. The ISIS member broke the baby’s back and handed the dead child to her mother then snatched the infant’s body and threw it on the floor. The mother contemplated suicide but her family yielded to ransom demands who bought the mother and the two surviving children out of slavery.
Aid workers associated with the UN and other organizations finally arrived in the mountain village of Malaya in Syria on January 12, 2016 after seven months of attacks by Bashar al Assad’s regime. What they found was horrendous; medical facilities out of medicine and food, children too hungry and feeble to play and new mothers unable to nurse their infants because they were so near death from dehydration. This town of 40,000 residents said they were surviving by eating leaves and stray animals; some were drinking only boiled water spiked with spices. Doctors reported that people die of starvation daily; Syria’s Ambassador to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari denies that any areas of his homeland are besieged.
Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery named Mar Mattai is located near Mosul in the Kurdish region of Iraq on a high mountainside. The monastery, hewed from solid rock dates back to the fourth century. ISIS Jihadists overran the monastery on July 22, 2015 and ordered the remaining five monks to leave immediately on foot taking only their clothes. They were denied the request of taking some of their possessions and ancient relics.
Muslim Syria is killing its own Muslim people. Muslim Iran is supporting Muslim terrorist organizations. Muslim Turkey is killing Muslim Kurds. Muslim ISIS is killing certain Muslim sects, Jews and Christians. What’s this Presidential double-talk about Islam is peace? Damage by climate change is in the future; death by terrorists is here…… now.
