If there is a link between the Boston Marathon bombings, the shooting at Fort Hood, the attempt to explode a bomb on a plane landing in Detroit and the failed attack on Times Square, it’s this: the perpetrators’ claim of anger over innocent Muslims killed directly by America in Iraq and Afghanistan or by proxy through our Israeli ally.
In short, they say they’re driven to do what they do because America holds Muslim life cheap.
We thought of this while reading the headlines on the latest massacre of Muslim men, women and children . . . by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
These murders occurred in two suburbs of Damascus. Unfortunately, that’s business as usual in Syria these days. Two years after a civil war to topple Assad broke out, the United Nations says that upward of 70,000 people have been killed. Even the Obama administration — which keeps moving the goalposts for what it will take to intervene — has now been forced to acknowledge that Assad is using chemical weapons.
Muslims have good reason to ask why the UN and most Western governments refuse to take action beyond offering “non-lethal” aid to the rebels. Not to mention why Russia and China continue to act as Assad’s protector against any kind of international action or sanction.
The failure to act more strongly against an Arab dictator who has no scruples against killing his own people has created a leadership vacuum increasingly filled by radical Islamists.
Syria is but one example. In all wars, innocent civilians are killed, and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Israel’s) have undeniably had their share. But claims that we are indifferent to Muslim life would be much stronger if those making them would start to make some critical distinctions.
First, in Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen were putting their own lives at risk so that Afghans and Iraqis might be free of the people who terrorize them. Remember that Time magazine photo of the Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban? She was an innocent Muslim, too, and our troops were fighting for her and millions like her.
More to the point, the most lethal threats to innocent Muslims come from Islamist terrorists or dictatorial Islamic regimes that have for decades been deliberately targeting and killing civilians, and as Assad’s Syria shows, continue to do so now with little consequence. Wouldn’t it be nice to see some anger about that?