Recent developments are triggering danger signals for Israel and Diaspora Jewish communities alike.

Concerted air attacks by the US Air Force against Houthi terrorists in Yemen do not seem to have made any impression. One wonders how effective the American campaign actually might be given the almost daily missile launches against Israel in recent days.

Based on past failures in Vietnam and Afghanistan, how long will this bombing of Houthi infrastructure continue before the US throws up its hands and ceases its efforts? In the past few hours, Trump has announced a cessation of the bombing campaign because he claims that the Houthis have promised to stop targeting US shipping and have “given up.” They have not, however, promised to cease firing missiles at Israel, which means that the Americans have once again left the job half finished.

Already, isolationist voices in the Republican Party are talking about a cessation of overseas involvement. The same goes for Iran’s sprint to nuclear blackmail status. Talk of deals and understandings, which are really code words for appeasement and lack of resolve, now abounds.

The lessons of history, whereby tyrants and dictator bullies were undeterred by futile negotiations and spurious agreements, are ignored. Instead of a determined effort to defang the Mullahs of Tehran, the US, UK and the EU prefer a soft option of believing Iranian deceit and deception. Everyone knows that the Houthis are being supported by Iran, yet this inconvenient fact is swept under the Persian carpet.

This week, a missile managed to impact near Ben Gurion airport, thankfully with no serious fatalities or major damage. This blatant act of war has generated a harsh response, which in turn will bring the hypocritical wrath of the UN down upon Israel. “Disproportionate force” will again be the theme song of the international choir as it passes more condemnatory resolutions.

The time is rapidly approaching, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the charades being choreographed by the democracies will have to be replaced by meaningful actions. If we do not want to face another North Korea-type fiasco, then action must replace duplicitous diplomacy.

Our hostages are still held captive in Gaza, and the world has lost interest. How much longer can this scandalous situation be allowed to continue?

Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Independence Day) this year was celebrated in the midst of conflagrations lit by Arab arsonists. It was a coordinated campaign of deliberate destruction. This inconvenient fact was generally glossed over by the general international media. If they had been true purveyors of the truth, they would have reported the incitement that accompanied the forest fires.

Hamas posted: “burn whatever you can of groves, forests and settler homes. Youth of the West Bank, youth of Jerusalem and those inside Israel, set their cars ablaze. Let us make their night a burning day. We will not give in and will not give up until we burn every piece of stolen land.”

The Telegram Channel, Jenin News, wrote: “burn forests close to the raped lands. The Zionist entity is burning. This is an opportunity for you to increase the fires, youth of Jerusalem and the occupied interior, raise your spirits and make up your mind, their settlements, set them ablaze.”

It is important to note that, as far as these arson inciters are concerned, all of Israel is an “occupied settlement” and therefore the message conveyed is to set the whole country alight.

A few countries offered firefighting aid, but not a single UN member condemned the calls to light more fires. This should ring loud warning signals. The lessons are clear. Those causing arson and those urging on the arsonists are precisely the same people whom the international community wants to reward with Palestine recognition. If this is the face of peace, democracy and security touted by all and sundry, then we can look forward to a dark future.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Great Britain and Australia, potentially ominous developments have unfolded that have the possibility of souring relations with Israel even further and negatively impacting local Jewish communities.

In England, local council elections and a by-election in one parliamentary constituency produced earth-shattering results for the two main parties. Candidates from the Reform Party trounced Labour and Conservative nominees in what is being described as a mass protest vote. In addition, a once safe Tory constituency also fell to the Reform Party candidate.

The aftershocks of these results should flag warning signals for Britain’s Jewish Community.

The leader of the Conservative Party could be on shaky ground and who knows what her possible replacement’s policies on Israel might be.

There are already rumblings in the Labour Party, and without a doubt, the extreme left plus disgruntled Corbyn supporters are waiting to topple Starmer. If this happens a return to full blown anti Israel policies is guaranteed.

With Islam now the second-largest religion in the UK, electoral considerations are increasingly relevant. The omens do not look good given the increased toxicity of anti-Jewish/Zionist/Israel sermons in m osques as recently revealed by UK Talk TV.

Canada held a general election where the Conservatives had been projected to defeat the ruling Liberal Party. The former ran on a pro-Israel platform with pledges to combat Jew hate. The latter are paid-up members of the “two fake solution” and weak on action against incitement against Jews.

Thanks to the anti-Canadian rhetoric of President Trump, the voters preferred to stick with what they know and thus re-elected the ruling party. Once again, this result does not augur well for Canadian–Israel relations. Instead of a Prime Minister who supports Israel’s war against terror, there will be more condemnations of the corrupt UN and joining together with Macron of France in propping up Abbas.

As in the UK and Australia, Canadian Jews will find that the continual drip feed of negative rhetoric against Israel produces more waves of hate activities.

This past week’s third electoral earthquake saw the spectacular defeat of the Australian Coalition Parties, which only a short time ago had been poised to oust the ruling Labour Government.

Domestic policies and considerations were at the core of the campaign and basically these factors determined the outcome. Lurking, however, in the background for Jews was a rather stark contrast involving Israel in particular and incitement of hate in general.

It is true, as Jewish leadership spokespersons reiterate, that until fairly recently, there has been a bipartisan agreement when it comes to Australia’s policies concerning Israel. Past Coalition and Labour policies were more or less in alignment when it came to the question of Israel’s legitimacy and efforts to defend itself from terrorist acts. Voting at the UN followed a predictable pattern whereby Australia usually voted with the moral minority and refused to be associated with knee jerk Zionist hating member nations.

This all changed once the Albanese/Wong Government came into power. Adhering to a well-worn leftist script, for the first time ever, Australia joined the immoral majority and voted more often than not to condemn and sanction the Jewish State. Talk of recognising a fake Palestine is now official policy, accompanied by strictures concerning Israel’s alleged moral failings.

The fallout from all this display of double standards has been a record increase in Jew hate graffiti, attacks both physical and verbal and even arson of synagogues. Perceived weak responses by authorities, law enforcement laxity and a knee-jerk requirement to equate Islamophobia with Judeophobia all contribute to an increasing sense of anxiety. The answer of political parties to this is throwing millions of dollars to affected communities. While this may pay for cameras and added security in schools and Synagogues it does not address the fundamental problem.

The stage is set for a troubling three years now that Labour has been swept back into power with an absolute majority in the lower House of Parliament and possibly a reliance on virulent anti-Israel Greens in the Senate.

It is more than likely that rhetoric and resolutions condemning Israel will ramp up. Voting at the UN and other corrupt bodies will follow a familiar pattern. With all restraints now gone, the chorus of criticisms from Canberra will increase. Recognition of “Palestine” is bound to follow, and more money will be squandered on UNRWA and similar terror-controlled groups.

The spinoff will be increased anti-Jewish outbreaks in what was once a safe and welcoming country for Jews.

Danger signals are increasingly flashing red.

Ignoring and denying these warning signs are failed strategies.

“Gaza Is Starving,” a headline in The New Yorker declared in early January 2024, pushing a harrowing narrative that took hold during the first six months of the war. In March, The Washington Post asked: “Is Gaza Heading Into Famine?” A headline in the Post the next day answered: “Israel’s War on Hamas Brings Famine to Gaza.”

In April 2024, Samantha Power, director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for the Biden administration, became the first senior U.S. official to declare that famine in Gaza had begun. She cited a report published by an independent, United Nations–affiliated monitoring system, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC).

First developed in 2004 with backing from the UN, the IPC has become the global gold standard for food security analysis. Using a data-driven, evidence-based, five-phase scale that ticks up as food supplies run low, the IPC is designed to shield the humanitarian goal of having enough to eat from the political pressures of war. Today, a famine is declared only when the IPC’s data about a region shows that at least 20 percent of households have run out of food, at least 30 percent of children are acutely malnourished, and two people out of every 10,000 are dying each day from starvation.

In 20 years, just four famines have been confirmed by the IPC: Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and Sudan in 2024. A confirmed famine in Gaza, as Power told Congress was happening, would have been a historic catastrophe and the first to occur outside continental Africa. Power’s statement bolstered claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war, and that the U.S. government was therefore complicit in an alleged war crime.

But there were serious problems with Power’s sensational testimony. Foremost among them: The IPC never declared a famine in Gaza. The report she cited was a projection of possible outcomes, not a conclusive finding. The next month, USAID issued its own analysis alleging that famine was underway, an indictment so serious that it required confirmation from an independent board of global experts known as the Famine Review Committee (FRC).

The FRC, which functions as the IPC’s final authority and quality control check, rebuked the USAID analysis, calling its conclusions insupportable. The failures were stunning.

Private sector food deliveries, such as trucks contracted to commercial warehouses, were left out of the agency’s estimates of the total food supply in north Gaza. As a result, as much as 82 percent of the “daily kilocalorie requirement” in northern Gaza last April wasn’t counted. In the same month, USAID’s famine monitor also left out 940 metric tons (2 million pounds) of flour, sugar, salt, and yeast donated by the UN to bakeries in north Gaza, enough to make about 1,400 metric tons (3 million pounds) of bread.

When asked about erasing the bakery donations, USAID’s internal famine-monitoring network justified the decision on the grounds that bread from those bakeries had been sold rather than given away for free.

It was never in doubt that the Israel-Hamas war brought immense human suffering to Gaza, including from food shortages. But USAID depicted a world that had little in common with reality.

North Gaza actually had 10 times more food last April than USAID had claimed. These findings should have been big news. As aid shipments increased, a famine had been averted.

But a troubling thing happened to the FRC report: Its conclusions were ignored or went unnoticed by news organizations—and other UN officials made it sound like nothing had changed.

Food insecurity is not the only gauge of the war’s toll that now looks shakier than it did at first. Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry recently deleted at least 3,400 deaths, including more than 1,000 children, from its lists of civilians killed by Israeli air strikes, according to nonprofit news watchdog HonestReporting.

The health ministry’s own statistics chief said some of the reported deaths had actually been from natural causes, or were people found to be in prison or missing. Yet the Hamas-run health ministry remains a go-to news source, despite significant errors found in its casualty reports by independent monitors.

USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network was suspended in January when the Trump administration moved to close USAID and fold it into the State Department.

There were many hints that the headlines about famine in Gaza last year weren’t quite right. On social media in March 2024, one food importer showcased a tractor trailer full of frozen chicken, and a chef in Rafah advertised his plates of chicken and rice. One Gaza City restaurant showed off its racks of stuffed rotisserie chickens about two weeks after Power’s testimony.

Journalists can peruse a social media archive of life in Gaza compiled by Jacqui Peleg, an Israeli-British citizen who speaks Arabic and has been scraping YouTube, Telegram, TikTok, and other sites since 2018.

Posting on X under the name Imshin, Peleg has gained nearly 80,000 followers who are curious about the conflict’s complexities and skeptical of media narratives. After watching Gazans posting their new BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes on Instagram for years, the opening of an upscale car dealership in August 2023 didn’t surprise her. “I just watch Gazans talk to each other,” she told me. “I’m not a journalist. I’m just watching and sharing.”

Last June, the FRC’s panel of independent experts released a follow-up report reaffirming famine was a serious risk in Gaza but saying that “available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.”

That same week, Reuters ran an elaborately produced feature which, along with ghoulish cartoon simulations of a dying child, strongly implied that a famine was underway in Gaza. An erroneous CNN headline said: “Children Are Dying of Starvation in Their Parents’ Arms as Famine Spreads Through Gaza.”

Clear messages from the UN last summer might have helped. Instead, 11 independent UN officials, led by Michael Fakhri, the special rapporteur on the right to food, said in July that an “intentional and targeted starvation campaign” by Israel “has resulted in famine across all of Gaza.” The denunciation was covered around the world. Fakhri couldn’t be reached by The Free Press.

In August 2024, the FRC confirmed that an actual famine was killing people in Sudan. Famine persisted in five regions of Sudan and was expected to spread to five more by this May, the report found. It barely made the news.

To help make sense of all this, I talked to Nicholas Haan, who designed the food-insecurity classification system that became the IPC. Haan serves as a volunteer on the FRC, was one of the authors of the report that rebuked the USAID analysis, and is the lead technical adviser in a UN effort to replicate the IPC in areas such as health, hygiene, and shelter.

Famine—like genocide, fascist, and dictator—is a word susceptible to rhetorical abuse that can dilute and even invert its meaning. “My goal was to take famine from being a rhetorical word and make it a technical term,” Haan told me. When the IPC uses the word famine now, “we mean famine.”

IPC owes its success during the past two decades to the fact that it works. And because it works, nefarious governments and armed groups have tried to sabotage it. Reuters reported last year that when the ruling junta in Myanmar detained several food researchers, the IPC was forced to remove its reports about the country from the internet. In Yemen, Houthi forces hijacked the IPC process in 2023 to exaggerate food shortages and compel aid shipments that were then stolen by the Iranian-backed militia.

“Political actors, for their own reasons, will manipulate information. It’s a truism,” Haan told me. The best response, he said, is for the IPC to uphold its standards and the clarity of its messaging. “The most important, powerful, and necessary tool to achieve this is truth. When you give up truth, you’ve given up all moral standing to end suffering.” He wouldn’t comment on the famine declaration by Fakhri and the other UN officials.

Since the ceasefire in Gaza collapsed and Israel resumed its offensive, the UN’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs has apologized to Gazans for being “unable to move the international community to prevent this injustice.” Over the weekend, the UN refused to accept a U.S.-Israeli plan to deliver aid directly to civilians. On Tuesday, a senior Hamas official accused Israel of waging a “hunger war.”

The famine storyline in Gaza is like the proverbial bell that cannot be unrung. In September, ProPublica inaccurately said, “The UN has declared a famine in parts of Gaza.” When I asked if the reporter who wrote the article had read the FRC’s reports from last summer, a ProPublica spokesperson said it stands by the reporting, citing statements by UN officials who aren’t part of the IPC process and an FRC follow-up report in November. But that report, like the others before it, warned of “a strong likelihood” of famine, not that famine had begun.

The New Yorker has published roughly 20 interviews that referred to famine or starvation in Gaza—and three that addressed the IPC system and the FRC’s authoritative role. In all that reporting, The New Yorker never mentioned the FRC’s rejection of USAID’s analysis or its no-famine verdict.

As Haan and his FRC colleagues wrote about USAID’s slippery numbers last year, “High uncertainty is compounded through several layers of assumptions.” So many unthinkable tragedies have occurred since Hamas’s massacre on October 7, 2023, but a famine in Gaza isn’t one of them.

Michael Ames is an investigative journalist and co-author of American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan. He is writing a book about former Fugees rapper Pras Michel.

Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun
SEAS@state.gov
Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat ANTISEMITISM.
U.S. Department of State (.gov)

Your first challenge awaits you  as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat ANTISEMITISM.:

The visit of the President in Saudi Arabia.

Since 2000, our news agency and research center has monitored  anti-semitic textbooks for the PLO that Saudis have financed, together with other  nations

This our latest report, in English and Hebrew

Israel, Jews and Peace in Schoolbooks and Teachers’ Guides Used in UNRWA Schools in Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip

https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/app/uploads/2024/05/E_114_24.pdf

ישראל, היהודים והשלום בספרי הלימוד ומדריכי המורים שבשימוש של אונר”א ביהודה, שומרון, מזרח ירושלים ורצועת עזה

__דר ארנון גרויס – הרצאה על ספרי הלימוד של אונרא- 2024 – עותק.pdf

THE WIDER CONTEXT;  THE REBBE’S WARNINGS OF PIKUACH NEFESH

The Blogs: ‘Pikuach Nefesh’ Alert: Save Jewish Lives | David Bedein | The Times of Israel

Rabbi Kaploun, Please use your  position  to demand that the Saudis and the PLO remove this war curriculum.

Thank you

While Alawites constitute but a small religious community in Syria, perhaps 10 per cent of the country’s 15 million resident population, they suffer from a unique prominence and vulnerability.

Through a millennium, they stood out as Syria’s most isolated, impoverished, despised and oppressed ethnicity. Only when generals from their community seized power in Damascus in 1966 did the power balance change.

But the ruthless domination of Syria by Alawites for the next 58 years caused the country’s majority Sunni Muslim population in 2011 to rebel, leading to a full-scale civil war that ended in December 2024 when Sunnis overthrew Alawite rule and returned to power.

Recent events point to an ominous Sunni desire for retribution. To understand its sources and implications requires a look at the past.

As is well known, Islam claims to be the final religion; accordingly, Sunnis and Shi’ites alike historically reviled Alawism, a new and distinct religion that emerged from Shia Islam in the ninth century. They looked upon Alawites as apostates. A 19th-century Sunni sheik, Ibrahim al-Maghribi, decreed that Muslims might freely take Alawite property and lives, and a British traveller records being told: “These Ansayrii, it is better to kill one than to pray a whole day.”

Frequently persecuted and sometimes massacred during the past two centuries, Alawites insulated themselves geographically from the outside world by staying within their highlands. A leading Alawite sheik called his people “among the poorest of the East”. Anglican missionary Samuel Lyde found the state of their society “a perfect hell upon earth”.

After Syria’s independence from French rule in 1946, Alawites initially resisted central government control but reconciled to Syrian citizenship by 1954 and, taking advantage of their over-representation in the army, began their political ascent.

Alawites had a major role in the Baath coup of 1963 and took many key positions while purging Sunni competitors. These developments culminated in a group of mainly Alawite Baathist military officers seizing power in 1966. In the final drama, two Alawite generals, Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, battled for supremacy, a rivalry that ended when Assad prevailed in 1970.

Confessional affiliation remained vitally important during the 58 years of Alawite rule, mostly under Hafez al-Assad (1970-2000) and his son Bashar (2000-24). Hafez built a brutal police state and imposed Alawite control by placing his co-religionists throughout the government.

Until the outbreak of civil war in 2011, Sunnis made up about 70 per cent of Syria’s population; beyond numbers, they historically ruled the region, which translated into an easy assumption that they should enjoy the perquisites of power. After 1970, however, they served mostly as window-dressing; in the pithy words of an army veteran, “An Alawite captain has more say than a Sunni general.”

The psychological impact of this turnaround on Sunnis can hardly be exaggerated. For them, an Alawite ruling in Damascus compares to an “untouchable” becoming maharaja or a Jew becoming tsar – an unprecedented and shocking development. Michael Van Dusen of the Wilson Center rightly calls this shift “the most significant political fact of 20th-century Syrian history and politics”.

This power reversal caused Sunni Muslims to perceive Assad’s totalitarian repression in sectarian terms. The Assads endeavored to present themselves as Muslims but few if any Syrian Sunnis accepted them as such.

The assertion of Alawite power in 1966 provoked the Sunnis’ religious apprehensions. Their grievances festered as they suffered domination by a people they considered inferior, as they perceived discrimination in aspects of life (such as Sunni households paying four times more than Alawites for electricity), as they lived with the memory of the 1982 Hama massacre and other brutal assaults, and as they resented the socialism that reduced their wealth, the indignities against Islam, and a perceived co-operation with Maronites and Israelis.

A vicious circle set in. As Sunnis became increasingly alienated, Alawites depended ever more on Alawite rule. As the regime took on an increasingly Alawite cast, Sunni discontent deepened.

When the regional Islamist rebellion of 2011 reached Syria, it began a hideous 14-year, mainly Sunni insurrection against Bashar al-Assad’s government that generated an estimated 7.5 million internally displaced people and 5.2 million external refugees, and led to some 620,000 deaths.

Domestically, the regime relied increasingly on its Alawite base. News service Reuters recounts how Bashar “sent army and secret police units dominated by [Alawite] officers … into mainly Sunni urban centers to crush demonstrations calling for his removal”.

Some quotations capture the intensity of Sunni hostility:

• Adnan al-Arour, a Sunni religious leader, referring to Alawites opposed to the Sunni uprising, declared: “I swear by God we will mince them in grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs.”
• Syrian Sunni leader Mamoun al-Homsi told “you despicable Alawites” that “From this day on, we will not remain silent. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth … I swear that if you do not renounce that gang and those killings, we will teach you a lesson that you will never forget. We will wipe you out from the land of Syria.”
• Ibtisam, 11, a Sunni refugee living in Jordan: “I hate the Alawites and the Shi’ites. We are going to kill them with our knives, just like they killed us.”
• Heza, 13: “After the revolution, we want to kill them.” Even a child his own age? “I will kill him. It doesn’t matter.”

Such statements, not surprisingly, scared the small Alawite community. Wild rumors spread, such as the apocryphal female butcher in Homs who asked the shabiha, the armed civilian militia, “to bring her the bodies of Alawites they capture so that she can cut them up and market the meat”.

The New York Times reported: “Many Alawites are terrified; they are often the victims of the most vulgar stereotypes and, in popular conversation, uniformly associated with the leadership.”

Worse, many Alawites suffered from the Assad government. Wafa Sultan, an exiled physician, tells about the many injustices, including intentional impoverishment (to ensure their sons would serve the government to earn a living), the persecution of intellectuals and imprisonment of dissidents’ relatives. Accordingly, many Alawites rejoiced at Assad’s fall.

Then came the stunning events of early December 2024, when the Sunni Islamist forces of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham under the leadership of Ahmed al-Sharaa (Al-Julani), along with allies, swept rapidly through Syria and seized Damascus, and Assad fled to Russia.

During the first three months of the new regime there was some Sunni retribution against Alawites, but it was limited and not organised: firings from jobs, vigilantism and small-scale violence. In late January 2025, Syrian journalist Ammar Dayoub documented acts “from directing sectarian curses at Alawites and Shi’ites to gathering the men in the squares and flogging them, smashing furniture in people’s homes, stealing gold and silver and acts of violence against women”.

In response, Dayoub explains, the regime “did not acknowledge these violations [but] blamed individuals or small local factions”. Further, the Middle East Media Research Institute reports, “It also refrained from publishing the names of those responsible, thus preventing the families of the victims from taking legal action against them.” This led to the establishment of Alawite “resistance groups” that the regime promptly vilified as “Assad loyalists”.

Then, on March 6, came the large-scale assaults, mostly in the Alawites’ coastal home region, Latakia, a province in the northwest of Syria. Sunni forces, including the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and foreign jihadists, rampaged, torching homes and killing indiscriminately. The HTS government presented itself as defending itself from an insurgency of “Assad loyalists”.

But Alawites suffered greatly in the Assad era and even more during the civil war, so they had widely abandoned Bashar in his hour of need when they could have saved him. As Assad languished in Russia, Iranian support had collapsed and Israeli forces had demolished all the old regime’s arsenals, they did not fight a rearguard action for him. Rather, attacks by those “resistance groups” on governmental forces reflected fears of persecution.

Unlike the civil war period, when Sunnis freely expressed their rage at Alawites, in 2025 they came under pressure to be on best behaviour so Sharaa could convince foreign NGOs and governments to aid his regime. Dig down below the surface, however, and it became very clear that the March attacks served as vengeance for what one Sunni religious scholar, Abdallah Khalil al-Tamimi, termed the two million Sunnis killed by “the Alawite regime … on sectarian grounds”.

In Damascus, one radio host “encouraged his listeners to cast the Alawites into the sea”. An HTS-affiliated commander called out, “Oh warriors of jihad, do not leave any Alawite, male or female, alive. Slaughter the most respected men among them. Slaughter the most respected women among them. Slaughter them all, including children in their beds. They are pigs. Seize them and throw them into the sea.”

Proud of their actions, many perpetrators videoed their actions, such as killing two sons in front of their mother. “This is revenge,” cries a man looting and burning Alawite homes. Sunnis humiliated Alawites, the Economist reports, forcing them “to bark like dogs, sitting on their backs, riding them, and then shooting them dead”.

To this carnage, Sharaa responded serenely. “What is currently happening in Syria is within the expected challenges. We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” he said. “We call on Syrians to be reassured because the country has the fundamentals for survival.” Plus he set up a commission of inquiry.

That HTS leaders emerged out of al-Qa’ida and the Islamic State lends an air of theater to their donning blazers or suits and ties.

That HTS leaders emerged out of al-Qa’ida and the Islamic State lends an air of theater to their donning blazers or suits and ties, then embracing happy talk about human rights while blaming the violence on Alawites. Western acceptance brings so many financial and other benefits.

Some already refer to genocide. Kurdish Syrian writer Mousa Basrawi decried “an organized campaign of genocide … aimed at exterminating the Alawites”. Christian Solidarity International issued a “genocide warning” because of the “orgy of targeted killings accompanied by dehumanising hate speech”.

The public response to this danger? Virtual silence. No marches in the Western capitals, no encampments at universities. And Western governments? Canberra “condemns the recent horrific violence in Syria’s coastal region” and is “deeply concerned by UN reports that many civilians from the Alawite community were summarily executed”. Washington “condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days”. The U.N. denounces “harrowing violations and abuses”.

Condemnations are necessary but not sufficient. Repulsing Islamist aggression represents a core Western interest, plus moral responsibility requires urgent action to avoid a possible genocide.

U.S. inaction during the 1994 Rwandan genocide led to subsequent apologies (Bill Clinton: “I express regret for my personal failure”), as did Dutch failures in Bosnia (Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren: “We offer our deepest apologies”). This time, will politicians act so as to avoid having later to apologise?

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is founder of the Middle East Forum. This article draws on his three books about Syria, plus a 1987 analysis titled “Syria After Assad.” First posted in the Australian.

A more detailed version of this analysis will appear in the Summer 2025 issue of the Middle East Quarterly.