Overcoming the hellish Arab reality

You have to choke back the tears when you see the pictures of thousands of Syrian children and families fleeing from the violence in their homeland. The level of official Arab inaction in the face of this is shameful; an Arab state is being dismembered and regional capitals are not lifting a finger to stop the sectarian dagger making the cuts. It is humiliating to read the statements made by the Arab elites and their electronic brigades as they glorify the new invading armies who are deluded by the dream of Iranian imperialism disguised as resistance and opposition.

In Syria, the options for death are endless. The people either die from the sectarian barrel bombs dropped hatefully on anyone demanding freedom and justice; or are slaughtered by the intercontinental intelligence death squads. You could also die from hunger and thirst while trapped under the ruins of your home or you could die defeated after the betrayal of someone close to you and the silence of those far away. The Syrians have eaten cats, dogs, grass and paper, and they have still starved to death. Their only crime is to have fallen into the clutches of a dirty regional game wherein their government has sacrificed the people for the sake of Iranian imperial ambitions in the Arab world. The delusion of opposition and resistance, which has exploited Arabism and the Palestinian cause for decades, has slaughtered a country the size of Syria in order to please Iran.

The images of death and destruction no longer stir Arab officialdom. However, the Arab League is now looking at the options for interfering in Libya and activating the joint Arab defence agreement in support of those revolting against the February Revolution. The regional umbrella group, though, won’t lift a finger against the Iranian death gangs that are roaming Syria; they are not concerned with the fate of millions of families besieged under bombs and rubble.

The Syrian refugees know that they stand alone as they face death on their land or the traffickers who are exploiting this human tragedy. They have had little choice but to flee, and the Syrians have become the largest group of refugees in the world, according to official statistics, with more than 7 million displaced. Their cities have been levelled by the regime in Damascus, which has opened the borders to death squads authorised to kill at random, with the tacit blessing of the international community. Social networking sites and media outlets are now filled with images of the humiliation of the Syrians in Lebanon and other Arab countries after the regional governments refused to internationalise the issue of Syrian refugees and raise it with the UN Security Council. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has shamed the Arab world by pointing out that, “The German people are welcoming Syrian refugees from thousands of miles away; the Muslim countries are only a few metres away.”

What is happening in Syria is unprecedented. Who else has killed their own people before the eyes and ears of the rest of the world? However, the Syrian people’s plight is just part of the chaos engulfing the Arab world, especially the Levant. The fall of Iraq at the hands of US economic colonialism and Iranian cultural colonialism is an indication of this chaos. The progress made by jihadist groups in Egypt confirms that most Arab countries will be infected by revolutions countering the Arab Spring and its peaceful demands for freedom and social justice. It began with Iraq, reached Syria, then Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, which has a war on its borders under Iranian orders using Houthi proxies.

The revenge of the tyrannical Arab regimes against their people’s demands for freedom and dignity is no secret. It is also no secret that the regional forces have adopted scorched earth policies to keep the balance of power in their favour. However, the awareness resulting from the Arab Spring and the number of masks it caused to fall is enough to renew the revolutionary waves and give new weight to the movements of change that will inevitably emerge, because the region today only has two options: either chaos and deterioration or change and reconstruction.

We cannot imagine that the current Egyptian, Iraqi or Syrian situations are sustainable indefinitely. They will produce real viable alternatives to overcome the hellish reality that has come about in the Arab world through tyranny, repression, chaos and destruction. The Arab Spring has been an important wake-up call for us to realise the magnitude of our decline, the fake nature of the discourse and the lie of human rights that does not include the Syrian people. This consciousness will be the foundation on which the new Syria will be built, far from Iranian ambitions and free of sectarian and nationalist delusions.

Translated from Arabi21 on 27 August, 2015.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.