TERRY GLAVIN,
Canada needs to find its voice in all this Syrian calamity
There are all sorts of fascinating and necessary questions that remain unanswered about exactly why, whether or when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should or will withdraw Canada’s CF-18s from the U.S.-led coalition arrayed against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
There are at least as many troubling questions about whether it is wise or even remotely possible for Canada’s new Liberal government to fulfil Trudeau’s campaign promise to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees in this country before Christmas.
But there is a far more important unanswered question that deserves at least some passing attention in all this. Just whose side are we on, anyway?
For five full years, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives chose to go along to get along with U.S. President Barack Obama’s half-baked responses to the hideously violent Baathist reaction to the Arab Spring that has now metastasized into the world-devouring catastrophe with its jihadist epicentre in the Syrian hellhole of Raqqa. The New Democrats spent all that time counselling us to pretend that it was “not our fight” to begin with. The Liberals spent the time mainly wishing it will all go away.
Now, Canadians are suddenly up to their necks in it, and while everybody seems to agree upon who we’re against, exactly — that would be ISIL, obviously, for starters — it’s high time Canadians started asking that more fundamental and now exceedingly urgent question: Whose side are we on, exactly?
Of course there are other questions. Up to 1,000 Syrian refugees a day are expected to begin arriving next week in the first convoy of a half dozen wide-body jumbo jets shuttling Syrian refugees from Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to Canada. About all that, here’s just one question that remains unanswered: what exactly are we going to do with all these people?
At least as many similarly unanswered questions have arisen about where Canada situates itself exactly following last Friday’s ISIL-orchestrated atrocities in Paris and the stiffened resolve of French president François Hollande, whose Mirage and Rafales fighter jets have been pounding ISIL targets in their Raqqa command centres ever since.
Allegiances are shifting. The bloodthirsty, creepy Vladimir Putin is ever more strenuously insinuating himself into NATO’s military and diplomatic circles. U.S. President Barack Obama is appearing increasingly feckless even to his senior advisers, so many of whom have jumped ship or resigned in exasperation. The French and the British have pretty well had it with Obama, and appear to be hedging their NATO bets on what is suddenly seeming to be the more reliable mutual-defence guarantee available in the
In the first six months of this year, the Syrian Network for Human Rights documented the deaths of 9,025 innocent civilians ... The main killer was not ISIL ... Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad killed seven times as many Syrian civilians as ISIL did — Terry Glavin
If Trudeau’s Canada is to be something truly new and different, then in this most horrific of global calamities, Canada should be the voice for Syria’s voiceless.
European Union Treaty.
ISIL’s Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, meanwhile, is giving every indication of having shifted gears from ISIL’s founding, schismatic monomania, which insists on the allegiance of the world’s Muslims to a crackpot territorial caliphate within Dar al-Islam — the land of Islam. Al-Baghdadi is now increasingly dispatching his lunatics in a full-metal hyperdrive of the Al Qaida doctrine from which he emerged, which stipulates a religious obligation binding all Muslims to wage a global jihad against “Crusaders and Jews” by way of bloody terror in the land of war — Dar-al-Harab.
ISIL has been dropping what you might call rather broad hints about its insistence on the duty of slaying kuffars in Dar-al-Harab for quite a while. More than a year ago, ISIL blowhard Sheikh Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani singled out the French, Canadians, Australians and Americans as ripe and proper targets for mayhem. Lone-wolf jihadists should turn on any available infidel, “smash his head with a rock,” run over him with a car, “destroy his crops,” or poison him.
Within weeks, Martin Couture-Rouleau murdered Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent in Quebec and Rouleau’s fellow Muslim convert Michael Zehaf-Bibeau went on a shooting spree in Ottawa, murdering Corporal Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and barging into the Parliament Buildings where he was finally cut down in a barrage of bullets. At the time, it was fashionably comforting to the NDP and some Liberals to insist that the pair were merely listening to voices in their heads, and not the voice of Sheikh Al-Adnani.
It’s been almost a year since jihadists nominally affiliated with Al Qaida slaughtered 11 staff at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo and the almost simultaneous murders of four people at the HyperCacher kosher supermarket in Paris, carried out by self-professed ISIL enthusiasts. Last July, a suicide bombing in the Turkish-Syrian border town of Suruc killed 30 people, and last month, more than 100 people were slaughtered by a suicide bomber at a peace rally in Ankara. Both atrocities were carried out by brothers who had reportedly travelled inside Syria to be trained by ISIS.
Two weeks ago, Madrid police foiled a plot that was intended to replicate the January Charlie Hebdo and HyperCacher murders. Madrid police say the plotters were Moroccans who were affiliated with, or at least loyal to, ISIL. Then last week, an ISIL suicide bombing killed 18 people in Baghdad, another ISIL suicide bombing killed at least 40 people in Beirut, and then Paris: 129 dead.
This is all gruesome enough, but I’m afraid it gets worse. In the first six months of this year, the Syrian Network for Human Rights documented the deaths of 9,025 innocent civilians in that country’s implosion into barbarism. The main killer was not ISIL. Not even close. Between January and July, Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad killed seven times as many Syrian civilians as ISIL did.
Assad’s barrel-bombing of Syria’s cities is the main reason why four million Syrian refugees are lingering in UN camps in Jordan, in hovels in Turkey, and in the back streets of Beirut, and are now about to depart for Canada, a mere 25,000 of them. Russia and Iran are the main reasons — the only reasons — that Assad remains in power. Four million refugees, and another 7.6 million people living in the rubble inside Syria, out of a total population of 22 million people.
At the “peace talks” tables in Vienna, at the G20 in Turkey, at the UN in New York, and the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, the victims of the Syrian crisis are without a voice. Canada can be either the hipster eccentric of NATO, or a fresh new internationalist voice in a droning “world stage” chorus line of incompetent presidents, blood-soaked strongmen and other such utter failures — or we could be that voice.
It’s been only a month since the Oct. 19 election, and Trudeau is trying the give the impression that he’s holding his own, and that he’s going to keep his campaign pledges no matter how untenable, contradictory or redundant they may suddenly seem. No, our CF-18s will not be part of Obama’s coalition, but yes, our Special Operations Regiment will remain a rod to ISIL’s back, and yes, more Special Operations trainers are on their way.
But if Trudeau’s Canada is to be something truly new and different, then in this most horrific of global calamities, Canada should be the voice for Syria’s voiceless.
That’s whose side we should be on.