Christmas in Syria
AS OUR British jets leave their bases, their pilots safely wishing their loved ones good cheer for Christmas, their bombs will remind the people of Syria that this Christmas will be different.
They’re being made safe by British bombs landing heavily on their burnt earth. as the earth shakes and more of their country turns to rubble, they’ll forgo the cheers of Christmas and breathe the acrid smoke of liberation.
We’re being propelled along by the tragedies in Paris, caught up in fear as we charge head first into the rage of war.
Cameron uses the rhetoric of paranoia, linking the attacks in Paris to ISIS, to an imminent threat to the UK in an unfounded train of logic.
We find ourselves voting for the bombing of Syria over Christmas; they’re Muslims so Christmas means nothing to them.
France has been part of the allied bombing of Syria, but it hasn’t made their country safer. The allies already had the capacity to bomb Syria; the handful of jets the UK is contributing to the effort will make no material difference in the fight against ISIS. It is a symbolic gesture, a desperate act of leaders who don’t know how to deal with this unwinnable war on terror and need to show some decisive action.
how short our memories are: the blood from Iraq and afghanistan just wiped from our brows and we charge headlong into more tragedy.
Cameron, undeterred by recent history, speaks the language of war as a proud Churchillian.
The war on terror is a war on us as governments seek powers in the interest of national security to snoop on us, to monitor our communications, to trial without jury, to abstain from the international convention on human rights.
This doesn’t sound like the workings of a liberal democracy, more like a dark dictatorship.
Let not the war on terror be a war on our freedom by our leaders. Let it not be a random act of rage because we don’t know what better to do.
Let not the lives of innocent ‘collateral damage’ be justified for the greater good because we can’t think of anything better to do.
as we go about our Christmas shopping, satisfied that we’re doing something, we should know that the something we’re doing isn’t making us any safer.
SHUAIB KARMANI, West Grinstead, W. Sussex.