{"id":45880,"date":"2014-08-11T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=45880"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:45","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:45","slug":"bombs-away-us-to-the-rescue-but-only-of-certain-minorities-not-muslims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/08\/bombs-away-us-to-the-rescue-but-only-of-certain-minorities-not-muslims\/","title":{"rendered":"Bombs Away! US to the Rescue \u2013 But Only of Certain Minorities, Not Muslims"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Robert<\/a>

Robert Fisk<\/p><\/div>\n

Obama\u2019s air strikes on Isis in northern Iraq are hypocritical, and a sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu is understandable.<\/em><\/p>\n

He wouldn\u2019t bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi\u2019s bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barak Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees \u2013 and the Yazidis \u2013 because of \u201ca potential act of genocide\u201d. Bombs away. And thank heavens that the refugees in question are not Palestinian.<\/p>\n

This hypocrisy almost takes the breath away, not least because the US President is still too frightened \u2013 in case he upsets the Turks \u2013 to use the \u201cG\u201d word about the 1915 Turkish genocide of a million and a half Armenian Christians, a mass slaughter on a scale which even Abu Bakr\u2019s thugs have not yet attempted. We\u2019ll have to wait another year to see how Obama wriggles out of the 100th anniversary commemorations of that particular Muslim massacre of Christians.<\/p>\n

But for now, \u201cAmerica is coming to help\u201d in Iraq with air strikes on \u201cconvoys\u201d of Isis fighters. But isn\u2019t that what the Americans staged against the Taliban in Afghanistan, often mistaking innocent wedding parties for Islamist \u201cconvoys\u201d? Dropping food parcels to minority refugees in fear of their lives on the bare mountainsides of northern Iraq \u2013 also under way \u2013 is exactly the same operation US forces performed for the Kurds almost a quarter of a century ago; and in the end, they had to put American and British soldiers on the ground to create a \u201csafe haven\u201d for the Kurds.<\/p>\n

Nor has Obama said anything about his friendly ally Saudi Arabia, whose Salafists are the inspiration and fund-raisers for the Sunni militias of Iraq and Syria, just as they were for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The wall between the Saudis and the monsters they create \u2013 and which America now bombs \u2013 must be kept as high as it must be invisible. That is the measure of American dissimulation in this latest act of duplicity. Obama is bombing the friends of his Saudi allies \u2013 and the enemies of the Assad regime in Syria, by the way \u2013 but won\u2019t say so. And just for good measure, he believes that America must act in defence of its consulate in Erbil and embassy in Baghdad.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the same excuse the US used when it fired its naval guns into the Chouf mountains of Lebanon 30 years ago: that Lebanon\u2019s pro-Syrian warlords were endangering the US embassy in Beirut. That the Islamists are as unlikely to seize Irbil as they are to capture Baghdad is neither here nor there. Obama says he has a \u201cmandate\u201d to bomb from the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, the elected but dictatorial Shia who now runs Iraq as a broken and sectarian state. How we Westerners love \u201cmandates\u201d, ever since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which drew the borders of the Middle East for our \u201cmandates\u201d \u2013 the very frontiers which Abu Bakr\u2019s caliphate has now sworn to destroy. There is not much doubt about the awfulness of the equally sectarian Isis which Abu Bakr is creating.<\/p>\n

His threat to the Christians of Iraq \u2013 convert, pay tax or die \u2013 has now been turned against the Yazidis, the harmless and tiny sect whose Persian-Assyrian roots, Christian-Islamo rituals and forgiving God have doomed them as assuredly as the Christians. Ethnic Kurds, the poor old Yazidis believe that God, whose seven angels supposedly govern the Earth, pardoned Satan: so inevitably, this ancient people came to be regarded as devil-worshippers. Hence their 130,000 refugees \u2013 at least 40,000 of them living on mountain rocks in at least nine locations around Mount Sinjar \u2013 tell stories of rape, murder and child-killing at the hands of Abu Bakr\u2019s men. Alas, they may all be true.<\/p>\n

The Yazidis are probably descended from supporters of the second Umayyad Caliph, Yazid the First; his suppression of Hussein, the son of Ali \u2013 whose followers are now the Shia of the Middle East \u2013 might theoretically have commended the Yazidis to Abu Bakr\u2019s Sunni Muslim army. But their mixed rituals and their denial of evil were never going to find favour with a group which \u2013 like Saudi Arabia and the Taliban \u2013 believes in \u201cthe suppression of vice and the propagation of virtue\u201d. In the fault lines that lie across ancient Kurdistan, Armenia and what was Mesopotamia, history has dealt the Yazidis a bad hand.<\/p>\n

But for them and the Nestorians and other Christian groups, Obama has gone to war. The French, their old Crusader spirits reawakened, called the Security Council to reflect upon this Christian pogrom. But the question remains: would America have done the same if the wretched minority refugees of northern Iraq had been Palestinians? Or will Obama\u2019s latest bombing campaign merely provide a welcome distraction from the killing fields of Gaza?<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East and a <\/em>correspondent for <\/em>The Independent, a UK newspaper.\u00a0 He is the author of many books on the region, including <\/em>The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 independent.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He wouldn\u2019t bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi\u2019s bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barak Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees \u2013 and the Yazidis \u2013 because of \u201ca potential act of genocide\u201d. Bombs away. And thank heavens that the refugees in question are not Palestinian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}