Why does Cameron place a higher premium on the lives of Syrias Sunni Muslims than he does on the millions of Christians who are being killed persecuted and ethnically cleansed throughout the Muslim world today?
On Monday the British Prime Minister David Cameron likened the crisis in Syria to what he called the Holocaust. He also warned against the shame of doing nothing to stop it.
David Cameron was utterly wrong to describe what is happening in Syria as aHolocaust even to compare it to a holocaust. He is either demeaning the English language or simply engaging in cheap and ugly politicizing. He is playing a similar game to that of the Leftists who describe everyone who dares to disagree with them as being a fascist racist or nowadays an Islamophobe. Such uses simply degrade the English language. In Camerons case what happens when a real holocaust comes around? In the Leftists case what happens when real Nazis are on the streets or when you come across genuine racists (not just those who dont endorse your Marxist theories)?
The Holocaust against the Jews was a systematic attempt to wipe out an entire racial group. Six million Jews were killed in that attempt. Bashar Assad on the other hand in engaged in a civil war with Sunni militants and Islamists. The entire stability of Assads nation Syria is being threatened. He is not attempting to wipe out an entire ethnic or religious group.
In terms of numbers Camerons got it all wrong too. How can the deaths of 1400 Sunni Syrians be likened to a holocaust? Holocausts or at least genocides in the past (as in the Sudan Europe and Armenia) involved millions of people. (In addition what Pol Pot did in Cambodia was clearly genocide against the middle classes and many have argued that Stalin carried out genocide against the kulaks.)
So yes 1400 deaths are 1400 deaths too many. But its not a holocaust.
It could be argued that Cameron was warning of a potential holocaust in the future if we dont act soon. Nonetheless he did use the words doing nothing to stop it; which is present tense. Despite that holocaust now or holocaust next week its still the case that even violent and bloody civil wars (such as whats happening in Syria) are not synonymous with holocausts. There was no holocaust during the English Civil War or during the American Civil War (even if there were massacres). There were tens of thousands of deaths but still no holocaust because holocausts are very specific phenomena. As I said they are systematic attempts to wipe out an entire racial ethnic or religious/political group. Assad could not possibly wipe out every Sunni in Syria because they are the majority and that would therefore leave him with an empty shell of a nation.
Yet - and this is the extreme irony of what Cameron said - if the jihadists and Islamists did gain power or even before that time they may very well attempt to cleanse the whole of Syria of two groups: Christians and Shia Muslims. In fact they have already begun doing so. So I actually agree with Cameron when he told guests at a charity dinner that the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten. Yes but which holocaust was he talking about?
Consequently in Camerons cheap attempt to inflate peoples emotions by talking about a holocaust his actions may actually lead to a genuine holocaust the holocaust of Syrian Christians by Sunni Islamists and jihadists. After all Christians have already been ethnically cleansed from Libya and Iraq. They have also been ethnically cleansed form many other Arab-Muslim states before that. And even outside of the Arab world (as in Pakistan) it can be said that even if Christians arent the victims of outright genocide they are certainly being killed and persecuted on a massive scale.
All this leads to one question: Why does Cameron place a higher premium on the lives of Syrias Sunni Muslims than he does on the millions of Christians who are being killed persecuted and ethnically cleansed throughout the Muslim world today? Why?
Interestingly Cameron did shift from the word holocaust to the word genocide. He cited two examples of genocide:
When we look back at Srebrenica and Rwanda we wonder now why we didnt do more at the time."
What happened in Rwanda was genocide precisely for the reasons I have suggested. In that conflict one ethnic group literally attempted to wipe out another ethnic group. Moreover the Hutu even killed on a massive scale when there was no large or hardly any - threat from the Tutsis. They massacred thousands simply for the sake of killing them. They wanted to wipe them out. Assad is simply and certainly not doing anything which remotely resembles what the Hutu did.
Finally Cameron had the audacity and cheek to claim to speak for Britain as a whole. Yet he knows full well that the Commons rejected his call for a military intervention in Syria. He also knows that most British people are against intervention. Despite all that this little PR man said:
Britain is not the sort of country that wants to stand by."
So now Cameron believes that he is the nation? That he alone personifies the British people in all their differences and diversity. This is arrogant stuff; just the sort of thing youd expect a despot or dictator to say.