Tears for Paris, only indifference for Syria?
The media coverage of the November Paris attacks was phenomenal. It was almost painted as the darkest day in history. Although 130 innocent lives were lost in Paris, the figure is nowhere near the number of deaths in Syria. Reports of the ongoing civil war in Syria are almost non-existent on the front page of newspapers. It’s also notable how attacks on civilian populations lose media attention within a fortnight.
We are truly desensitised by violence. It is a bold statement by Parisians to come back from trauma and make a statement that they are not going to live in fear. However, the question still lies unanswered: who is the real victim?
The violence on the streets of Paris is a part of a larger problem which has been brewing for a while. The Western interests for oil have been the fuel for conflicts in the Middle East. The US, in order to serve its oil interests, is hand-in-glove with certain Wahhabi factions for creating dissent in the Islamic countries.
In Syria, foreign-funded militants have divided the local population. A large part of terrorism is ideological propaganda. Shias and Sunnis have co-existed in Syria for a long time but the country has fallen into a state of sectarian civil war owing to the factionalist politics played by the US and European Union (EU) to oust their traditional rivals - Russia.
Russians always had influence over Syrians. The leadership in Syria is not equipped to handle threats posed by the Islamic State (ISIS), and the ongoing civil war has given a chance to global powers to directly interfere into Syrian affairs. The result: a massive death toll, widespread panic and mass immigration. This is being played out very systematically. As Professor Kelly Greenhill has pointed out in her paper, coercive immigration can be used as a weapon to destabilise countries and cause regime changes, and Syria seems to be a playground for a larger geopolitical game. There are two aspects to it.
Firstly, it will be a great economic burden for some countries to deal with such a large immigration and secondly, some countries might see this as an opportunity to increase their labour force. In either case, the future of the millions of people displaced from their homes in Syria remain uncertain.
The situation in Syria is so severe that hundreds of thousands of people forced to live as refugees will have to survive for years without jobs before they are accepted by other countries. Somehow, for people like George Soros, this mass migration is an opportunity. He is already on his way to establish a sponsored asylum quota system across Europe.
It is not strange to see industrialised countries like Germany, struggling with lean labour forces, welcoming refugees with open arms. This makes the whole Syrian crisis seem orchestrated for economic benefits. The Paris attacks by the ISIS have been dubbed as a false flag incident by an overwhelming number of sources.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has even gone on to state on record the US link in the creation of the ISIS and yet, the plunder of Syria goes on in the name of war on terror.
As Trevor Noah observes, the anti-Islamic propaganda created around this so-called war is used to mistreat the refugees. Erika Fuller of Melbourne University notes in her piece that the Paris arracks could be used as a ruse to implement harsher immigration policies. The main argument behind harsher immigration measures being the fear of terrorists posing as refugees who enter unchecked and cause attacks like those in Paris. This was exactly the reaction of Poland after the Paris attacks.
With no solution to the Syrian crisis in sight and the refugee issue worsening every day, I can only hope that humanity finds its way into the hearts of people who are the masterminds of such a mess. The economic incentives to provoke wars and mass exploitation must be stopped. It might take decades to normalise the conditions of the refugees but efforts must be made that this mess does not occur elsewhere.