The Washington Post and ISIS are both advocating the genocide of Alawites, though obviously in their own different ways.
Alawites, the esoteric religious sect that Assad belongs to, is not only facing threats of genocide from terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Nusra, but also from the radical war hawks on The Washington Post editorial board.
The Angry Arab - Deputy Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post calls for the threat of "destruction" of Alawites:
From Mike: "Hi As'ad,The suggestion of "tipping the military balance" against Assad is very dangerous and irresponsible, and opens the possibility of widespread bloodletting on a scale that will make today's headlines about the casualties of innocents in the war in Syria seem insignificant.
Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He wants to destroy the Allawite community if Assad fails to 'compromise' . Sounds like genocide.
"In the end, the Syrian political settlement Obama says he seeks will require pursuing Kerry’s original idea of tipping the military balance so that Assad’s generals and his Alawite community face a choice between compromise and destruction." Can you imagine the outcry (and rightly so) at the international level and the street protests if this was said about Jews?
What this chief propagandist is saying in essence is that the U.S. and its allies should bolster ISIS and other like-minded terrorist groups so that they pose a real genocidal threat to Alawites, who make up the core of the Assad regime. The U.S. and its allies will push them to the edge of the cliff, and only then put diplomacy on the table, if at all.
What he is recommending is terrorism against an innocent population, not a fair and just political solution that brings together all Syrians, especially those belonging to different religions, sects and minorities who can live peacefully with each other in a post-Assad age.
When you put people between the corners of "compromise and destruction" then they'll choose neither, and stick with resistance. That is just human psychology. Jackson Diehl is, whether he knows it or not, supporting ISIS's false narrative that the problem with Syria is not only it's current political leadership headed by Assad, but also the members of his obscure, and open-minded religious sect.
Diehl and others in the morally bankrupt U.S. media who subtlety and sneakily spread the false narratives of terrorist groups like ISIS don't want to highlight the reality that the biggest problem Syria faces today is not Assad's tyrannical rule but the massive presence of foreign religious extremists and terrorists in the country who seek only war and destruction.
The fact that the U.S. has allied itself with such evil forces means the U.S. doesn't care if the ultimate result of its policy is the genocide of Alawites and other communities in Syria.
Wikipedia:
Jackson Diehl (born 1956) is the Deputy Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post. He writes many of the paper's editorials on foreign affairs, helps to oversee the editorial and oped pages and authors a regular column.An excerpt from, "Syria’s Ruling Alawite Sect" by Robert Mackey, New York Times, June 14, 2011:
While many non-Muslims are now aware that there is a sectarian divide in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, it is less commonly known that Syria is ruled largely by members of an esoteric Islamic sect, the Alawites, whose belief in the divinity of Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, is just one of the reasons that they were oppressed as infidels for centuries by other Muslims.
Fearing for their future in any Syrian state dominated by Sunni Muslims, in 1936 six leading Alawites, including Sulayman al-Assad, the grandfather of Syria’s current president, wrote a letter to Léon Blum, France’s first Jewish prime minister, explaining that their community would “refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria because in Syria the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam the Alawis are considered infidels.”The authors of the letter even appealed to Mr. Blum’s presumed Zionist sympathies, arguing that the persecution of the Jews in Syria and Palestine would be the fate of all religious minorities if the majority Muslim population was allowed to rule. They wrote:
The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non‑Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the Mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief. …
All of this makes it interesting to look back now at an essay written in 2006 by a member of the Alawite community for Joshua Landia’s Syria Comment Web site, “What Do Sunnis Intend for Alawis Following Regime Change?”The author, who used the pseudonym Khudr, observed that many younger members of his community “have not lived the unjust circumstances that our fathers and grandfathers were subjected to by the Sunnis. As such, we do not have the same appreciation as our fathers of the Alawite rule that the late president Hafez al-Assad brought.” He added that there were many reasons to argue for an end to Alawite rule, but also criticized the Syrian opposition for not explaining clearly, “What exactly are your plans for the Alawis after we give up power?”
