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Does Anyone Understand the Syrian Nightmare?

I am struggling more and more every day to understand the Syrian humanitarian crisis. I sympathize with those fleeing trying to save themselves and their families from the horrors happening every hour in Syria, horrors that have gone on far too long. It doesn’t matter to me whether they are refugees or migrants, they are escaping for their lives and any hope of a future, and they deserve a safe place to live. Have you seen Syria? Who can live there now? It is a place of utter devastation and ruin. Why aren’t the Arab nations, including Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates doing more to help these people? Why aren’t we? So far, according to NPR radio, we have taken in 1,500 refugees. That’s deplorable. I know we have given money and arms and the Syrian catastrophe is a complex situation but surely we can do better to help these desperate people. European nations have so far, except for Germany, been stubbornly indifferent to the mass of refugees risking their lives to get to safety. And many of those nations are doing very little to help them. Some just turn them away. But in spite of all of that what mystifies me the most is how is it in this day and time that a tiny country like Syria is able to endlessly create so much misery and chaos in the world? Is there no solution to the Syrian political quagmire? Can nothing be done to end the violent, inhuman, deranged control of Assad? Is NATO helpless? Does the Arab League have no interest in this mess? Where are the world negotiators who have brought sanity and peace to other warring countries? Or are we simply witnessing the complicity of corrupt nations everywhere who have some financial or military interest in letting Assad and Syria carry on its savage implacable slaughter of human life? Are we just to assume there is no solution to this cruelty?

 (c) Timothy Moody
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