We have, in essence, two great forces operating against each other in the West, Declan Hayes writes.

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Ten blood-soaked years ago, on Easter Sunday 2014, I entered Syria’s fabled town of Maaloula with the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army and their Hezbollah allies. Along with the Christian leaders of Syria and Lebanon, we toured the wrecked churches and looted monasteries and some horrified priests kindly translated the graffiti of the NATO backed rebels which informed their readers that they got closer to God by hacking the heads off Christians, Shias and thousands of similar folk, who stood in their masters’ way.

As these scum had already perpetrated much worse crimes against young Christian girls in the surrounding Qalamoun Hills, such threats did not faze me or the Syrian and Lebanese heroes who had saturated the town in search of these savages.

Maaloula had always been a special town, a picturesque mountain town which, in peacetime, had been on every tour of Syria, as its inhabitants still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus and it was full to the brim of all interesting relics and historical curiosities, all of which NATO’s rebels either destroyed or looted and sold off in the swanky auction houses of London and similar NATO strongholds.

I had earlier visited the Shia Zaynab shrine in Damascus, along with a bus load of Iranians and sundry other Shias. As Zaynab is central to their religion, they quite naturally got quite emotional; it is what Shias do when they reminisce on their centuries of suffering.

Not so a wiry Hezbollah volunteer I spoke to. He told me he hailed from the besieged Shia villages of al Fu’ah and Kafriyah and he asked me to do what I could to highlight their ongoing Golgotha. Although I later got MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace to take testimonies from survivors at that shrine and to raise the matter in the Irish Parliament, my efforts were largely in vain as the lives of Syria’s Shias, like those of Syria’s Christians, are very much surplus to NATO’s requirements.

Fast forward to Easter 2024 and consider this report by Irish state broadcaster RTE on Israel’s latest attack on the Zaynab shrine. Note how this Irish government outlet (feebly) argues that Israel is entitled to attack the shrine and to hell with the collateral human damage because it is a Hezbollah (read Shia) stronghold. The reality, had these genocidal apologists bothered to check, is that Hezbollah have to guard all Shia locales because Israel and their NATO proxies continually attack them and slaughter every and all Shias that they can. Think of a Russian Orthodox Church in Western Ukraine and you get the picture.

I asked a good friend of mine, a female secular Sunni tour guide, if the Zaynab shrine was always so heavily guarded. She said that prior to NATO’s war against Syria, it only had normal security, the type that would be common in the mid West of the USA. Syria, before NATO launched its genocidal war against it, was considered one of the safest countries one could travel in. And that was probably their mistake, that it looked like easy meat for NATO’s cut throats.

But let’s forget Syria and Maaloula (which the Western media conveniently forgot about once Hezbollah and the Syrian Army freed it from NATO’s nun-torturing proxies). Let’s move on to Gaza or, rather to the BBC’s sickening coverage of it, as exemplified by these examples here and here of the BBC’s complicity in this most disgusting of war crimes. The sufferings the people of Gaza are enduring is the plainest example there is today of a war crime committed by war criminals, who should answer for their crimes. That the BBC considers Gaza is just some sort of pedantic philosophical talking point is a criminal indictment of the BBC on a par with anything the Nazis stood accused of in Nuremberg.

And then there is NATO’s most recent criminal attack on Moscow, which is brilliantly addressed here by British maverick Russell Brand, who uses this article from WSWS, which often features in this site’s Editor’s Picks. Although Brand easily and convincingly argues that NATO’s instant denials of Ukrainian intelligence involvement in these terror attacks are not in the least credible, Maaloula, Zaynab, Gaza and a million other places show that the criminal case against NATO goes much further and deeper than that.

We have, in essence, two great forces operating against each other in the West. On the one hand, we have the business model of NATO and Israel, which see themselves fulfilling their manifest destiny by cleansing the lands they conquer of Shias, Armenian Christians, and elderly Russian monks and nuns. Their logic is quite simple. By cleansing the Middle East of its minorities, NATO can argue that the war there is between their pampered Israeli puppets and intransigent Sunnis, who don’t know their place of half devil and half child in the Pax Americana’s scheme of things.

On the other side of the ledger sheet, you have the Armenians, the Assyrians, the Mandaeans, the Shia, the Yezidi, secular Sunnis and many more who just want to live out their lives in peace, observing the customs their ancestors have observed since the dawn of time. This is not so much the Clash of Civilizations NATO’s mouthpieces harp on about but NATO, being utterly devoid of civilisation, trying to wipe everything from Maaloula and Zaynab to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Masha and Mishka from the face of the earth.

Hyperbole? Consider the case of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the man who flew to Kiev to order the cross dressing Zelensky to fight to the last pregnant woman. This “cultured” man suggested that Palmyra, one of the jewels in Syria’s cultural crown, be allowed fall into ruin but that it should be recreated in some British controlled virtual world or other. True to form, this modern day Kipling has not a thought on how Palmyra, Maaloula or Zaynab fit into the greater glory of Greater Syria and the entire Fertile Crescent. Johnson would make a good Israeli, brash, boorish, and so arrogantly full of piss and wind that he is.

Perhaps Johnson, Zelensky, Israel, Hunter Biden, Macron and his “wife” will prevail and the world will resemble a giant Belsen, with that lot relaxing to pillaged copies of Rachmaninov and Afghan Black on one side of the wire and the rest of us subsisting like Gazans and Syrians on the other. Who is to say?

What I can say is this. So much has been sacrificed by Syrians, Russians, Libyans, Palestinians, Iraqis and Armenians to turn back now. Though generations yet to be born will remember them and call them blessed, in our own time, there are legions in Yemen and far beyond who are determined to even the body bag score. A sub-optimal solution to be sure but the only viable one as long as Johnson, Zelensky, Israel, Hunter Biden, Macron and his “wife”, Clinton and his ogre, Obama and his “wife” and the rest of these over dressed killers presume to hold the moral high ground.