Syria - my children would be ashamed

'Do you love your creator? Love your fellow-beings first.'

Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)

Being fairly ignorant about history, it took the film Hotel Rwanda for me to pay any attention to the Rwandan genocide. This was about five years ago and I could scarcely believe that not only were up to 1 million people murdered in the space of three months but that this actually happened in 1993. How could something so horrific on that scale happen in my lifetime? What the hell was the world doing??

I would have been six or seven, I felt ashamed that my parents' generation could let children and innocent people get slaughtered in this way. The slaughter wasn't even perpetrated by armies with tanks and planes and drones, only knives and machetes. Just like I was ashamed at the generation that preceded me, I fear that my children will feel the same way about Syria. People in their suits with fancy titles sit behind their desks and often appear for a few minutes on the news 'denouncing' Syria and 'imposing sanctions', doing so until the cows come home and yet these kinds of words are meaningless. Israel some years ago bombed one of Syria's alleged nuclear plants and they did not retaliate, it hardly made a peep on the news. Are you really telling me that almost all the countries in the world cannot stop the massacre of mothers, fathers, grandfathers, and children in this relatively small country?

OK so Russia and China are blocking resolutions, they have their own interests and I suspect that they also have the good sense to see the danger of yet another military intervention in a Muslim country. In Libya, Britain, US, France and Nato exceeded their UN mandate, which was for the protection of civilians, and specifically sided with the opposition and targeted Gaddafi's strongholds in order to overthrow him. And then had the nerve to (pretend to) baulk when a Libyan assassinated Gaddafi! It is obvious to the world that Libya was 'easy', it is rich, has a lot of the black stuff, is mostly desert and a relatively small population. No-one believes for a second that the countries that presided over the campaign give two shits about Arab civilians, they're the last people they care about! Clearly there are so many governments that cannot be trusted, worse than bodies such as the UN who comprise of so many and talk a lot, yet are unable to protect children being maimed. You wouldn't have kids if you couldn't protect them, so what is the point of having a 'United Nations' if they can't protect its people?