Israel has has militarily occupied much of the Golan Heights since 1967 and which it has illegally stolen from Syria. The United Nations Charter, to which Israel is a signatory, forbids the acquisition of territory by war, and all but one of the UN member states have refused to recognize the 1981 annexation. Israel’s Occupation has separated Syrian families from one another, with 26,000 mostly Druze Syrians trapped on the Israeli side of the occupation line. Israel’s government has planted a similar number of Israeli squatters on the land owned by these Syrians, stealing it from them without compensation.

The widely respected International Commission of Jurists has a long and detailed paper on how Israeli squatting on, and annexation of, occupied territory are both about as illegal as you can get.

In 2019, the Trump administration recognized the Israeli annexation of the Golan, contravening international law. That the world community let Israel get away with annexing part of Syria, which has had no negative consequences, has encouraged the far right wing Likud-led government of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to also illegally annex the Jordan Valley and other parts of the Palestinian West Bank this July.

The government will spend $2.3 million to build Trump Heights on the Golan. Some of the money will be passed through the World Zionist Organization.

When the plot — oops, I mean, plan, was announced last year, Trump tweeted his support. He alleged that these Israeli settlements on Syrian soil would protect Israel from Iran and Hizbullah. Actually, there are no Twelver Shiites (the sect from which Lebanon’s Hizbullah is drawn) in the Golan, and putting a few more civilian Israeli squatters on Syrian territory in any case would not actually protect Israel from anything. I mean, the US does give the Israelis (a rich country) over $3 billion a year of your and my taxpayer funds and they do have, like, fighter jets to protect themselves from Hizbullah, which they did in 2006. Hizbullah is a small guerrilla group and has no aircraft. The configuration of the aggressive acquisition of other people’s land as a defensive move has an unsavory history in Central Europe that you would think Trump would want to distance Israel from.

The site of the planned Trump Heights (Ramat Trump) squatter settlement now only has a population of 10, but it is expected that some twenty Israeli families will settle there in the coming months, according to Euronews Arabic. Ultimately a population of 120 Israeli families will live there.

Trump has been a one-man wrecking ball for the international rule of law, challenging principles such as proportionate response in warfare, threatening to kill or take hostage civilians, and approving of the illegal acquisition of a neighbor’s territory. It makes it hard for American diplomats to go on criticizing the WW II Axis. Many of the crimes tried at Nuremburg have now been blessed by Trump. In fact, the US is sanctioning members of the International Criminal Court in the Hague for daring interfere with Trump’s and Netanyahu’s march of illegality.

So in some ways it is only right that an illegal squatter-settlement on land illegally annexed from a neighbor should be given the Trump name. That’s what he stands for. An epochal shame. And Americans wonder why they are so often hated around the world…

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Bonus Video:

The National: “Trump Heights: Israel approves plan for occupied Golan settlement”

Pew Research has released a report saying that

“As a whole, the region continued to have the highest levels of religious hostilities in the world. In 2014, the median level of religious hostilities in the Middle East and North Africa reached a level four times that of the global median.”

But is there another way to look at this data? Is it really all about religion?

Pew does excellent polling and I’ve used their work a great deal, e.g. in my Engaging the Muslim World . And the good thing about their polling is that they are very up front about their assumptions and methodology.

This is what they mean by “religion”:

“For the purposes of this study, religion-related terrorism includes acts carried out by subnational groups that use religion as a justification or motivation for their actions.”

So a “subnational” group might well be driven primarily by nationalism, but if its members commit terrorism that is “religion-related,” then it gets counted under the sign of religion.

Social scientists talk about people having “markers” of identity. Language and religion can be such markers, as can constructions like “race.”

In the context of Protestant Britain, Irish immigrants in the 18th century were coded as Catholics or “papists.” Where there were mob attacks on them, however, it would be difficult to prove that the fine points of theology were always the main drivers of the violence. Some of it was social class, some of it was “race.”

So it isn’t easy to disentangle religious motivations from nationalist ones.

Pew adds

“Religion-related terrorism also includes terrorist acts carried out by individuals or groups with a nonreligious identity that deliberately target religious groups or individuals, such as clergy. ”

So what Pew is really measuring is not religious fanaticism at all, but the prevalence of symbolic targets that are religious in nature.

So if two secular groups fought and a religious symbol was harmed, the incident in this study would be classified as religious violence.

In social science, you have wide latitude in making your definitions, as long as you clarify your terms to begin with.

What Pew is actually saying is that in the Middle East and North Africa, people are four times as likely to act out their ethnic violence by attacking religious symbols as in the rest of the world. It isn’t saying they are four times as likely to be religious fanatics.

My guess is that the Middle East is unusually religiously pluralistic, and this is especially true of the Levant to the Gulf. Whereas Poland is almost entirely Catholic, Iraq is 60 percent Shiite and 37 percent Sunni (counting Arabs and Kurds).

There are also relatively high rates of religious belief in the region. If you wanted to hurt a member of another ethnicity, you’d know that striking their religious edifices or clergy, etc., would hit them hard. Thus, al-Qaeda’s destruction of the Shiite Golden Dome shrine of the eleventh Imam in Samarra in 2006 set off an Iraqi civil war. You couldn’t hurt the feelings of very many French by taking a sledge hammer to a gargoyle.

A lot of the violence that gets coded in the US press as religious is actually about nationalism. This principle holds especially true in Palestine-Israel.

But take Syria. Some observers suggest that the Lebanese militia, Hizbullah, which is Shiite, intervened in Syria to help the Alawites, also Shiites. But they don’t belong to the same branch of Shiism. Most Lebanese Shiites belong to the orthodox Twelver school, with mosques, collective Friday prayers, clergymen, etc. Alawites are heterodox– lacking mosques and having wise men rather than seminary-trained clergymen. Most Sunni and Shiite Muslims don’t consider the Alawites to be Muslims. Moreover, many Syrian Alawites are members of the Baath Party, which is highly secular and socialist. So Hizbullah did not come into Syria for reasons of religious sympathy. They came in because the Baath, secular government of Syria is a vital supply route for Hizbullah.

So if a Sunni mosque was shelled by Baath Party members because even relatively secular Sunni opposition groups were hiding behind it, Pew would count that as religious violence in this study.

That outcome is legitimate, since they defined their terms to begin with. But as consumers of such studies, we should be careful about how we use the findings. They aren’t saying what we might at first assume they are. In polls as in consumer purchases, always read the fine print.

—–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

U Chicago Social Sciences: “PANEL 2: Religious Minorities in Syria’s Civil War | Keith Watenpaugh”

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — A plan approved by Israel’s cabinet last week to provide half a billion dollars worth of assistance to Israel’s Druze and Circassian minorities has been denounced by leaders of Israel’s Palestinian community as a “divide and conquer” tactic.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the 2 billion shekel ($510 million) multi-year plan “for the development of the Druze and Circassian communities” at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday.

The plans followed the earlier announcement of a 15 billion shekel ($3.8 billion) five-year plan to address the gaps in access to infrastructure and discrepancies in rights between Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and their Jewish counterparts.

While it was not initially clear whether the assistance to the Druze and Circassian communities was included in this larger plan, Netanyahu warned separately on Sunday that the larger plan for the development of other “Arab communities” was dependent on the implementation of a law enforcement plan alongside it.

“I want to make it clear that nothing that has been done in various areas — infrastructure, tourism, education, trade, economy — can move forward if we do not address the question of enforcing the laws of the state of Israel in the Arab sector,” the prime minister said.

The further security measures proposed by Netanyahu would target Palestinian citizens of Israel — who represent an estimated 20 percent of the Israeli population — but would, critics say, do so unequally.

Security measures for ‘good Arabs and bad Arabs’

Palestinian communities in Israel recently came under intense scrutiny from Israel’s security forces after a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, Nashat Melhem, allegedly killed two Israelis at a Tel Aviv cafe on Jan. 1, before killing a Palestinian citizen of Israel as he fled the scene.

Melhem was killed in a shootout with Israeli forces on Jan. 8 in his hometown of Arara in northern Israel.

Jafar Farah, the director of the Mossawa Advocacy Center For Arab Citizens In Israel, told Ma’an at the time that there had been a high level of incitement against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship on the part of Israeli government officials.

“The atmosphere right now is very heavy and racist — there is a lot of incitement against Arabs,” Farah said. “We know that in these circumstances there is no authority willing to intervene in the media to do anything other than support the (crackdown).”

“This is a period where the extreme right wing is trying to prove that the occupation is not the problem, but the relationship between Jewish and Arab communities is.”

Farah’s sentiments were echoed by Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli’s Knesset representing the left-wing Hadash party of the Arab Joint List coalition, who sees the Israeli government’s recent funding plans as reflective of its discriminatory policy.

Touma-Suleiman slammed the government’s intention to tie development aid for Palestinian communities to law enforcement as an attempt “to create conditioned citizenship.”

This “conditioned citizenship,” she said, was being carried out by the Israeli government with the aim of creating divisions among Palestinians in Israel.

“This has been a tactic from different Israeli governments, even those who claim they are from the left,” she told Ma’an.

“They try to divide and conquer us, either based on geographical locations, religious affiliations, and now between good Arabs and bad Arabs. Those who obey the government, who serve in the military, will benefit from the plan, and those who refuse the government’s oppression will not.

“We are used to the attempted fragmentation of the community, and we’ll always stand against it,” she said.

A picture taken from the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights shows Druze men residing in Israel watching smoke rise in the horizon in the Syrian Druze village of Hader, on June 16, 2015. (AFP / Jalaa Marey, File)

‘Divide and conquer policy’

Israeli law differentiates between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and forms further distinctions between various Palestinians minorities.

Druze and Circassians are subject to mandatory military service in the Israeli army, whereas Muslim or Christian Palestinian citizens of Israel are not. Israeli identification papers do not recognize Christians, Druze and Circassians as Arabs, unlike Muslims.

These legal distinctions have been criticized by many, including MK Abdullah Abu Maruf, as an attempt to divide the Palestinian population inside Israel.

Abu Maruf, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and, like Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Hadash party, told Ma’an that Israel’s plan — which he said would actually only amount to 1.2 billion shekels — was an attempt to sow divisions among Israel’s Palestinian minorities through preferential treatment.

“As an Arab citizen and a member of Knesset I never oppose allocation of money to the Arab citizens, but we are against a political process of discrimination,” the MK said.

“All members of the Joint List view this plan in the same way,” he added. “We consider it a ‘divide and conquer’ policy. It’s a continuation of the systematic Israeli government policy towards Arabs in Israel.”

Abu Maruf noted that a similar plan to allocate funds to the Druze and Circassian communities was approved by the Israeli cabinet in late 2014, although he pointed out that only 10 percent of the 185 million shekel project had been allocated so far.

A Druze himself, he further pointed to the small size of the Druze and Circassian communities in Israel, which total around 130,000 and 4,000 respectively.

“With all due respect, this is a small number and the Israelis are using this to talk about minorities and enact discriminatory policies,” Abu Maruf said.

‘The rights we deserve’

This is not the only initiative since the beginning of the year to explicitly benefit the two communities. On Jan. 5, less than a week earlier, the Israeli National Planning and Building Council approved an initiative presented by Netanyahu to “build a new Druze town” near the northern town of Tiberias, a press release from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office revealed at the time.

“I ascribe great importance to the establishment of a new Druze town that will advance the Druze sector,” Netanyahu said following the announcement. “The Druze community has bound its fate to the State of Israel.”

According to rights organization Adalah, there are at least 76 Israeli laws that discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

A 2011 report by the organization stated that “Arab municipalities exercis[ed] jurisdiction over only 2.5 percent of the total area of the state,” adding that no new Palestinian towns had been built in Israel since 1948, compared to 600 Jewish municipalities. Infrastructure in Palestinian-majority towns is notoriously inadequately maintained, and access to public transportation is insufficient.

“This plan is not a favor from anybody, it is only a small part of the rights we deserve,” Touma-Suleiman said.

“We are also worried of the political use of this plan against us,” she added. “Netanyahu’s government needs this plan for international reasons, in order to build an image of Israel as a democratic state at a time when there is international criticism of Israeli policies.”

“Even if this plan is not implemented later on, it will still look like the government is looking after its Arab citizens.”

Via Ma’an News Agency

Making alliances of convenience is a perennial temptation in Washington, where policy-makers often have more ambition than ethics or common sense.

Thus, the Washington Post just published a slick op-ed by a representative of the Islamic Movement of Syrian Free Men (Ahrar al-Sham) claiming that the group is “moderate” and not “extremist.” The implication is that the US should feel comfortable allying with this Salafi Jihadi group.

Here’s what’s wrong with that scenario:

The Free Men want to see Syria become what they call an Islamic state, just as the Taliban wanted Afghanistan to be their idea of an Islamic state. Islam is an old and diverse religious tradition, but these people don’t mean any old “Islam.” They have a rigid fundamentalist interpretation of it that makes no room for people who disagree with them. They say they will accept some sort of pluralism, but this is frankly a lie and can be shown to be so.

The Free Men are closely allied with the open al-Qaeda affiliate, the Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra). This is not a mere alliance of convenience. They have formed joint operation offices. They coordinate closely militarily. They have a common rubric in Idlib Province of the Army of Conquest (Jaysh al-Fath).

When the two groups of holy warriors and their allies took over the city of Idlib this summer, they conquered 18 villages north of that city largely inhabited by members of the esoteric Shiite Druze religion. The Free Men leadership gave control of the Druze villages to al-Qaeda, which promptly began stealing their property and killing them when they objected. Some 23 were massacred.

The al-Qaeda oppression of the Druze, enabled by the Free Men, tempted many members of that group to get off the fence and support the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. In Israel, members of the Druze minority pressured the Israeli government to attack al-Qaeda so as to protect the Syrian Druze. (Israel appears to have an alliance of convenience with al-Qaeda in the Golan Heights against their common foe, the Lebanese Hizbullah, and brings wounded anti-regime fighters fighters over the border into Israel for treatment. Druze in the Israeli-held Golan rioted and attacked these wounded jihadis recently, alleging that the injure who were being transported in an Israeli ambulance were al-Qaeda).

Note that the Free Men did not have to give the Druze in Idlib Province to al-Qaeda. They could have administered that territory themselves. That they thought al-Qaeda a suitable overlord for a group viewed by hard line Salafis as unbelievers and idolators shows that they just don’t care about human rights. They want a Salafi , Taliban-style Islamic state. We know exactly what happened to Shiite Hazara under the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were massacred.

If the Free Men are so moderate, they would renounce their close alliance with al-Qaeda and stop coddling the terrorists, who report directly to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a mastermind of the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. That this intertwining of the Free Men with al-Qaeda is all right with the Washington Post is just baffling.

Another hint at the Free Men’s lack of pluralism is their hatred for the leftist Kurds who have fought so effectively against Daesh:

Senior Ahrar Al Sham leader condemns allying with Kurdish forces. pic.twitter.com/qASMDqRaR6

— أبو فريدالمرزم (@HeyAkhi) June 21, 2015

The Free Men, in alliance with al-Qaeda, made an incursion in late May into the Kurdish-majority Shaykh Mahmoud District of Aleppo, trading live fire with the YPG leftist Kurdish militia. A truce was later worked out.

One of the founders of the Free Men was Hasan Aboud, who in 2013 told an Egyptian newspaper that secularism would not be allowed and tried to assure its readers that “the rejection of democracy” does not mean domination, but rather consultation. Aboud was killed in fall of 2014, but there is no reason to think the organization has changed its mind about those evil secularists or about the undesirability of doing more than “consulting” with the governed.

The weasel words in the WaPo op-ed notwithstanding, just a month and a half ago, Sam Heller notes,

“On 26 May, Ahrar al-Sham’s chief shari’ah officer “Abu Muhammad al-Sadeq” issued a treatise on Twitter titled “And the Idol Has Shattered” – the “idol,” in this case, being democracy. Drawing on Algeria and Egypt’s aborted democratic experiments, Abu Muhammad argued that democracy is, in real practice, a trap for would-be Islamist participants.”

So I think we know what sort of society the Free Men want to build in Syria. It is apparently one where al-Qaeda has a free hand with minorities and there is no democracy, and the Kurdish socialist, feminist experiment is crushed. I think we also know what they have in store for Syria’s women.

All that said, the Free Men are not al-Qaeda or Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Indeed, they expelled fighters who would not take on Daesh and have had several battles with it. They don’t go in for mass beheadings or anything, and they did try to persuade al-Qaeda not to massacre the Druze (though they did nothing to stop the Support Front from just, like stealing their property). And, they don’t want to blow stuff up in the West– they have local, Syrian territorial ambitions.

But in all these ways they resemble the Afghan Taliban, who also were not international terrorists, who also just wanted an Islamic state in their own country, and who also had a soft spot for al-Qaeda, with which they were allied.

The Free Men are counting on Washington being willing to overlook their tight entanglement with al-Qaeda and their anti-democratic, sectarian Sunni theocratic aspirations because they might be useful in fighting Daesh as well as in overthrowing the Syrian regime.

We have seen this movie before, in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when the US allied with the Muslim extreme right, groups like Gulbudin Hikmatyar’s so-called Islamic Party (Hizb-i Islam) against the Afghan socialists. Although CIA station chief in Islamabad Milt Bearden denied that the US directly trained or funded the Arab volunteers who fought alongside Hikmatyar and who were grouped by Usama Bin Laden under the Office of Services, there isn’t any doubt that CIA tradecraft was communicated to al-Qaeda by American allies. That knowledge of cell formation, avoidance of surveillance, and planning of covert operations, was then deployed against the United States itself by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001.

The al-Assad regime is evil and genocidal. But not all of its enemies are worthy allies for the US. Friends of al-Qaeda are no friends of ours.

Just this past weekend of July 4, US-led coalition aircraft targeted the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria. It was one of the “largest deliberate engagements to date,” said a coalition spokesman, and it was executed “to deny [ISIS] the ability to move military capabilities throughout Syria and into Iraq.” The scale of these responses gives a hint both to how concerned we are about such groups–and to how badly we misunderstand how to deal with them.

ISIS–the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”–is the monster of our times, our Grendel. Every pundit, commentator, armchair warrior and presidential candidate, declared and otherwise, claims to have a strategy to defeat them. A steady stream of political statements offering answers to “what do we do about them?” have gotten progressively more hawkish.

Would-be presidents have given us options ranging from bombing ISIS “back to the 7th Century” (Rick Santorum), increasing the number of American troops in the fight (Lindsey Graham), and “look for them, find them and kill them” (Marco Rubio, quoting an action movie).

Bold words…and every one of them will fail, because they are far too idealistic to work in reality. If the candidates want realism, they’ll have to advocate something else: peacebuilding.

“War as utopian idealism” and “peacebuilding as hard-nosed realism” sounds like an absurd joke.

Here’s why it isn’t.

War is just politics by other means

Carl Von Clausewitz, one of history’s foremost military strategists and right at the foundation of American strategic teaching, famously called warfare an “extension of politics by other means.”

What he meant by that is that if military action is going to be successful, it cannot stand alone or direct itself. Unless it grows out of and complements a solid, sustainable political strategy, it will fail.

That was true in his day of formalized warfare; in today’s world, it’s even more critical an insight, because what the world faces in ISIS isn’t a war among uniformed armies and sovereign nations.

This conflict and others like it around the world are rooted in people, not states. It’s rooted in ideology and religion, in sectarian frictions, in political exclusion and social marginalization, in resources and access.

That’s a long list of root causes and conditions that do not respond to force and cannot be bombed out of existence.

In other words, if “defeat ISIS” isn’t couched within a clear, realistic plan to do the human, political, diplomatic and development work necessary to fix the problems that gave it rise, the mission will fail.

In its failure, it will leave behind the seeds of a new threat in fertile soil, just as ISIS itself grew from the roots of al-Qaeda even after the bloom was cut off above.

Peacebuilding, at its heart, means doing the hard work of correctly analyzing the causes and conditions that lead to violence and instability. It means identifying ways of breaking those causes down, and then doing the even harder work of helping to build healthy, resilient social and political structures in their place.

It’s work that’s usually dismissed as an exercise in starry-eyed, utopian idealism by a policy community dominated by the philosophy of nation states and Realpolitik. And yet over the last few years, the fallacy of that dismissal has become increasingly clear.

General James Mattis told Congress flatly that “if you don’t fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition.” General Phipps, former commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Afghanistan, when asked about peacebuilding outreach to men he’d fought not long before, replied “That’s how wars end… we can’t kill our way out of this.”

The least effective tool against terrorism is war

Serious research centers have arrived at the same conclusion: the RAND Corporation, as far back as 2008, advised that outside military intervention is bar none the least effective way to make terrorist groups go away.

Ending the kind of conflicts we see most often today requires building inclusive governance and rule of law far more than it requires the defeat of a fighting force on the battlefield.

“Peacebuilding” is a broad category of work, which seeks to address the root causes of conflict and instability within populations and systems of governance. In conflicts that involve people more than states, any answer other than this shows a lack of understanding. Beginning now rather than waiting for the battlefield victory is an imperative, because it’s only through this work that the next battle gets less likely.

In fact the battlefield options – however satisfying they may seem in a tactical sense – often cause more trouble than they’re worth. The Saudis are discovering this in their campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which is entirely military and has no parallel political component, and is having predictably destabilizing consequences.

Yes, building peace is a long process that will take years, perhaps generations; but those years will pass whether or not we recognize the need for a more realistic foreign policy, and the only question is whether in years to come progress has been made, or the war goes on.

The discussion about ISIS, as with many others around the globe, has lost track of realism. Instead of looking at the military as an extension of politics, speakers across the board have begun to look at politics as secondary – something to worry about once the hard work of fighting’s done.

Practical actions for peace-building

What does this look like in practice? Here are four possible actions:

One: The “real battle” here isn’t with ISIS, it’s for the populations they’re trying to sway. There is no understating the power of the following scenario: An American politician saying, in a public forum, “I speak now to all of the population caught up in this fight, be you Sunni, Shiite, Yazidi, Kurd or otherwise, and I say, ‘It’s not just their destruction we have in mind – it’s your survival.”

ISIS may prove impossible to talk with, but if we’re indiscriminate and also ignore the population who is looking to the outside world for engagement and help, we’re doing nothing but feeding into the vicious cycle.

Two: Make it clear to the populations concerned that we strive to address the problems they face, not just those symptoms of the problems that we face.

Speaking to the current fight but not the problems that gave rise to it and which will still exist once the smoke clears just comes across as naive and disingenuous. Make a clear statement, for example, that we will not support repressive regimes in exchange for expedient stability, but are prepared for the long haul of achieving stability through unfailing support for the ideals of inclusive good governance that we ourselves hold dear.

Three: My research and personal experience working for organizations in the region as well as many years spent in conflict-affected areas have shown me repeatedly that the real key to peace-building (as with development overall) isn’t “what you do,” it’s “how you do it.”

The most effective “how” is to look past states to see people, and provide incentives to get the population and government alike involved in designing and negotiating their own inclusive way forward – with our support, but not with our direction. Helping to build connectivity between the two – defined through trust, partnership and locally negotiated outcomes – is a powerful programmatic outcome.

It’s also a good working definition of “good governance,” and a more terrifying thought for ISIS than any weaponry can be.

Four: Most of all, recognize that the military neither can nor should be the primary vehicle for American engagement overseas, and reprioritize funding accordingly.

The military is not trained for the jobs that peace-building entails, but USAID, the State Department and most importantly non-governmental organizations, are.

The message we send by prioritizing our own national security agenda while underfunding the agencies whose core mission and skillset is to work with good governance, justice, peace and livelihoods, is that we have no intention of doing more than eradicating symptoms while leaving the causes unchecked.

The military does have its role to play in winning a battle, but if “war” is our only lens, we will see only battlefield solutions to a set of problems that can’t be solved with those. If we want to end the problem, we need to speak to the broad population with those tools that bring life, not death.

At some point an American president will be forced to recognize that fixing problems like the ones in Iraq and Syria is too complicated to sum up in a campaign slogan or sound bite. That’s the hard truth.

The only question is how much in blood, time and treasure will be wasted before this realization hits home.

Getting rid of ISIS and groups like it certainly requires seriousness and a willingness to get hard work done — but that doesn’t just mean preparing to get bloody. It means we need to be realistic and unafraid to say, “Our strategy is to build peace.”

David Alpher is Adjunct Professor at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

David Alpher is an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University

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related video added by Juan Cole:

ISIS execution video shows teenagers killing Syrians in Palmyra – TomoNews

The al-Qaeda-linked Support Front has murdered 23 men from a single Druze clan in Qalb Lawzah, Idlib Province, Syria. Druze villagers fled in large numbers to surrounding Sunni hamlets seeking refuge from al-Qaeda. There are some 18 Druze villages in the north of Idlib Province.

The Army of Conquest coalition of Salafi Sunni fundamentalists swept into remaining regime-held areas of the northern Idlib Province in late March. A key component of the coalition, the Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra) is loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri of al-Qaeda, who helped plan the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Free Ones of Syria (Ahrar al-Sham), another coalition component, has also had leaders who were close to al-Qaeda, but it adopts a pose of greater moderation (a low bar for al-Qaeda affiliates).

The Druze minority is an offshoot of the Ismaili branch of Shiite Islam, but it has evolved so far in a Gnostic, esoteric direction that it is barely recognizable as a form of Islam. Its doctrines, mainly Neoplatonic, are secret even from lay followers. Druze do not pray 5 times a day or have mosques, and are said to believe in reincarnation. The Druze communities in the Levant are spread among Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Israeli and Lebanese Druze reacted with alarm to the killings. Al-Qaeda types view even ordinary Sunni Muslims as infidels, so you can imagine what they think of Druze.

Druze are 3 percent of the Syrian population, about 660,000.

The Army of Conquest coalition, in which the Free Ones of Syria is the leading component, gave control of the Druze villages in Idlib over to al-Qaeda. This decision has to be seen as a deliberate provocation and as a crime against humanity waiting to happen. The Free Ones of Syria is also part of the Islamic Front, at least one component of which is Saudi-backed, and rumor has it that the Free Ones themselves get support from Turkey.

It is extremely distasteful that US allies are willing to back a coalition like the Army of Conquest, given that al-Qaeda is a central component of it. The last time the US supported al-Qaeda allies, in the form of the AFghan Mujahideen, the whole thing came around to bite us on the ass on 9/11.

As might have been expected, al-Qaeda has constantly bothered the Druze in Idlib, denouncing them as heretics and confiscating property from them. Several hundred are said to have been forcibly converted to Sunnism. A Tunisian al-Qaeda commander, Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Tunisi, tried to take a home from a Druze family. When the head of the family object, the thugs just shot him down. His brother grabbed a gun from one of the al-Qaeda pond scum and it went off, killing an al-Qaeda guy. Then al-Qaeda killed the other brother. Then reinforcements came and they rounded up the unarmed men of the village and executed them Nazi style.

The Support Front leadership investigated and decided that al-Tunisi had gone too far in killing his prisoners, but declined to punish anyone. They also fended off suggestions from Sunni authorities that the perpetrators be tried by a traditional Sunni court judge or qadi.

Between leftist Kurds and religious minorities, something like 40% of Syrians belong to groups that al-Qaeda would shoot down just as it did the Druze. Not to mention that it would happily shoot down the majority of Syrian Sunnis, who are secular-minded.

The story is that Free Men of Syria and other coalition partners intervened to try to patch up things with the remaining Druze. But it should be remembered that they gave the Druze into the hands of al-Qaeda in the first place and continue to be allied with al-Qaeda, which killed nearly 3000 innocent American civilians and continues to rack up the body count. They are sort of playing Mussolini to al-Zawahiri’s Hitler. Mussolini wasn’t as bad as Hitler, but that is hardly a character recommendation.

The Druze community outside Syria was badly split over the incident. Some Israeli Druze have been lobbying the Netanyahu government to bomb radicals in Syria to protect Druze villages there, especially in the Syrian south. (In fact, the only Israeli bombing in Syria has been directed not at al-Qaeda or ISIL but at Hizbullah, the enemy of the former two).

In Lebanon, Druze warlord Waleed Jumblatt wants to see the al-Assad family overthrown and was clearly afraid that the massacre would turn Syrian Druze against the rebel opposition.

Jumblatt’s father was assassinated in the 1970s, likely at the order of Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current dictator, Bashar.

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Related video:

AFP: “Syria, a paradise lost for the Golan’s Druze”