First, a note to everyone who has been kind enough to sign up to get notifications from this site.
This is an issue that comes up a lot, but I don’t often remember it because I don’t check the emails as I know what post I just made. But many people do not visit the site and just read the emails. The problem there is the emails will show you the text, and maybe an image. But the embedded videos do NOT show up in the site emails. This means that a lot of people cannot make heads or tails of the posts since they are often, perhaps even usually about a video, or an event shown in a video embedded in the post.
Also the numbers of people who visit this site has been sinking hard. I think this is because people who like to read it, do so by just reading the emails the site sends out. To repeat, you are not getting the post if you don’t click through to the site and see what the post is talking about. And this one will be the same. A few words about an event, and the event can only be seen here on the site, or at RAIR, by looking at the video.
The event was maybe 150 people if I am being generous, marching up Elgin St. on Saturday, March 15th 2025 protesting the actual genocide of religious minorities in Syria.
There are a lot of angles I could take on this issue. And I am hoping that readers to this site will add their own observations about the attitudes of some of these groups towards other religious minorities in the region. Even ones that don’t exist within Syria.
But the three ways this post will deal with it for the moment are:
A: An actual genocide gets practically no response from most people, and a tiny one from those affected. like Christians and Alawite Muslims.
B: The left, which has been occupying campuses and other locations for years now, creating chaos and violence and destruction everywhere and attacking Jewish targets claiming to oppose a non-existent genocide of the ‘Palestinians’, are no where even near this protest.
This must not be looked at as hypocrisy, but as a very conscious preconceived strategy to achieve a very specific outcome by the use of selective magnification and minification/diminution to replace reality with state narratives, and enforce those narratives.
C: When the Arab Spring happened, (an Obama euphemism for the reestablishment of an Islamic Caliphate starting from Tunisia and ending in Syria), the plan was to start a major war with all non-Islamic powers as Sunnis see it, in order to bring on the end of the world in a Syrian city called, Dabiq. Those same jihadis, I don’t even mean in terms of the ideology, but some of the same individuals from the Islamic State/Al-Qaeda/Al Nusra front/Muslim Brotherhood are now in control of Syria and consequently Dabiq.
So we must do what none of the media is doing. Pay close attention to events there, as they will, not may, but will, attempt events that will bring on the end of the world. It is their eschatology and greatest ambition. And Islam, exactly unlike Christianity, believes that the end of the world must be brought on by human, and not divine action. That Muslims are the agents of “Allah”. While Christians believe that the world will end and Jesus will return. but while there are nebulous signs which more or less are always happening, there is no way to know, or more importantly, to cause them to happen.
I don’t know if Judaism even has an eschatology.
The protest seems to have had at the head of it, an Eastern or Syrian orthodox priest, going by the vestments.
This is how many people turn out when they are not being compensated with $, attention, or time off from work.
Judaism has an idea that the Messiah will come sometime before the solar correction factor to its lunar calendar gets too out of sync for Passover to be in the Spring. Of course, there are other opinions: the most telling one is that if someone tells a farmer that the Messiah has arrived, he should finosh olowing his field before going out to greet him.
One should not lose sleep over things that one has no control over, especially when there are so many opportunities to connect to God and to each other in this world, as opposed to the next world.
Some of the Christian sects in this region have been foes every bit as virulent as tardish Sunni and Shia. And for a longer time. Greek Orthodox wouldn’t come out for Maronites in Lebanon. They’d sooner support “moderate” tards.
The Crimean War kicked off with a dispute over the holy places in the declining Ottoman Empire. Who would get the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem? The conflict was framed as who could best protect Christians: Orthodox Christians or the Catholics of Napoleon III (subsequently aligned with Protestant Great Britain).
It was a clash of empires, trade routes and resources that was sold as a clash of civilizations. Religious identity serving as a proxy for culture in the most intimate of allegiances. Us and Them in terms that mattered.
The propaganda, at least what I’ve seen in English-language newspapers, looks identical to today’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. Demon-Bear looked like a pre-PC Mongol savage pushing to enslave civilized Europeans; now it’s Demon-Communist Bear seeking to roll over Western democracies.
Facts don’t matter. Propaganda, the narrative, does. The populations fought and died over advertising gimmicks they had internalized as faith-based. I cite the Crimean War because it’s the first such clash for which contemporary evidence is abundant. Sectarian enmity – or at least mutual indifference – is nothing new amongst Christians in the Middle East.
(That’s why I take Red Scare-mongers with a grain of salt. No matter how meticulous and sincere they are, former Sovietologists-turned-Kremlinologists are as afflicted with tunnel-vision as theologians in prior centuries.)