As the world media continued to put Israel under a microscope, drawing attention to every incident of violence in Gaza and usually buying the Hamas spin, a massacre was happening not far away in Syria.
“Eyewitnesses and monitoring groups accuse the Syrian Transitional Security Forces of executing Druze civilians in cold blood,” Rizik Alabi reported on July 16 in The Media Line. “One of the most harrowing video clips shared online showed ten Druze men drenched in blood inside the Al-Radwan madaafa, some lying motionless on the floor, others slumped on sofas. Torn photos of Druze clerics and smashed furniture lay scattered across the room, a chilling scene interpreted by many as a retaliatory message.”
If you don’t recall any worldwide condemnations of this murderous rampage, it’s because there wasn’t any.
As Melanie Phillips wrote in JNS, “this slaughter elicited no condemnation from those who, day in and day out, signal their own supposed virtue by falsely accusing Israel of war crimes…The likes of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch were silent. Al-Julani’s troops reportedly slaughtered the entire staff at Suweida’s hospital along with their patients. Yet from those who falsely accuse Israel of targeting hospitals in Gaza in order to kill patients and staff…there was only silence.”
Why was there only silence?
The answer is as obvious as it is shameful: No Jews were involved.
Indeed the only time the world seemed to wake up is when Israel came to the rescue of the Druze.
“Israel went into Syria to defend them,” Phillips writes. “The IDF conducted dozens of airstrikes targeting Syrian government troop convoys, and also struck the Syrian defense ministry headquarters in Damascus and sites near the presidential palace. Under this pressure, a ceasefire was agreed, and Syrian forces withdrew from Suweida.”
As Brooke Goldstein of The Lawfare Project posted on X, “The only country that didn’t stay silent was Israel. Home to a large Druze population, Israel acted immediately after these horrific videos surfaced.”
But because we’re talking about Israel, that’s not the way the mainstream media portrayed it. The L.A. Times, for example, offered this anodyne headline: “Israel Bombs Damascus Military HQ as sectarian strife rages in Syria.”
Why would the Times erase the slaughter of Druze from its headline? Maybe because it didn’t fit their preferred “big bad Israel” narrative.
Ignoring massacres to focus on the Jews and Israel is nothing new. As Dumisani Washington posted on X after the Druze massacre, “It’s not just Syria. Islamic-led slavery and/or genocides are happening in Nigeria, Sudan, Mauritania, Libya, Algeria, the entire Western region of Africa, and more.”
But because Jews and Israel have had nothing to do with these genocidal war crimes, the world media has remained eerily silent.
Evidently, when Muslims or other non-Jews do the killing, it doesn’t hold the same drama as when Jews are involved. Jews, after all, are the cool people who run Hollywood, and Israel is the Start-Up Nation that is the envy of the region. It’s a much sexier story when they do the killing.
The converse, of course, is also true—it’s a much less interesting story when the Jews are the ones being killed.
Call it antisemitism, call it anti-Zionism, call it whatever you like. You can even call it cynical. I call it factual.
For the Druze being slaughtered in Syria, or the millions of war crime victims around the world who get no attention because Jews are not involved, do they really care who’s doing the killing?
