Soap Box

If you consider the proximity the borough of Brooklyn to the borough of Manhattan, you will get an idea of Syria's proximity to the Golan Heights of Israel and begin to realize that any hostility happening there becomes a clear and present danger to the state of Israel.

As with almost everything else concerning the Middle East, there are old vendettas and scores to settle involved in the bloody civil war going on there now. Americans and other people raised in Western cultures have little or no access to the ancient Rosetta Stone required to untangle the twists, turns and tribal loyalties that come in to play here.

The conflict in Syria goes much deeper than a dictator giving up power. It involves old injustices and the lives of millions of people.

Although it goes much farther back let's just start here.

The French controlled post-war Syria up until 1946 when they turned the country over to the people, which was made up of several ethnic groups.

Roughly one million Druze
Twenty percent Kurds
Twenty percent Alawites (a sect of Shia Islam)
And the rest were Sunni Muslims, which make up the vast majority still today.

The French - for some reason known only to them - turned the military over to the Alawites and they have been in power ever since.

Hafez al-Assad who ruled Syria from 1971 to 2000 was an Alawite, an ironfisted tyrant who, in 1982, slaughtered 25,000 of the Muslim Brotherhood which incensed the Syrian Sunnis, and that desire for revenge plays a large part in the politics of Syria's civil war.

Hafez's al-Assad's son, Bashar al-Assad, took over the reins of power when his father died in 2000 and as we know is fighting for his regime and his life. In reality, he is fighting for the lives of a couple of million Alawites because it is all but a forgone conclusion that should Assad's military be defeated, the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni Majority would repay the Assad regime for the 1982 murder of 25,000 Sunnis and basically execute genocide on the Alawite population of Syria.

So Assad's simple falling from power would not necessarily end the civil war in Syria, but could well incite an even bloodier one between the Alawites and Sunnis with the Druze and Kurds caught in the middle and possibly an even more volatile situation on Israel's northern border.

Things are rarely what they seem in the Middle East. You can't understand the branches on the trees without looking deep into the root system, and the politicians in America and the West barely skim the surface and try to plaster over millenniums-old tribal hostilities that they can't even begin to understand, and then draw up some half-baked peace plan that means nothing to anybody except the politicians who get their picture in the papers.

There is a saying in the Middle East, "Me and my cousins against the world, me and my brothers against my cousins."

My friends, that one sentence sheds more light on the subject than all the think tank theses and academic theologies combined.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels