The metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wing on one side of the world setting off a chain reaction that ends in a storm on the other side of the planet is most apt here. The butterfly, in this instance, is a tiny Druze community in a forgotten corner of vast, war-torn Syria. Its wing is its simple wish for survival, and its flap is asking Israel to annex them. The chain of events that this promises to set in train is no less profound than the flap of a lonely 19th-century butterfly wing that eventually ended in the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, for it portends the demise of the forces that sought to strangle her at birth, and the dawning of a Golden Age of Israel.
After well over a century of global orchestration, hatred for the Jewish people culminated in high morality that now equates to wishing for the destruction of Israel and indifference to the genocide of the Jews. At the vanguard of that orchestration has been jihad. So timid, treasonous and delusional has been the response to jihad that the Shi’a jihad has come within reach of the means to carry out that genocide, a nuclear bomb, while the Sunni jihad seized Damascus, legitimising itself as a state and now able to rely on the world acquiescing in whatever actions it chooses to take against Israel, and since the Jewish state “occupies” Syria, the Syrian regime is automatically part of “the resistance”, a certificate of immunity from international censure.
Against this apocalyptic backdrop, a tiny, humble nation clinging on at the fringes of civilisation issued a desperate cry for help. The timing, the nation and the one to whom they appealed make this not just any cry for help, but civilisation’s cry for help. It has become somewhat of a cliché: “clash of civilisations”; “civilisation and Islam are two different things”; “Israel fighting to defend civilisation”, “the frontline in the battle for civilisation”, etc., and the gravitas of the warning is diluted to the banal for lack of any concrete expression. What would Israel rescuing civilisation actually look like? Well, one thing it looks like is imperilled nations around Israel finding refuge under the barrels of her guns.
For fourteen hundred years the great nations of the Middle East have been subsumed into the barbarian horde, reduced to scattered, quivering shadows, or exterminated altogether, a process that continues to this day, as it necessarily must, for Islam is not Islam unless its adherents “kill those who believe not in Allah… …until all worship is for Allah.”
It came close, very, very close. In Hader, a village in the Syrian Golan, the Druze made their plea for Israeli annexation. 50Km away, in Damascus, an Islamic terrorist who goes by the nom de guerre “One from the Golan” (Al-Jolani) had just taken the seat of power. The Druze know very well what this means, and are not about to be impressed by designer beards, Armani suits or promises of peace. “That evil might take our women, might take our daughters. They might take our homes.” The Druze had a tragic foretaste of this: “Notable incidents include the 2015 massacre in Qalb Loze, where 20-24 Druze were killed, and the 2018 ISIS attack on Suwayda, which claimed at least 258 lives.”
The timing of the plea, was no less close. Already from some of whom one should expect better, the most they can manage is: “we don’t believe it”; “we don’t trust him”; “wait and see”; “one wrong move”, and the like. All they are saying is give peace yet another chance, because they “don’t believe in war,” even if it is barrelling directly towards them. These are the sharp ones. More representative was The Jewish Chronicle that pre-emptively capitulated on Israel’s behalf with the headline: “New Syrian leader not on the warpath against Israel.” No one screams: WAR IS DECEIT! No word of Taqiyya, or anything like that. It is a basic Islamic stuff. You don’t set up your own rival ISIS and your own rival Al-Qaeda, unless you are in the same line of business as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and believe you can outdo them! We know what they are, just as we knew what Hamas was. We know why they exist, just as we knew why Hamas existed. Destroy them while the cost is low!
Thankfully, the Druze appeal for annexation came as such a surprise that it cut right across Al-Jolani’s headlights transfixing the rabbits in the middle of the road. The appeal deflected the Israeli public discourse from a dangerous resurrection of the peace impulse. There was unreserved praise for the Israeli Druze and hopes that the Jewish state would annex the Syrian Druze villages, some Israelis even going so far as to suggest that their country had a moral obligation to do so.
EU Today contends that, “Israel lacks a formal mechanism for annexing foreign territories and their populations”. Syria is at war. The country is lawless. Its next government will be one of barbaric mass murderers. There are no formal mechanisms for anything. Israel has to do what is best for Israel before circumstances force her to settle for the best that she can get.
I conjecture that the Druze would not have taken the risk of exposing their wish so publicly without prior agreement from Israel to annex their land, if not immediately, then with transitional military protection. To reduce the diplomatic fallout for Israel—somehow, the Israeli government still thinks this matters—the Druze had to make the first public move. They could have had their conference in secret, but instead they broadcast it.
So intimidated is Al-Jolani’s gang by the IDF, or so firmly did Turkey make its position clear, that instead of immediately descending upon the Druze elsewhere in Syria and punishing them for their treachery, as would be their wont, they tried their charm offensive by meeting the Druze to reassure them, complete with wall-to-wall scowls and firmly-folded arms. Why are they deigning to talk to people they would sooner crucify in the city square? Because at this point, they still fear Israel’s proven military might. The humiliation of Hezbollah is still firmly on everyone’s mind. Besides, they do not want to provide Israel with an excuse to seize more Syrian territory when they are in no position to defend it. One of the few exemptions from the obligation on Muslims to wage war on non-Muslims is certainty of losing.
The significance of this tiny community’s please for help points towards a far greater reality: for the first time in fourteen hundred years, there is a real chance of survival for the non-Muslim peoples of the Middle East. The Israel Defense Forces, whether they want to or not, are becoming the de facto armed forces of all the region’s peoples long suffering Muslim oppression. One of the great humiliations of the Ottoman Caliphate was the 19th-century Western powers forcing the caliph to abolish dhimmitude, to howls of indignation from Muslims across the caliphate.
Some commentators in Israel see further, and are talking of the significance of taking territory from Muslims, which is the direction in which the discussions and analyses have to go, if they are to avoid getting bogged down in sentimentality. The context is war and a looming genocide. The echo of just such a moment in the recent history of the Jews could not be clearer. The Druze man making the “What is to be our fate?” speech to his people at this twelfth hour before their possible extermination, elicited a unanimous, unequivocal response, loud and clear: Israel! Israel! The setting is different, but the issue is identical: Ze’ev Jabotinsky in Warsaw on Tisha B’Av in 1937, except that the assembled voices then did not rise in unison, Palestine! Palestine! Instead, they attacked Jabotinsky from all directions. My dear Jews, there is a lesson in this. Be humble enough to learn it. The Druze are offering you a chance to make good that infamous moment.
“The problem is occupation. The problem is apartheid. The way out of this is only by accepting us Palestinians as equal human beings” – three lies that Dr Mustafa Barghouti bleats on an endless loop. There is just a slight credibility problem here, and that is Dr Barghouti’s “way out of this” non-existent problem. Unquestionably, Palestinians are human beings; but equal human beings? That is quite a status to claim when no other human beings depend for their affirmation as a people, on their physical extermination of another people; and two, no other human beings consciously and deliberately procreate to give death to their own offspring and as nothing less than living instruments of murder.
So, sorry Dr Barghouti, your Palestinians are most definitely not equal human beings. They are monsters. It is a curious assertion anyway, given that, as Muslims, you claim to be superior to all other human beings. If that is “the only way out,” then you are asking us to be party to a lie – that the Palestinians are equal human beings – a lie with which you cover two other lies – that Israel is “occupying” – er, Palestine? – and that Israel is an “apartheid state”. You see, Dr Barghouti, another Arab people, the Druze, who really are equal human beings (and are also coherent), just blew your whole Palestinian scam right out of the water.
The simple plea from the Druze, a small Arab people, to be annexed by Israel is the propaganda equivalent of a nuclear bomb that is about to vaporise the step-by-step build-up over more than a century of a global effort to wipe out the Jewish people, and over the last almost eighty years to destroy their state. An Arab people of their own free will crying, “Israel, annex us,” is a profound negation of the notion of Israel as a genocidal, apartheid state that is “occupying” anyone. Yet it is also a culmination, a wider Arab embrace of Israel following the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “Am Yisrael Chai!” “Bibi is the King of the Middle East!” and “Abu Yair!” were heard on Syrian streets.
There will be sound and fury from the usual suspects, but the Israel of today is not the Israel of a year ago. That simple Druze plea completely wipes away every single claim, assertion, statistic and resolution ever advanced by every anti-Semite, Jew-hater and anti-Zionist in their evil cause, because the “oppressed” are begging the “oppressor” to save them from the “oppressed.” Prepare for the meltdowns and exploding heads. And all at this twelfth hour, as Iran comes within reach of a nuclear bomb, as a major jihad army settles in just up the road from Jerusalem, and as the organised traitors within Israel close in on their wartime Prime Minister, daggers drawn, trapped on stage in their own theatre of the absurd.
The Druze number roughly a million, half of whom live in Syria and a third in Lebanon. The tiny minority of Druze citizens of Israel are sufficient for their co-religionists elsewhere to know exactly what it is like to live under Jewish rule. Certainly, the Syrian Druze speak only for themselves when they seek to come under the Jewish state. But theirs is the fate of all non-Muslims in the Middle East, their states and armies long since destroyed, their spirits long ago shattered. Where they still survive, assaults on them have been relentless. Jihad’s first order of business right after conquering a place is to impose the terms of dhimmitude on the Christians (and the Jews), exactly as is now happening in Syria, while “experts” opine on potential international relations with, and Western diplomats beat a path to, the new murderers in Damascus.
An indication of just how far we are from getting to grips with jihad in Syria may be gleaned from some of the perspectives of many Western think tank spokespersons. For example, Nina Shea, Director of Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, told CBN News what Shari’a means for Syrian Christians, without the foggiest idea of what Shari’a is, or, for that matter, what jihad or Islam are, let alone recognise that the Christians are being reduced to dhimmis. Ask them what a dhimmi is, and they answer with complete confidence, “a second-class citizen” betraying the limits of the only paradigm they know.
There are no citizens in Islam, only servants. There are no rights in Islam, for anyone, only dispensations. Everyone in Islam is oppressed, except for the one at the top of the social hierarchy. Where you stand in the Islamic social hierarchy is a matter of how many people have dispensation to kill you. The dhimmi is second from the bottom of that hierarchy, just above the apostate, that even the dhimmi has dispensation to kill. The dhimmi’s life is already forfeit. The lauded “protection” of the dhimmi that Muslims are so keen to assure us about is protection from being killed on the spot for refusing to accept Islam, provided, of course, the dhimmi never once breaks any of the impossible restrictions piled onto his life, and never shows the slightest resistance to the grossest abuse and humiliation from every Muslim he encounters, down to the lowest peasant.
The two excerpts below are parts of the same interview from which the material between them was redacted in the source. She might have said something that contradicts the analysis offered here. Her words must be read in light of the preceding paragraph:
They will have to conform with Muslim laws, Islamic law, and that means that they will be restricted in what they can say, how they can pray, where they can pray. They will be restricted and women will be very restricted, in their dress, in particular—[redacted in original]—They should stand up for these Christians. They should be a voice for them. They should, and particularly, bring pressure against Turkey, who is our NATO ally and who has supported HTS and is considered by the Christians leaders that I’ve talked to there, as a manager and an influencer of the this rebellion that has taken place.
Isolated voices in the West acknowledge the genocide of Christians at the hands on Muslims, especially in Africa and Asia, but these are generally dissociated from the slow ethnic cleansing of Christinas from areas under Palestinian control. In a 22 December report, the JCFA revealed:
In Bethlehem, Christians frequently face violence and intimidation, and are left defenceless. A member of the Protestant clergy explained: “Christians feel unprotected due to the failure of the PA police to intervene on their behalf in confrontations with Muslims.”
In 1950, Bethlehem and the surrounding villages were 86% Christian. By 2017, Bethlehem’s Christian population had dwindled to 10%. The mass exodus of the Christians risks undermining the survival of Christianity in its birthplace.
Palestinian Christians report systematic employment discrimination, forcing many to leave their communities to seek opportunities elsewhere.In 1967, Christians in Judea and Samaria were 6% of the population. In 1997 they constituted 1.5% of the total Palestinian population, in 2007 – 1.2%, and in 2017 – 1%.
A 2022 study indicated a strong desire among Gaza’s Christian population to emigrate, twice as strong as that of Muslims. This explains how the Christian population of Gaza dwindled from 5,000 people before Hamas took control to just 1,000 in October 2023. (Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, Tirza Shorr, “Demographics Don’t Lie: The Decline of the Christian Population in PA- and Hamas-Controlled Areas”, JCFA, Vol. 24, No. 25, 22 December 2024)
But there is more to the PA’s jihad against Jews and Christians. In 1995, the Oslo Accords handed the holy Jewish city of Shechem over to the Palestinian Authority that immediately transformed it into a den of jihad terrorism. The Palestinians wasted no time in attempting to demolish the sacred site of Joseph’s Tomb, visited by religious Jews. The PA misses no opportunity, no matter how petty, to persecute Christians. Last year, 2023, the PA banned Christmas out of respect for the suffering of the Gazans. Curiously, no Muslim holidays were banned. This year, according to The Philo Project, Christian Arabs under PA rule are petitioning the Israeli government to allow them to celebrate Christmas in Jerusalem.
Only the Jews, who have a state and an army, have been able to prevent the Muslim reimposition of dhimmitude onto them, although, since the manufacture of the “Palestinians”, the effectiveness of the Jewish state in doing so has been significantly eroded. In the eyes of Muslims, the Jews have committed the ultimate crime: they established a state… on Muslim land… in which they rule over Muslims. There is only one possible answer to this: exterminate the Jews. In this, the Palestinians are uniquely placed, and have never missed an opportunity.
Muslim seething over the Jews’ violation of their Dhimma, “contract” of dhimmitude, goes right back to Western colonial “interference” forcing the Ottoman Caliphate to abolish dhimmitude in the 19th century. If you think like a Muslim, especially a learned one, you would say that the Jews had it coming. The Druze living within the borders of Israel saved themselves from jihad by making a deal with the Jewish state. The Christians chose the path of capitulation, the end result of which is all too evident today.
There have been calls for an independent Druze state before. Readers of Murtadd to Human might recall our recent suggestion of an independent Druze Protectorate. The Druze themselves, we understand, do not want an independent state. Annexation into Israeli sovereignty in exchange for full commitment to the Jewish state, is what they know from experience will save them from the pending imposition of Shari’a upon them, before which many influential Christians are already capitulating.
Part 2/…
Picture credits:
https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1867191424862818424/photo/1
https://i0.wp.com/jcpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/jerusalem-shragai-hebrewbook-2015_img_36.jpg?
OpenStreetMap
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1867356467533389973
The war of the West against the Jews goes unabated.