ISIS and other religious extremist sects around the world fill us with a sense of intellectual superiority – a feeling of being fortunate that we aren’t so backward as to be ones to entertain dogma with any seriousness, let alone base any serious decisions upon it. “We might say we believe in God, but we don’t take that too literally. We’re more advanced than to allow ourselves to let doctrine compel us into any kind of meaningful action”.

Or so we tell ourselves.

But no matter what we tell ourselves, the world around us knows better, especially in the Middle East. Case in point: Israel, the country we helped found, supported vehemently, continue to forgive every time it crosses moral lines, and turn a blind eye to its constant atrocities. An officially apartheid state which was founded using terrorism and genocide, which subjugates an entire population according to ethnic/religious distinctions, and which is drifting more toward extreme forms of racism and bigotry in its public opinion polls.

Moreover, supporting Israel has not come cheap one bit. We spend billions of dollars every year to keep Israel viable. To help stabilize Israel, we had to cut up the neighboring Arab area into bogus “countries” and install a bunch of dictators over them and support them as their despotic regimes fostered despair and extremism. We had to help squelch the Arab spring that attempted to overthrow these rulers because, among other reasons, overthrowing them scared Israel. The death toll from all this maelstrom that we helped create is in the millions of Muslim civilians in the Middle East since 1948. That, having to live in constant fear of terrorism, and the perpetual strain on our collective Western economies because of the war on terror can all be tied to the cingular act of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

So why, you may ask, do we put ourselves through all of this for Israel? The most confessed answer that we don’t spend much time even trying to deny is that we simply believe that God gave the land of Palestine to Jews 3000 years ago. That’s why. That’s why we helped Zionists from Europe exterminate an entire population and confiscate their homes and lands, why we continue to place the security of the entire world in peril, and why we are content watching millions of civilians die and millions of others live under oppression: because we believe God gave that land to the Jews.

Who then, pray tell, is the real religious zealot in this picture?

The real reason why we ought to help Syrian refugees, whether by welcoming them here in the West (especially in the US) or by pressuring Arab Gulf countries to accept them, is that we are responsible for most of their sorrow. The Syrian crisis is mainly a story of our own refusal to allow a Third World country (especially a Muslim-majority country) to be truly free.

We (American policy makers and the Obama Administration) saw how the Syrian revolution started. We knew it began peacefully. We knew it was about freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Yet, as we always do, we panicked. We panicked at the prospect of an independent government in the Third World that might adopt a system that may not be perfectly in line with our interests. In case you don’t know, maintaining dictatorships in Third World countries has been prototypical US foreign policy for almost a century. And the thought of a potentially Islamically-inclined government in Syria bordering Israel was just too risky for us, even if that’s what the Syrian people wanted.

Here’s our thought process in a nutshell when it comes to dealing with people in the Middle East: “We give these people democracy and they will vote for Islamists. We can’t have that”. This “can’t have that” mentality will prove to be the deadliest mindbug in human history. We are willing to go to amazing lengths of war, tragedy, creating enemies, and perpetual destruction just because we will not entertain the thought of having mature, diplomatic relations with people of different philisophies.

Subsequently, we consciously and calculatedly chose to stand back and watch as Assad butchered his people mercilessly. We knew all about his henchmen’s massacres, about the barrel bombs and the chemical weapons. We knew about the systematic rape and the mass kidnappings. We knew about the children chopped with machetes and the prisoners starved to death. We knew about the thousands of deaths. But to us, risking a new Syrian government that is truly independent and chosen by its people was not worth ending the carnage. We are hopelessly unable to learn from our foreign policy mistakes.

Then we watched as the rebels became more and more radicalized and we made that into a reverse-style excuse for not helping the revolution, even though this radicalization could have been thwarted had we supported the revolt earlier. When we finally decided to offer some help after realizing the mess we helped create, we repeatedly tried to coerce the rebels into working strictly on our agenda, pitting the rebel factions against one another in the process and weakening the revolution, thereby extending the carnage and prolonging the conflict.

Then we watched as ISIS took over many areas in Syria and declared itself the enemy of all other rebel factions. We let that happen. We stood back and allowed ISIS to weaken the revolution and enhance Assad’s stance and we were perfectly content watching the continuing onslaught so long as there was no decisive end to the war and all parties remained in a stalemate.

We also watched as Iran and Hizbollah aided Assad’s forces and infiltrated Syria. We even forged a treaty with Iran to help ease sanctions instead of focusing on stopping Iran’s support for Assad. Our drones targeted everyone except Assad’s strongholds.

Then we let Russia blatantly send troops and jet fighters to bomb all rebel-controlled civilian areas, whether under ISIS or other factions, essentially and intentionally bolstering Assad in the process. 

We’re good with all of that. In fact, we’d rather watch the world burn many times over than allow a Third World country be free and act according to its own interests. Similarly, we were perfectly fine watching Egypt’s coup leader Sisi kill thousands of democracy-demanding protesters in cold blood in the wake of his coup against democratically elected Morsi.

We acted according to our interests because we can do so, albeit in a very shortsighted manner. But for the mayhem that we continue to let happen in Syria, the least we can do is help Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom are not fleeing the brutality of rebel factions, but that of Assad-Iran-Russia – the brutality we evidently approve through our inaction.

In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks a few nights ago, we heard talking heads discuss who did it, why they did it, what to do about it, what not to do, how this is an “act of war”, that this signals a “clash of civilizations”, why we need to stop the Syrian refugee influx, how our foreign policies have lead to this, that we failed to take ISIS seriously, that we should not have invaded Iraq, that Muslims are cheering the attacks, that Muslims are not cheering, who masterminded the attacks, who may have helped the mastermind, whose passport was found on scene, what ISIS is trying to accomplish, what Anonymous has said to ISIS, what ISIS said back, how we should protect ourselves, that we should be vigilant, that we should perhaps own more guns, that we shouldn’t, that we should respond with utter ruthlessness..

.. and a heapload of more self centered arrogance: It’s all about us. We’re the only people on this planet.

No one will say this next paragraph, so I will say it and pretend I’m hearing it from someone else, just for comfort:

“People where ISIS comes from have been experiencing this death and destruction, mostly due to our own foreign policy decisions, almost daily for over a decade. Now I understand how it truly sucks to go through what they’ve been going through. Now I see their suffering better than ever before. Now I can begin to take their lives more seriously because I realize that I can die from a bullet just like they can – that we share the same biology and belong to the same species, that they have emotions and experience loss just as much as I do. Now I get how serious it is to wage war. Now I can think many times before agreeing to have my tax money go to killing people far away.”

Yes, there is deep irony here. For someone who lived under dictatorships, wiretapping, home bugging, and internet tracking came as a given. Walls had ears, cars had GPS trackers (and ears), and every other person could be a government snoop, including your own brother.

So when that person comes to the US and starts to hear about government surveillance, they’re not surprised one bit. Moreover, they expect that the NSA has been recording all communications in full for a long time and that it probably will continue to do so, with or without corrective measures from Congress, namely the USA Freedom Act.

The irony for us here is this: we’ve been supporting dictatorships that have invaded their peoples’ privacies for decades, and now we’re having our privacies invaded by our own government. Let’s just hope that other aspects of dictatorship rule don’t come around to us like surveillance did.

The USA Freedom Act can only do so much. The internal intelligence apparatus has grown to become a monster beyond control. It employs thousands of Americans and now has its own agendas, interests, and lobbies. It has vast buildings filled with advanced technology and it’s not going away any time soon. What will likely happen is an outward “restructuring” of activities, while inward operations will stay largely the same, monitoring and recording all communications of all kinds, but finding clever ways of keeping itself secret.

Meanwhile, we will keep supporting foreign dictatorships whose job is to keep their peoples under a watch to protect us from them, and think that the universal law of “what goes around comes around” does not apply to us.