Rag-tag leftists are silent about attacks on Syrians

The tragedy of the Syrian civil war has reached new levels of barbarism over the last week as Bashar-al-Assad’s Russian ally launched air strikes against the civilian population in the rebel-held north of this devastated country.

These attacks included the deliberate targeting of hospitals which, under international law, is, without equivocation, a war crime.

Hundreds of innocent civilians are being killed or maimed, yet this appalling slaughter has been met with a deafening silence by Ireland’s rag-tag leftists and pseudo-socialists.

This is reinforced when their inaction is contrasted with the national campaigns of protest by organisations like Amnesty International (AI) and the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) to Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge despite the fact that the Israeli Defence Forces went to extraordinary lengths (including putting its own soldiers at risk) to avoid harming the Palestinian civilian population.

Is a Syrian hospital of less value than one in Gaza? Is a Syrian civilian death not worthy of outrage, or is protest by AI and the IPSC confined to targeting Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy as it defends itself from the sustained attacks of Islamic fundamentalism?

Dr Kevin McCarthy

Kinsale

Co Cork