Hypocrisy and double standards over the massacre of the Druze
Some people blamed Israel—the only country that went to their aid—for attacking Syria.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Jul 17, 2025
The hypocrisy, double standards and malevolence are off the scale.
Syrian government forces carried out a four-day massacre this week of the Druze minority in Suweida, a Druze town in southern Syria. An estimated 300 Druze were slaughtered in a series of barbaric atrocities perpetrated by troops loyal to the new Syrian president, Abu Mohammed al-Julani.
About 150,000 Druze live in northern Israel. These are loyal and brave Israeli citizens. Many have served in the Israel Defense Forces, and several have lost their lives in the service of the Jewish state. Druze communities also serve as a strategic buffer zone for Israel on the Golan Heights and in Syria.
As a result, Israel went into Syria to defend them. 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.
The attacks on the Druze were barbaric. There were reportedly beheadings and rapes; children were murdered in front of their parents.
The troops publicly humiliated their male victims by shaving off their beards, which are religiously significant to them, in a chilling echo of what the Nazis did to the Jews of Germany.
Yet 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. Faced with the evidence of a horrific attempt to exterminate the Druze, demonstrators who have been screaming about Israel’s “genocide” for the past 21 months were conspicuously absent from the streets and campuses.
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—and who wickedly ignore the fact that Hamas has turned them into terrorist hubs and thus made them into legitimate military targets—there was only silence.
Astoundingly, these people instead blamed Israel—the only country that went to the aid of the Druze—for attacking Syria. António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, posted on X that he condemned the killing of any civilians, omitted to place responsibility on al-Julani’s forces and instead blamed Israel for defending the Druze.
Israeli Air Force jets bombed the Syrian military headquarters in Damascus on Wednesday.
Various media outlets reported these atrocities as “tit for tat” skirmishes between the Druze and Bedouin tribes. Even the Trump administration bafflingly described what happened as a “misunderstanding” between Israel and Syria that had somehow gotten out of hand.
The perversity of all this reaction was hardly surprising. Much of it was wrapped up in a deep animus against Israel and the Jewish people, which is its own dark and terrifying story.
Something else, however, was at work here—and that was the rush that took place to embrace al-Julani, a former member of Al-Qaeda and ISIS who had been imprisoned by the Americans from 2006 to 2011, as a force for good.
Despite al-Julani’s blood-soaked jihadi past, world leaders queued up for a picture of them shaking his hand. U.S. President Donald Trump declared him a “handsome guy,” delisting his militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as a terrorist entity and lifting sanctions on it.
All the new president had needed to do was trim his beard, don sharply-cut Western clothes, replace his nom de guerre of al-Julani by Ahmad al-Sharaa and declare that he wanted to join the Abraham Accords—and he was miraculously transformed from a depraved fanatic into an invaluable regional player.
This required his new fans to believe that one day, al-Julani thought that he had a mission from God to slaughter infidels, but the next day, that belief had conveniently vanished. Much more likely was that he had expeditiously parked his Islamism, following the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya or mandated lying for Islam.
Western leaders don’t know about or understand such things because they choose to shut their minds completely to the realities of the Islamic world and the fanatical Islamist mindset. They view the world through a Western prism that depicts everyone from other cultures as being governed, as they themselves are, by reason and self-interest.
Secularists are unable to understand any religious mindset, which seems to them too ridiculous to take seriously. They believe accordingly that Islamists are driven to commit their terrible atrocities from oppression, dire poverty or despair. They can’t grasp that, on the contrary, the jihadi ecstatically believes himself to be fulfilling a sacred duty in murdering unbelievers because this is the work of God.
Such Westerners accordingly seize upon any apparent confirmation that religious fanatics are deep down just like themselves. That’s why they all swooned over al-Julani.
A reformed jihadist confirms their belief that Islamist mass murderers are, in fact, charming and delightful individuals who are simply thrilled to give up the beheading and raping and burning alive in order to hobnob with world leaders, swan around in official cars and leave all their youthful excesses behind.
So, goes this thinking, there’s no need to be frightened by people like that at all. They’re basically fine. All they need is to be given a chance.
This same fantasy generated the disastrous Western attitude towards the Arab war of extermination against the Jewish homeland in Israel. The West’s insistence on dividing the land in a “two-state solution” derives from its fixed belief that the conflict is over the division of the land.
It refuses to believe that this is a war of extermination because that seems so utterly pointless; it makes no sense to the Western mind that can only think in terms of cause and effect.
That’s also one reason why the West finds it so difficult to understand antisemitism. Such persistent hatred of the Jews, goes this thinking, can only mean that they have done something really terrible to deserve it.
The idea that people want to wipe out the Jews simply because such antisemites subscribe to a deranged belief that the Jews shouldn’t exist at all runs smack up against the West’s deficient grasp of human nature. Which means it doesn’t understand antisemitism at all.
This failure in understanding led to the catastrophe of the Oslo Accords, the shattering impact of which has come into the sharpest possible relief as a result of the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war that has followed.
This is because, under the thinking behind Oslo, the West told itself that first the Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and then his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, were no longer terrorists but had become statesmen.
Accordingly, the Oslo Accords gave the Palestinian Arabs the infrastructure of autonomous self-government. The result has been three decades of a Palestinian Authority that became a global engine for the destruction of Israel and incitement against Jews.
In a fascinating podcast interview with Dan Senor, Israel’s minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, who has been at the forefront of Israel’s engagement with the United States during the current war and who was involved in trying to resolve the Middle East conflict for decades before, noted that since Oslo, the P.A. has systematically poisoned a generation of Palestinian Arabs against Israel.
A few days after Oct. 7, Dermer was sent a shocking video in which young Palestinian Arab children were talking about wanting to kill the Jews. The point was that these weren’t children from Hamas-run Gaza but from the Palestinian area of Jerusalem.
“People don’t want to believe it,” said Dermer, “because they don’t want to stare this evil in the face and say it has to be dealt with.”
Dermer remains remarkably optimistic that the current war, which he says Israel will win, will offer, once it ends, a chance to “reset Oslo” by linking the reconstruction of Gaza with deradicalization so that Palestinian Arabs no longer want to murder Jews.
Whether or not his optimism about this is well-founded, teaching the blinkered West to stare evil in the face is scarcely less of an urgent challenge.
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