ARE CHRISTIANS NEXT ..... A JEWISH POPULATION OF 30,000 IN 1948 HAS DECLINED TO JUST THREE PEOPLE

First, they came for Syria’s Jews …

Questions and concerns about what may happen to the minority groups under a new regime 

 

By Lyn Julius

 

JNS

Dec 27, 2024 

 

 

Projecting his new image of moderation and respectability, al-Julani has jettisoned his nom de guerre and his Kalashnikov rifle, and donned a suit to receive visiting diplomats.

 

The burning of a Christmas tree by gunmen in the Syrian city of Hama is a sinister portent of what minorities might expect under the evolving situation in the country.

The dominant group in charge, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has sent out messages reassuring religious and ethnic groups that they will be protected. It blamed “foreign fighters” for the tree burning, but can HTS be trusted? Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has jettisoned his nom de guerre and his Kalashnikov rifle, preferring to be known by his real name of Ahmed al-Sharaa. Projecting his new image of moderation and respectability, he has donned a suit to receive visiting diplomats. The United States has recently scrapped a $10 million bounty on his head.

Is it being too hasty?  HTS is an Islamist group with roots in Al-Qaeda and has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States, United Kingdom, United Nations and European Union.

A BBC reporter asked al-Julani if Syria would become another Afghanistan for women, and he said there was no reason to ban women’s education. He did not specify if they would be segregated. When asked if he would ban alcohol, however, al-Julani hedged, saying it would not be up to him but to a committee of legal advisers. He was not asked about his jihadi past.

To understand what the future might lay in store for minorities, look no further than the treatment of Christians in Idlib province, which slipped into HTS’s control about 10 years ago. Properties were confiscated and religious rituals restricted, although there was more freedom in recent times, one Christian told the BBC.

The system has been plagued by corruption, nepotism and arbitrary rule and is policed by militias who are only answerable to themselves.

According to a report by the Atlantic Council published in 2016, the judicial system in Idlib “is akin to jungle law, in which the powerful use it to impose their rule on the others. The military factions use the judiciary to encroach on civilian affairs. Traditional Islamic concepts like sharia and ijtihad (freedom for judges to make new rulings not based on precedence) are exploited to eliminate armed groups’ enemies and reinforce the control of militants and their associates.”

Judgment in a case depends on whether you can influence the judge. “The law has turned into a weapon to settle scores, imposing the rule of military factions, and undermine civil institutions,” said the article. “The situation under Bashar al-Assad’s reign was not much better, the only difference is that extremist groups rely, at least theoretically, on Islam and sharia law to justify their arbitrary rule.”

So, what might happen to the minorities now? The Alawites, the ethnic group to which the Assad family belonged, are the most vulnerable to revenge attacks.

The Kurds are already in HTS’s sights, as their aspirations to self-determination are diametrically opposed to those of HTS’s Turkish patron.

Syria’s Christian community has dwindled from 11% to 2% of the population in the last 15 years. They could find themselves as subjugated dhimmis under sharia law.

Indeed, their fate could mirror that of the Jewish minority, whose tragic story has barely been told—until now.

A Jewish population of 30,000 in 1948 has declined to just three people. A new report by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries charts the extinction of this millennial-old Jewish community, which suffered decades of human-rights abuses, torture and dispossession. It puts a figure on their material losses at $10 billion in today’s prices. If taken together with the losses of Jews in nine other Arab countries, the total could run to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Not only have the Jews lost their property, they have lost their roots and their history. The region is the poorer for having lost its Jews.

The Jews’ plight might seem marginal in the bigger picture, given that 500,000 Syrians have died in the country’s brutal civil war. Now that Assad’s Syria has been revealed as a slaughterhouse, one could argue that minority rights are a luxury that only democracies can afford. But state abuse of its minorities did, and can still, degenerate into the abuse of everybody’s rights. The treatment of minorities is the litmus test of the health of a society.

It is too late to save the Jews, but the Christmas tree burning is a wake-up call. The global community must not just stand by: It should keep a close watch on the treatment of minorities, safeguard the Christians’ right to practice their religion and hold Syria’s new leaders to account for the slightest deviation.