Bill Carmichael: Silence of the hypocrites as Syria suffers

No, neither did I. Because it simply never happened.

We are witnessing unimaginable horrors unfold in Syria – hospitals and maternity clinics repeatedly and deliberately bombed, thousands of civilians murdered, bloodied toddlers dragged from the wreckage of their homes and aid convoys taking food to starving people attacked from the skies.

But there has been hardly a peep from normally vocal far left groups such as the Stop the War Coalition.

So noticeable and uncharacteristic has been their silence that it even prompted the new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, in a speech to the House of Commons, to ponder why there had been no protests outside the Russian Embassy.

Answer came there none. It is not as though left-wing activists are reluctant to organise a march at the drop of a megaphone. In fact, so-called anti-war groups have taken to the streets of the UK and other Western countries so regularly over recent years that we have become familiar with the cast of characters.

There are the people dressed as giant puppets depicting George W Bush and Tony Blair dancing to the incessant drumming; there are the ex-public schoolboys – for some reason usually called Tristram or Torquil – shaking their waist-length dreadlocks; and there’s the retired civil servant couple from Cheam who cover themselves in fake blood and scream about ‘Western imperialism’.

Seemingly endless thousands have marched through our cities, demonstrating their independent thinking and individuality by carrying identical placards provided by the Socialist Workers’ Party.

This is all fine – one of the key things that distinguishes Western democracies from authoritarian regimes is that people are welcome to protest on the streets and we should be proud of that fact. If you tried marching against the government in North Korea or Saudi Arabia, it would be a different story.

But I have just one question – where are they now?

Imagine for a moment that the bloodied little Syrian boy sitting in the back of an ambulance after being dragged from the wreckage of his home, whose heartbreaking picture went around the world, had been injured in an Israeli airstrike instead of a Russian one?

We would never have heard the last of it. Yet all we get from the left today in is a deeply embarrassed silence.

They have every reason to feel embarrassed, because the conclusion is clear. Their compassion is entirely bogus and their outrage completely confected.

They don’t give a damn about the Palestinians beyond the fact that they give them a convenient weapon to attack to the democracies of the West.

And as we have seen in Syria, Arab corpses can be piled to the skies and they simply do not care – as long as it is their ideological soulmates who are doing the killing. It is not so much ‘stop the war’ as ‘stop the West’, and they will do everything in their power to avoid any hint of criticism of blood-soaked regimes such as Iran and Russia.

Until the day I see a big demonstration against Russian war crimes, I will continue to call out ‘anti-war’ left wingers for exactly what they are – morally bankrupt hypocrites.

In the meantime, what can be done for the people of Syria? I am afraid the answer is very little. US President Barack Obama’s attempts to “lead from behind” in international affairs have proved to be an unmitigated disaster.

He laid down “red lines” to Syria’s president Bashar Assad over the use of chemical weapons, but lacked the backbone or moral conviction to make good his threats once Assad ignored him.

The weakest US president in living memory has created a power vacuum in the Middle East that has sucked in vile regimes such as Russia and Iran as well as the Islamist maniacs of Daesh – the so-called Islamic State.

The result has been a catastrophe for ordinary people throughout the region and a destablisation that threatens peace as far away as Europe.

So if you are one of those people who complained about ‘Western Imperialism’ and dreamed of a diminution of American power, then well done – you have got exactly what you wanted.

But the sad fact is children will continue to be blown to bits in Aleppo 
as a result.