Special Treatment for Mideast Christians Is Un-American, and Dumb

Jeb Bush says he’s not sorry that he thinks Middle East Christians warrant special attention and protection from America. He’s defending himself against President Barack Obama who says that the former governor of Florida is wrong to say Christians deserve preferential treatment since they are more threatened. It’s un-American, says Obama, to discriminate between Syrian refugees according to religion.

Obama is right, but he has no standing to make that argument. The president has stood by idly while Bashar al-Assad has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims, bombing civilians and gassing children. “And how do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” said the man now openly declaiming his love for Syrian refugees.

The White House could’ve backed a proxy force to topple Assad, or even institute no-fly and buffer zones to protect those fleeing from Assad’s depredations. But Obama chose not to because that might have risked the nuclear deal he was eager to cut with the theocratic regime in Iran that also slaughters Sunnis, in Syria as well as Iraq and Lebanon, and for good measure imprisons Christian clergymen for preaching the gospel.

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Assad has not even protected his own minority Alawite community but has instead embroiled them in a sectarian war for no other purpose except to protect himself. As Tony Badran, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has written, the point of Assad’s campaign of sectarian cleansing was only partly to rid Sunnis from strategically vital regions in Syria. “By covering the collective hands of the Alawite community with Sunni blood,” writes Badran, “Assad is creating total identity between his family and the broader sect, while simultaneously heightening its existential fears and feeding its primordial hatreds. The reason Assad’s forces made their murders so vicious was to ensure equally bloody retaliation from the Sunnis, thereby forcing the Alawites to see that if they wanted to live they had no choice but to commit their fate to Assad’s hands. He’s turned his own minority community into a bloody moat surrounding the palace.

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