Charles Glass on Syria: Religious Cleansing Continues
“Urgent” Need for US-Russian Settlement
“Until the regional powers and superpowers agree that the war in Syria should end, it will not end,” veteran Middle East correspondent Charles Glass said Wednesday at an event sponsored by Christian Solidarity International.
In a public lecture at Boston College, Charles Glass, who has been reporting on Syria for decades and still regularly travels to the war-torn country, described the Syrian conflict both as a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia and regional powers, and a civil war rooted in local issues. “But the decisions, the money and the weapons come from the superpowers and the regional powers,” he concluded, “from the Americans through their client states and from the Russians and the Iranians.”
According to Glass, “The U.S., Britain and France had long harbored a wish to get rid of the Syrian regime.” When the Syrian revolution began, Glass said, his contacts in the opposition told him they were determined to keep the movement nonviolent, “to use a strategy the regime couldn’t cope with”: mass civil disobedience and general strikes. “It might have failed, but it would not have led to 250,000 dead and half the country homeless.”
Instead, Western states and their allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey “persuaded members of opposition to take up arms, and turn peaceful demonstrations in a civil war.”
Glass described the spread of violent sectarianism in Syria as a consequence of this policy. Minority Christian, Alawite and Druze contacts of Glass’ who initially participated in the peaceful, secular uprising against the Syrian regime “have been driven out of the revolution by jihadists, and forced to side with the regime just to survive.”
Despite the utter lack of political freedom in Syria before the war, Glass said, there was “social freedom,” particularly for Christians, religious minorities and women.
But if the United States and its Islamist regional allies prevail, “that means Jahbat al Nusra [al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate] wins, Syria will be religiously cleansed, and its people will be enslaved to an ideology they don’t believe in.” Alternatively, if Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime prevail, “there will be reprisals and massacres against Syrians who opposed the regime”. On the current trajectory, Glass said, the most likely outcome is not victory for either side, but “a long and bloody war with a big impact on Europe that endures as a problem in U.S. foreign policy for years to come.”
Instead, Glass argued, the two superpowers should reach a settlement on Syria, and impose a peace on the country’s warring parties, as was done in Lebanon in the 1989 Ta’if accord. “Lebanon healed very quickly, in one respect,” Glass said. “That could happen in Syria. The most urgent thing is for the outside powers that are keeping this war alive to stop.”
“There’s hope” for Syria’s multicultural society, he concluded, “unless all the Christians are driven out first.”
Glass was ABC News’ chief Middle East correspondent when he was abducted and held hostage in Lebanon for 62 days in 1987. He writes regularly for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and The Spectator, and is the author of several books on the Levant, most recently Syria Burning: ISIS and the Death of the Arab Spring.
The full video of Glass’ talk will be posted online at www.middle-east-minorities.com. Glass’s lecture was part of a lecture series on The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East being held at Boston College, and sponsored by Christian Solidarity International in cooperation with the Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages & Literatures, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Department of Political Science, Islamic Civilization and Societies.
Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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