“As an Arab Sunni, I am horrified that what criminal hordes committed is being enshrined as something that represents me or my community morally”, Yassine Sweiha writes.
As an Arab Sunni, I am horrified that what criminal hordes committed—first along the coast, and now in Sweida—is being enshrined as something that represents me or my community morally. I am appalled by the belief, shared by many, that such acts can lead us anywhere politically. The core of this country—its largest and most widely distributed community—must not be reduced to a pitiful reenactment of the Serbs of the 1990s: a blind, hate-filled group locked in a genocidal relationship with everyone around them. The Serbs of the ’90s had a lost paradise—Tito’s Yugoslavia. These heedless neo-Umayyads seem to view their lost paradise as Assad’s Syria, with an Abu Uday flavor. Shame on you for thinking we would become that.
And as a son of the Euphrates Valley, I feel deep shame that packs of raving “It’s burning, it’s burning—ha ha ha” types have emerged as enthusiastic purveyors of the vilest forms of abuse and atrocity during genocidal military assaults. They now resemble the ugliest bottom-feeders of the old student union, attacking the sit-in at the parliament tonight. No, by God—neither the living among my kin and countryfolk, nor the departed—were ever like this, are like this, or would accept being described as such. Shame on you, and shame on those who use you to threaten others. If your heads held reason instead of ammunition, you’d see just how deeply the one who threatens us with your violence and your savagery despises you.
Why am I saying this?
First, because this is a personal expression on a personal page, in the face of yet another calamity in this devastated country—and as a way to share my sorrow and shame with the many dear friends I have no face to write to, to ask if their families are safe.
Second, as a rejection of the symbolic violence practiced by the neo-Umayyad intellectuals in their many guises, who try to convince themselves and the world that the broad center of this country is nothing but genocidal criminal hordes—and that those who reject this view are either minorities or “intellectuals,” as if the very idea of minorities and intellectuals is inherently repulsive in their completed fascist narrative.
And third, because I believe—firmly—that this is the starting point of any viable politics in this country: the Arab Sunnis of this land must become political actors, and that political engagement must begin with the rejection of what is being done in their name. Only then can they assume their historical role as the backbone of this country, as its largest and most far-reaching community, the one most capable of encompassing the contradictions of its interests and visions.
No—what is happening today is not the Arab Sunnis taking over the country. It is, in fact, their total exclusion from political life, coupled with humiliation and scolding.