How can they forget geopolitics and remember humanity?

We are, it seems, the twenty three millions of us or so, terrorists and siren gas wielders. We are the ones who are using the chemical weapons, not the regime who made them stored them and remains in sole custody of them. We are suicide bombers, Kaiida lovers and a bunch of uncouth ramshackle disparate riffraff unworthy of the sublime attention and assistance from the respectable decent anti- terrorism world. But what about the majority of us, the human beings, those who died who are dying and who will die? Those who people the prisons of Assad in their tens of thousands, or those who have become displaced refugees in their hundred of thousands; what about the wounded, the disabled, the sick and the war victims, what about the millions of homeless starving humanity reduced to poverty, to begging? What about the children, a whole generation of them destined to privation and loss? What about the massacres of children and infants, butchered and dumped as garbage?

Listening to the excuses the Americans and the likes of them are putting forward this morning in order not to help the Syrian people, I felt sick to the very core of my being. Very good, we, who hated what we were, love ourselves as we have become: refugees, tramps, homeless, starving and on the way to extinction but mind you and remember this for now and for always: we have gazed at the bright face of freedom and drank from the holy grail it held forth to us. We have become the beloveds of Christ and a Prophet hounded away from his home; yes, we have become the holy outsiders, the aliens and foreigners in a world which has lost its humanity and morality, but we have also become the stuff of epics and legends. We shall be remembered.

The best of us roam in the wilderness of death and destruction that Syria has become, because they hold in their hearts the moral law of sacrifice, duty, otherness, responsibility for the deprived and the dispossessed, The best of us do not ask philosophical, intellectual, or pragmatic questions in the face of death and suffering because the best of us know that if you are human you do not abandon the children you do not forsake the sinking ship you do not turn the other way.

©Alisar Iram