Why do you support Syria?

Thomas P. Ross On June 22, 2006 my wife’s granddaughter (my step granddaughter) was killed by a single act of violence by a baby sitter in Virginia Beach. She was 15 months old. That death left a permanent void in our lives.

In 2012 Syrian Girl, (Mimi al Laham) began posting news articles including videos published by al Qaeda of Iraq and Jabhat al Nusra, (al Qaeda of Syria). The videos would be uploaded to You Tube and would remain there for about 7 or 8 hours and then be taken down by You Tube as they violated their content policy. I noticed that these videos were of ordinary citizens or police officers or Al Assad’s forces (SAA) being put to death in the most inhumane ways imaginable and I started to understand that it made no sense that our media was claiming Assad was killing his own people, when the video’s shown on You Tube were of his own army members being killed by what appeared to be religious zealots. I didn’t know anything about Wahhabism at the time, but Mimi al Laham provided an education of what was really going on in Syria and it all began to make sense. I followed the battles from any alternative media I could find. I grew a greater distrust for our media. I knew what was being reported by our media was a vast lie promulgated by all the major networks.

Having experienced the great loss we suffered losing our Kristen, I recognized that my country was causing that same loss for untold numbers of people living in Syria and in Libya. Except the loss might even be considered as being greater because the loss was just not a mother or father but in many cases, the bread winner and/or the nurturer. I wondered how many children were orphaned and were required forage on their own.

I could not comprehend that my government could be responsible for any of this but I knew it was true. And by my government’s actions, that made EVERYONE in my country complicit in these crimes. I spoke out every chance I had to anyone and everyone who would listen. I posted every article I could find relating to the crimes that were being committed in Syria and our country’s involvement. I convinced some. I irritated many. And I caused many to think I was a little crazy retelling what I believed to be true when it was in absolute conflict with what our media was reporting.

But I believed it was more important to convince people as to the truth even if it meant people lost respect for me. Knowing the loss we suffered losing our grandchild to a single act of violence, I knew the grief was felt no less to those experiencing death in Syria. That is the problem with many people throughout the world including many people in the United States. Many of us have a tendency to believe that some lives matter more than others. The adoption by many idiots in my country that we should make America great again plays into this illusion that we are or should be superior to the other people of this world. I am ashamed of my country. It is not the country I grew up knowing and loving as a child.

But the job of bringing attention to the plight of the Syrian people is not over. They are still under U.S. sanctions and those sanctions should be removed. And our forces are still in Syria. We are stealing the oil of the Syrian people and we are still supporting terrorists. I can not ever, in any capacity, undo the harm my country has caused the Syrian people. But I can still bring attention to their plight in my country and offer my own apology, insignificant as it is.

Here is the story of my granddaughter. Her death was worthy enough to report. But to be honest, in a perfect world, every person who lost their lives to our proxy terrorists in Syria deserve to have their names immortalized forever, here in the United States, on a vast memorial, names etched in granite near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington D.C. so that we all understand our crime and deter us from ever repeating it.