To the PM: The costs of our gullibility and ignorance re Syria

Jan 31, 2025
HTS (Hayaat Tahrir Al Sham) leader Ahmed Al-Shara, also known as Abu Muhammad Al-Jolani (centre), commander in the operations department of the Syrian armed opposition seen leading the Military Operations Management, checking operations in the North of Syria, ten days before his troops enter the capital and the overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad, in northern Syria, on November 28, 2024. Photo by Balkis Press/ABACAPRESS.COM Credit: Abaca Press/Alamy Live News Contributor: Abaca Press / Alamy Stock Photo Image ID: 2YW27GX

The letter below was sent to Prime Minister Albanese on 24 January 2025. In it, I refer to the abduction of Professor Rasha Al-Ali from the University of Homs. Reports indicate that Dr Al-Ali’s body has been found and that – either before or after her murder – her fingers were cut off. Her abduction and killing is reminiscent of Margaret Hassan’s, who was head of CARE in Baghdad.

Since posting the letter, violence against members of religious minorities in Syria has not abated. Furthermore, ISIS has threatened a comeback in Syria and beyond.

Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University describes the wars in Iraq and Syria as ‘phoney wars’. They were unnecessary wars. As well as the profound human cost of these phoney wars, the wars have severely undermined peace and stability in the region.

Tragically, they have come at a huge cost, also, to the integrity of Islam and the survival of Christianity in the Middle East.


Dear Prime Minister,

I write to you because I wish to bring to your attention the dangers inherent in the pervasive gullibility and ignorance that exists in our country in relation to the war in Syria.

Even such well-respected ABC Radio National programs as ‘God Forbid’ and ‘Late Night Live’ have become, if only by inference, cheerleaders for the agenda of Hayrat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has its origins in Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and which is still designated as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government.

As Syrian Christian commentator Kevork Almassian pointed out in a recent podcast, “Endorsing Julanis’ regime in Syria sends a dangerous and clear message to the youth of the Middle East: to gain political relevance, join radical militant groups.” Young Muslim Australians are receiving this message, also, and our politicians and community leaders would have difficulty dissuading them when even the ABC seems to be suggesting that the ideology of Al-Qaeda is now mainstream.

You once accurately described Syria, a Muslim-majority country, as “a sophisticated, secular state where people were able to live side by side with respect”. This was the Syria I came to know when I was teaching English there twenty years ago. It was a country loved by locals and visitors alike.

It stands in sharp contrast to today’s Syria under Mohammad al–Julani, head of HTS.

  • Al-Julani’s new justice minister is known to have overseen public executions of women accused of ‘adultery’.
  • Women judges have been dismissed by HTS.
  • Professors have been abducted by militants, including Dr Rasha Al-Ali, professor of Arabic at the University of Homs.
  • The theory of evolution has been taken out of school science textbooks.
  • Textbooks are being changed to present Jews and Christians as people God is angry at.
  • Since coming to power, HTS militants have reportedly abducted and killed at least one moderate Sunni Islamic cleric, Sheikh Omar Hourii.
  • From the minbar (pulpit) of the Umayyad Mosque, Sheikh Mustafa al-Joulani declared that Russians, Shi’ites, and Alawites, would burn in Hellfire, while the Mujahideen would live in Paradise. He threatened to ‘hunt these rats down and trample them underfoot’.
  • In villages around Homs, in particular, Syrian Christians and Alawis are being forced from their homes by militant groups, foreign jihadis among them. Some Christians have been killed, some forced to convert to Islam, but Alawis, particularly, are being killed in large numbers simply because they are Alawi.

During the course of the war in Syria, virulent hatred for Shi’ites was expressed by two former ambassadors to Washington: Israel’s Michael Oren and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan. (Oren actually expressed hatred for all Muslims, but he said Sunnis were “the lesser evil”.)

Sectarian religious hatred has been used to foment war and destruction in Syria. But such religious hatred and prejudice can stick in a person’s heart for life, and it crosses borders. Since the start of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Syria, this extreme sectarian hatred has been given a prominent platform on Al-Jazeera Arabic.

In 2015, when one popular presenter on Al-Jazeera called for the killing of Alawi men, women, and children, I wrote to the then Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull, to draw his attention to it. Many Australian Arabic speakers would have watched that program.

One major player in fomenting sectarian hatred in Syria was the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood. The late Egyptian Sheikh Yusef Qaradawi was based in Qatar. His weekly program on Al-Jazeera attracted millions of viewers around the world. In 2011, he declared if it was necessary to kill a third of Syria’s population to get rid of the ‘heretical regime’, that was OK; and two years later, he issued a fatwa approving the killing of any civilian, soldier, or religious scholar who still supported the ‘regime’.

When a respected media organisation like the ABC, in effect, promotes the so-called revolution in Syria, many Australians either tune out or go to alternative media outlets for information and analysis. One eminent Columbia University professor, Jeffrey Sachs, has garnered a lot of attention on alternative media.

Before his inauguration, Donald Trump posted a video clip of Professor Sachs calling the wars in Iraq and Syria ‘phoney wars’ and describing them as ‘games of narrative’. In an interview with Piers Morgan, Professor Sachs contended that the CIA, which had been tasked with the overthrow of the Assad government, was capable of orchestrating false flag attacks using chemical weapons.

The Australian alternative media outlet, Pearls and Irritations, has published an interview with the former UK ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, who contends that the West was basically responsible for the downfall of the secular Syrian government through the imposition of crippling sanctions which brought the country to its knees.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is on President Trump’s team, has detailed many of the covert actions undertaken by the CIA and MI6 against Syria after its establishment as a secular, sovereign state. The CIA was reportedly advised to stress the ‘holy war aspect’. His article’s subheading is “They don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries —for oil.”

Elon Musk has expressed his wish that former Republican Congressman Ron Paul be part of the Trump administration. As a libertarian, Paul is anti-war, in contrast to neoconservatives. In 2012, Paul delivered a remarkable address to Congress in response to the Houla massacre in Syria that the US blamed on regime forces. Paul alleged the evidence to justify any US military response was “bogus”. He added: “Most knowledgeable people now recognise that the planned war against Syria is merely the next step to take on the Iranian government, something the neo-cons openly admit.”

In 2016, following the brutal stabbing of a priest in France, Pope Francis declared the world was at war, and it was a war for resources and domination. It was not a religious war, he emphasised. However, in the waging of war, the three Abrahamic religions are being distorted and diminished.

The ABC management’s acceptance of a very biased, crude account of events in Syria is not ultimately in Australia’s interest. It undermines people’s trust in public institutions; it gives the message that political violence and sectarian hatreds are OK, and it makes it almost impossible for you, other parliamentarians, and journalists to present the more complex reality.

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