The End of Assad? Syrian Rebels enter the outskirts of Aleppo for the first time since 2016

The history of the world is one of violence. I won't disagree with that.

Yet it is you who wants to push a fantasy alternative history that the Jews in 1940's had a chance of a shared secular democratic nation with the Arabs in the Southern Levant, and that it would have been all sunshine and lollipops ever after.

But you admit that history is littered with conflict and violence, but somehow these areas would be different? Please tell us how?

Nation states are thus. People of a shared culture, religion, ethnicity and society norms want to rule themselves. Otherwise, why on hell did Ireland ever want to leave the Union 100 years ago? Are you telling us now that we should have stayed?

Come on! Come back to reality.

At the end of the day, the Arabs of the region never accepted this new reality, and have been beating the empty docket ever since. If they accepted this reality decades ago, we would have had an actual Palestinian state, with a chance.

"Not capable of aspiring to higher forms of culture"

Lord God but what you think of as higher culture is our culture, not their one, not westerner bourgeoisie socialist thought, or democracy.

They are coming from a very old tradition, the whole thread is about the sweeping away of the old Arab Socialist party in Syria, a legacy of European education of Arab elites.

Heres a pic taken in my time there…..what its like now, I have no idea.

Yes, just the shape left, the remains, unlike the big brother, where all is left is the hollowed-out shape where Buddha once proudly stood. But had the Taliban had their way, there would have been two hollowed spaces, like I said, Mullah Omar stopped further destruction of them.

Wikipedia says both were destroyed (that was my recollection of it too) but that the smaller one is being restored from pieces left over and resin:

The decision made was leave the bigger one destroyed as a testimony to the destruction of both.

The idea that Arab people trying to aspire to some form of government and society, not intrinsically based on Islam, is just a colonial or European legacy, is a tad racist, or at least condescending.

Jews did face discrimination in Middle East countries after 1948.

And nothing before that? Seriously?

While Jewish communities in Islamic countries fared better overall than those in Christian lands in Europe, Jews were no strangers to persecution and humiliation among the Arabs. As Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis has written: “The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam.”

Muhammad, the founder of Islam, traveled to Medina in 622 A.D. to attract followers to his new faith. When the Jews of Medina refused to recognize Muhammad as their Prophet, two of the major Jewish tribes were expelled. In 627, Muhammad’s followers killed between 600 and 900 of the men, and divided the surviving Jewish women and children amongst themselves.18

The Muslim attitude toward Jews is reflected in various verses throughout the Koran, the holy book of the Islamic faith. “They [the Children of Israel] were consigned to humiliation and wretchedness. They brought the wrath of God upon themselves, and this because they used to deny God’s signs and kill His Prophets unjustly and because they disobeyed and were transgressors” (Sura 2:61). According to the Koran, the Jews try to introduce corruption (5:64), have always been disobedient (5:78), and are enemies of Allah, the Prophet and the angels (2:97-98).

Jews were generally viewed with contempt by their Muslim neighbors; peaceful coexistence between the two groups involved the subordination and degradation of the Jews. In the ninth century, Baghdad’s Caliph al-Mutawakkil designated a yellow badge for Jews, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany.19

At various times, Jews in Muslim lands lived in relative peace and thrived culturally and economically. The position of the Jews was never secure, however, and changes in the political or social climate would often lead to persecution, violence and death.

When Jews were perceived as having achieved too comfortable a position in Islamic society, anti-Semitism would surface, often with devastating results. On December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, Spain, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants. The riot was incited by Muslim preachers who had angrily objected to what they saw as inordinate Jewish political power.

Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in “an offensive manner.” The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.20

Other mass murders of Jews in Arab lands occurred in Morocco in the 8th century, where whole communities were wiped out by the Muslim ruler Idris I; North Africa in the 12th century, where the Almohads either forcibly converted or decimated several communities; Libya in 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews; Algiers, where Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830; and Marrakesh, Morocco, where more than 300 Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880.21

Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293-4, 1301-2), Iraq (854­-859, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Despite the Koran’s prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92) and Baghdad (1333 and 1344).22

The situation of Jews in Arab lands reached a low point in the 19th century. Jews in most of North Africa (including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Morocco) were forced to live in ghettos. In Morocco, which contained the largest Jewish community in the Islamic Diaspora, Jews were made to walk barefoot or wear shoes of straw when outside the ghetto. Even Muslim children participated in the degradation of Jews, by throwing stones at them or harassing them in other ways. The frequency of anti-Jewish violence increased, and many Jews were executed on charges of apostasy. Ritual murder accusations against the Jews became commonplace in the Ottoman Empire.23

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/myths-and-facts-treatment-of-jews-in-the-arab-world-chapter-11#google_vignette

It seems to be that the west must both get in there and fix up the countries - whichever countries - but will also be entirely in the wrong for doing so.

It also seems to be a very white western approach as well. The word "self hating" comes to mind except of course they don't hate themselves, because they feel they're on the "right" side by taking this hostile approach. They only hate some made-up notion based on extrapolating the very worst of CIA Cold War excesses to the entire western world.

It's a loathing of everything that they are not, purely because it differentiates themselves as better, especially better than the working class, who the modern left despise, utterly despise.

People talking about how the west must help women in Afghanistan, do this in Iraq, that in Syria.

That involves going to war in those places.

Heres another opinion on what a future Syria will be like, worth a look as it paints HTS in a different light, much different than is portrayed here on Boards

https://youtu.be/4Xt_OdzOioE

This is interesting. I have doubts if they are supporting a failed regime or Russian paid mercs holding out.