So many humanitarians are silent on Druze ethnic cleansing (07-21-2025--Hour1)

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The Drus numbered more than one million in the early twenty first century. They lived mostly in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, with smaller communities in other countries. I thought this was interesting also that they call themselves Moahid muahadun done anyway, it translates apparently as unitarians. So I don't know if that will help with the pr that they're going to need from American liberals because they found themselves on the receiving end of just the latest installment of the Religion of Peace. Yeah, they they have been targeted for actual ethnic cleansing by Syrians, by jihadists. So the again back to the Britannica. The Dru's Faith and that spelled Druze Drews. The Dru's Faith originated in Egypt as an offshoot of Isma i Shiism. I don't know if that is like Shia or what. I'm not going to go to in depth on their religious beliefs, but this was around like nine ninety six to ten twenty one time frame, Okay, so like over the course of like thirty years, right as the nine hundreds were rolling into the thousands, that's when this offshoot began. And then twenty years after that, in the year ten forty three, they basically ended all of their proselytizing and so ever since then, so since ten forty three AD, they have not recognized conversions to their faith and they don't permit conversion away from the faith. I don't know what the penalty on that is, but like that's it. Like the one million that there were in the early twenty first century, it's like you got to keep marying and reproducing among the million Drews in order to expand your ranks because they don't allow conversions in or out. Okay, the largest concentration of Drews in the present day is in Lebanon. Oh. By the way, the Drews are Arabs people. They are Arabs m h. And it seems like this is a very similar kind of a religion to Islam, I think, but I don't know, but they're different and that cannot be tolerated in Muslim majority countries in the Middle East. So there is the largest concentration of Druze rather in the present day, that's in Lebanon. They've got like three hundred thousand. And while they got the largest concentration of Drus in Lebanon, the most the largest population by number is actually in Syria, where there's seven hundred thousand Drews there now I thought this little tidbit was interesting in this would have been in nineteen twenty five, the leader of the Druze, Sultan al Atrash, led a revolt against French rule. After local success, Syrian nationalists outside the Druz community joined the revolt, and the rebellions spread throughout the region and into Damascus before it was suppressed in nineteen twenty seven. Among Syrians, this revolt is remembered as the nation's first nationalist uprising. So the Drews were the first. Dare I call them anti colonialists? Right? They tried to They tried to kick the French out of their area back in nineteen twenty five. Dozens of local Dru's militias have formed amid the turmoil of the Syrian Civil War after Ahmed al Sharrah, a Sunni Islamist leader, took control of the country in late twenty twenty four. Believe this is the the Isis guy, the former Isis guy, right, or a former al Qaeda guy or whatever he is, and he started pushing for the local militias to disarm. But the Drews were a little suspicious of this, so they were very hesitant to disarm. Themselves Drew's militias in two different areas is One is called Sweda Orsuada Sweida Sweda, and there's another another area called Jeremanah near Damascus. So these various militias coalesced into four coalitions, and they were very hesitant to disarm themselves fearing what exactly has now been occurring, which is the targeting of Drus by these Islamists in Syria. Israel also has a sizeable community of Drus, about one hundred and forty thousand of them. Actually, back in nineteen forty two, after the Sunni leadership in Jerusalem threatened to take control of the Tomb of Jethro, the Drus sided with the Jewish forces in the nineteen forty eight war. Druze soldiers have ever since fought for Israel in every Arab Israeli war. So now you can see the problem that the Islamists have with the Drews. Right, they are the only Arab group conscripted into the Israeli defense forces, and they participate in Israel's border security and diplomatic corps as well. So they're too close to the Jews, which really I mean Drews. Jews like you can see how that would be like a natural alliance there. So John Spencer, the executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute co author of Understanding Urban Warfare, wrote a lengthy piece. He posted it as an article on Twitter and The Jerusalem Post republished it, talking about what has been occurring over the last excuse me, like a week and a half in Syria along the border with Israel. The Drews have been attacked, they have been targeted, and the Islamists who are engaging in the ethnic cleansing have been Stop me if you've heard this tactic before, videotaping their atrocities and broadcasting them out to the world because they are proud of the work they are doing for their profit. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news, slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which story get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself check dot ground, dot news, slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. John Spencer, the executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute. Over at the Jerusalem Post, Spencer writes this past week, a brutal campaign of violence has unfolded in southern Syria. Hundreds of Druze civilians, members of a minority community indigenous to the area to the levant, have been murdered, kidnapped, or forced to flee their homes. Villages have been burned. Women and children were reportedly slaughtered in sacred sites where they had sought refuge. The perpetrators include radical Islamist militants, Bedouine gangs, Sunni Muslims, and regime backed elements, all empowered by years of state collapse and lawlessness. The carnage has been captured on video and is now spreading across social media. These are not vague reports or unverifiable claims. There is footage of Dru's civilians being hunted down and executed. Elders are dragged into the streets. They are mustaches shaved in acts of humiliation see for the Drews. It's not just an insult, it's a desecration. In Druze culture, facial hair, especially the mustache, is a powerful symbol of dignity, piety, and manhood. Women are stripped and assaulted. Men are beaten, tortured, and forced to leap from rooftops as militants cheer. More than one video shows Drew's men being driven to the edge of their balconies. They are forced to climb over the railings and as they leap, they are shot multiple times as they are leaping to their own deaths. This is a special kind of evil, deliberate, performative, proud. All of it is filmed. All of it is shared online for the enjoyment of the killers. These images are not just horrifying, they are a visceral reminder of the savagery unleashed by Hamas on October seventh. It's the same evil, the same joy in human suffering, the same defilement of dignity for propaganda and sadistic pleasure. The worst of these atrocities have occurred in and around Sweda, that's the area in Syria. The violence is not collateral damage from some larger conflict. It is direct, targeted and deliberate. It is ethnic and religious cleansing in broad daylight, which is why you've heard so many of the pro Palestinian people that have been chanted from the river to the sea and globalized the Intofada. That's why you've seen so many of them rising up, you know, to condemn this slaughter of the Drus who are Arabs. I'm just kidding. They haven't done any of that. There's been nothing, no commentary, not a peep, just like we didn't hear from all of these you know, Christian defenders on the right that are constantly just asking questions about Israel and the Palestinians and stuff after Christians got massacred in Nigeria last month by jihattists. Didn't hear anything about that from them. No, it's just there's just one particular kind of conflict that really gets the juices flowing for so many people now on the right and the left. The violence began escalating around July eleventh. There was a Dru's merchant who was attacked on the road between Sweda and Damas. In retaliation, Druze fighters from local defense forces captured these suspected attackers that quickly spiraled into retaliatory attacks by regime linked bedoing gangs, with fighters storming villages and igniting brutal clashes. Between July thirteenth and sixteenth, entire neighborhoods in and around Sweda Province were overrun, homes burned, bodies mutilated. Armed groups stormed hospitals, killing all of the wounded fighters, and by the end of the week, hundreds were dead, tens of thousands had been displaced. No commentary about the targeting of a hospital. Now, see it's different. See this is totally different. On July eighteenth, the ceasefire was announced after international and regional pressure, the Syrian regime, Jordan, Turkey, sorry, Turka, I think it is how they pronounce it now, and the United States all reportedly pushed to prevent a broader sectarian war. Despite that announcement, the violence has continued. Militants have ignored the truce. They are still roaming doing revenge killings. The underlying threats have not been resolved, because what is the underlying threat? What is the you know, what is the problem that the Drews pose is that they're not converting. They are a different religious group, and so therefore they have to be eradicated. That's the extent here the of the conflict. As the carnage spread, the spiritual leader of the Druze community in Israel sent a personal message to Benjamin Nintonyahoo, the Prime Minister of Israel, invoking the memory of the Holocaust. His response. Bibbi's response was immediate. He shared the message publicly and issued a clear reply saying we have taken action and we will continue to take action as necessary. What was that action, Well, we still don't know the full extent of the response from Israel, but it has already included air strikes against Syrian regime military positions South of Damascus and even within the capital Damascus itself. The strike's reportedly targeted forces involved in the attacks on Dru's civilians. It may also involve intelligence support and other covert actions to deter further massacres. But John Spencer writes that what matters more than the tactics is the principle. When a close knit, historically loyal minority community within Israel cries out to the Jewish State for help as its kin are massacred across the border, Israel does not turn away. This is not just about shared history or mutual loyalty, though that does run deep. It is about moral clarity. It is about responding to evil when others stay silent. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion. 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Final thoughts here from John Spencer again. This was published over at the Jerusalem Post. John Spencer is the executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute. He writes, what matters most is not just what is done, but who does it? While the international community hesitates, while human rights organizations say very little, while Western capitals issue muted statements or none at all. Israel has stepped forward when others calculate political risks, Israel sees human lives. When others look away, Israel acts. The silence is deafening. The same institutions and voices that claim to champion human rights have gone quiet. There have been no emergency UN sessions, no international protests, no hashtags, no outcry. It is a silence that reveals the selective morality of those who only speak when it fits their politics. It is a silence that enables genocide. It is a silence that history will remember. This moment reveals a deeper truth. It shows what solidarity looks like when it actually costs something. It shows what it means to remember your own history and refuse to let others suffer alone. It shows that the vow of never again is not only about one people, but about the kind of world we are willing to build. He concludes, Let history record who acted, let it record who stayed silent, and let it record that when the DRUS cried out, Israel listened. This is what has been since October seventh when Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered all of those innocent people, took a bunch of them hostage, committed atrocities against innocent people. And I said at the time, you know, I said, like, I have a moral clarity on this, and you can disagree. You may arrive at some different morality. And that's not to defend every single thing that every single IDF soldier has done and everything Israel is done in every single instance. It's not to say that, and it's not to say that war is good. War is not. War is terrible. It is the breakdown of all order. It's the breakdown of law, it's the breakdown of society. It is violence. It is awful. But over the last what now almost going on two years now, right, there has been this rising argument that gets more and more tracks that somehow or another, Israel is behaving in a disproportionate way to the threat. The threat is existential. This is what I don't understand. And nobody is ever, no one that I have seen, and I have watched over the last almost two years, I have watched a lot of debates between people advocating either side of this issue. You know, pro Israel, anti Israel whatever. I've seen scores of debates, and there is this failure, a refusal to grapple with the the Hamas strategy. The defenders, well, I shouldn't say defenders of amask because a lot of times they will say, I'm not saying Hamas should have done it, but right so they'll say I'm not pro Hamas, I'm just you know, I just want the killing to stop. That's comic Dave Smith, who somehow was a stand up comedian and now has become some expert in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But the few times where I've seen people, most recently Josh Hammer, conservative writer, he was on stage at Turning Point USA with comic Dave Smith, and he he asked Smith this question. I've seen Smith dodge it. He dodged it again. What to do with the Hamas strategy? How do you combat a strategy? And Dave Smith's response was figure it out, bro Like literally that's what he said. That was literally his response. He did not know how you would go about fighting a g hottest terrorist organization that has spent billions of dollars building tunnels right embedding itself in the civilian population using their own people as human shields. How else do you fight them? How do you go get them? How do you get your hostages back? How do you do this? Right? Because they criticize every action that Israel takes, but they offer no other alternative. And here's the thing. If you allow Hamas to survive, then this strategy becomes widely adopted because it would have worked. And if you want to live in a world where civilian populations are used as shields, then keep demanding that Hamas be allowed to stay in power. Right, that Hamas be rewarded for their tactics. By the way, all of these humanitarian groups that somehow have lost their tongues on the Druze attacks in Syria, they are very very upset at the Gaza Humanity Foundation. And I've talked about this organization before when they first launched. They're still doing it. They're still delivering meals for free to people in Gaza, and Hamas keeps shooting at them, at the people and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. They Hamas murdered a bunch of these aid workers and why would they do that? Why would Hamas murder people that are coming to feed the Gazans. Does that make sense if Hamas cared about the blockade about you know, people starving, If they cared about that, why would they Why would they murder the people that are bringing new food. It's because Hamas wants to control that distribution system. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven in Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit Creative video dot Com. The UN Food Agency is accusing Israel of using tanks, snipers, and other weapons to fire on a crowd of Palestinians seeking food aid in what the territory's health ministry said was one of the deadliest days for aid seekers in over twenty one months of war. Israel that is helping to feed people, they're part of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. We are to believe that they are just handing out all of the millions and millions of meals in order to try to randomly shoot it some Palestinians to perform genocide. That's what we're supposed to believe, at least if you believe the World Food Program, which is getting its information from that's right, Hummas, the Health Ministry, the health ministry in Gaza, which is controlled by Hummas, which as a strategy, wants the world to believe that Israel is murdering Palestinians left and right all over the place, doing so as part of an ethnic cleansing camp, which is in fact what Hamas is interested in doing right. They want to from the river to the sea, cleanse the area of all the Jews. This goes back to the Nakba, right. And if you listen to the pro Palestinian folks, they will say, oh, that was when that was the catastrophe, when we lost all of the homes, all of our land was taken. This was the catastrophe, right. The catastrophe was that you lost to Jews because Jews were second class citizens. They were looked down upon. There was a superiority complex that the Arabs in the region had against the Jews. And then to be defeated in combat by these people, that's the catastrophe. And by the way, when you go to war with people over territory and then you lose that war, you lose the territory. That's the historical norm. Okay, the historical norm. So I've mentioned this organization before. It's called the Network Contagion Research Institute or the NCRI. It's based up in Jersey. I don't hold that against them though. I think they're out of Rutgers and they did a study on the type of coverage regarding this issue. And you may want to sit down for this, but The study found that the US and European mainstream media have been complicit in spreading biased and false narratives to malign Israel and discredit the US backed humanitarian operation currently underway in Gaza. The US led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation quote was targeted and discredited via an ecosystem of unverified claims, narrative laundering, and institutional amplification. According to the study, we believe Hamas made yeah, so this is the GHF's executive chairman, Reverend Johnny Moore says, we believe Hamas made over one billion dollars last year just from manipulating the system of aid managed by the UN and others. They take the free food, they then sell it to their people, They hoard some for their fighters. They use the food to recruit to their ranks. This is why, and I said this when the GHF started. This is why Hamas views the GOHF as an existential threat because if people can get fed and Hamas isn't in control of the distribution of the food, they lose money and they lose power. That's why they've been attacking the GOHF sites. They've been shooting at their own Palestinian people right. They are totally fine murdering as many Palestinians as they have to in order to win the propaganda war against Israel. That's what we are witnessing right now. And the NCRI, kudos to them for looking into this and for coming to these conclusions which anybody who's been following it already knew. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.