Mick Hartley

We need to keep our anger over Syria, argues Terry Glavin. It's what makes things happen:

Anger gets a lot of bad press, but it was only after the world became enraged by the indifference of “the international community” to the Islamic State encirclement of thousands of defenceless Yazidis on Mount Sinjar two years ago that U.S. President Barack Obama cobbled together his air-power coalition to begin bombing the genocidal doomsday cult. Not long afterwards, public fury was incited by images of unveiled teenaged girls and grandmothers defending the Syrian town of Kobane with rusty Kalashnikovs and antique Lee-Enfield rifles. It was only then that NATO made a 180-degree turn and began backing the Syrian Kurds that the Turks and the Americans had been slandering as “terrorists.”

It was only two weeks ago that another viral photograph of a Syrian child—Omran Daqneesh, sitting bloodied and dazed in an ambulance—aroused worldwide anger. It was sufficient to cause at least a modicum of public attention to American official-policy indifference as Bashar Assad’s napalm-and-chlorine barrel bombings and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s hospital-targeting fighter bombers turn Aleppo into Dresden.

The problem with public rage about these things is not that it can get out of hand. It’s that it’s difficult to sustain. People have buses to catch and jobs to go to and kids to get off to school. It subsides under the weight of expert admonitions that we should not be so emotional, that Syria is complicated, it’s best left to the foreign-policy specialists, the Middle East is a quagmire, and the Arabs should fend for themselves.

Five years of this, nearly a half million dead Syrians, close to six million refugees, and at last count 373 more refugee children have drowned in the Mediterranean since the day Alan Kurdi died for our sins on that beach.

We all have every right to be angry. What Syrians need from all of us everywhere right now is our rage.

Unquenchable, incandescent, blind rage.