Rime Allaf, October 12, 2016

Many more Syrians were killed by Assad and Putin yesterday than there were MPs who bothered to attend what was clearly mislabelled an “emergency” debate on Aleppo. If this is how the House of Commons deliberates on emergencies, it’s a shame for issues less urgent than live genocide.

Nevertheless, one would have hoped that quality would trump quantity, even with the expectation that the devil’s advocates would go out of their way to absolve criminals from responsibility for the carnage in Syria. Indeed, since Ed Miliband’s shameful posturing after the August 2013 chemical massacre, most Labour MPs continue to disgrace themselves by refusing to denounce Assad’s – let alone Russia’s – massively documented war crimes. Jeremy Corbyn and Stop The War’s deafening silence on Syria speaks volumes when compared to their outrage to Israeli bombings.

But members of a government whose declared policy is to stop the Assad regime were expected to do better than foreign secretary Boris Johnson saying he would “like to see demonstrations outside the Russian embassy.” As bombs continue to obliterate Syria, Whitehall, Westminster and Downing Street seem to have adopted a new doctrine of phoney outrage which had hitherto been a speciality of the so-called resistance front dictatorships. When the US bombed an al-Qaida camp in northeast Syria in 2008, Assad closed down the American School of Damascus and ordered demonstrations - because that will show them.

Many Syrians were crushed when MPs voted to deny a small Kindertransport for a mere 3,000 unaccompanied children. As pitiful a spectacle as that debate was, it left some feeble hope that Britain would strive to do more to protect these Syrian children’s lives, precisely so they wouldn’t need to seek shelter elsewhere. That hope dissipates with every empty declaration reassuring Assad and his allies that nothing, absolutely nothing, will be done to halt their aggression.

All that remains to complete this theatre of the absurd is for Johnson to suggest that people organise candle-lit vigils while singing Kumbaya to help the people of Syria. But Johnson is tragically wrong: the wells of outrage on Syria are not growing exhausted. Rather, what grows are wells of outrage at powerful nations’ inaction in the face of this century’s greatest catastrophe.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/12/how-should-uk-respond-syria-crisis