Ayoon Wa Azan (Justice is slow but sure)

Justice is slow but sure. This is what we learned when we were young, and I see proof of this adage every day. Recently, I wrote about the drones operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that kill, along with the suspected terrorists that they target, scores of Muslim civilians, all with the approval of Barack Hussein Obama. In the comments I received from the readers, there was unanimous support over my personal protests against the killing of innocent Muslim civilians – a rare consensus in the attitudes expressed by my readers in the messages they send me. What I want to add for the readers today, is that on the same day my article was published, I was following news of the trial in Texas of John Russell, a US army sergeant who collapsed during his service in Iraq and killed four workers and a patient at a clinic where he was being treated, and wounded another sergeant in the face. Another issue that is more important than the madness of one soldier is the suicide rate of US soldiers deployed in or returning from Iraq. 2012 saw a record number with 349 suicides, a 15-percent increase compared to 2011, when 301 soldiers committed suicide. There are many other detailed figures related to this. Death by suicide last year even outpaced the number of those killed in action, according to military data published by The New York Times. In Israel, almost at the same time, a military commission of inquiry cleared soldiers charged with murdering a family of ten during the eight-day attack on Gaza last November. The commission ruled that the soldiered had killed six women and four children from al-Dalow family by mistake, and should not be prosecuted. To put it in a different way, this would be like someone stabbing a man in the back and then telling him “sorry.” The attack claimed the lives of 168 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were civilians. If we wait one or two years, the neo-Nazi government of Israel will probably claim that those Palestinians had committed suicide, and that the Israeli soldiers were swimming in the beach in Nahariya when it happened. Justice is slow and sure, and they will no doubt be punished for their crimes. Moving on to some in the Syrian opposition, and I stress that I am talking about only some in the opposition, when I wrote that terrorists had infiltrated its ranks, I received comments that betray the nature of those who made them. Now that the Nusra Front has declared its allegiance to the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, I would like to see those who denied terrorists had infiltrated the opposition to do so again, when terror is clearly and presently rearing its ugly head amid a sea of blood and tears in Syria. I've always said that there is a patriotic and honest opposition and foreign terrorists operating in Syria, so those who denied the existence of terror must be involved in it, by endorsing it or covering it up. One reader politely commented, “You as intellectuals and writers wagered from day one that the regime would be able to crush the revolution in Syria.” I do not wager, and I am not in a position to defend all intellectuals and writers, and only speak for myself. I never wagered that the revolution would be crushed, because in the first weeks of the uprising, I thought that the regime would pursue a different solution than violence for its problems. However, its insistence on violence and then its escalation made me gradually change my tone. In the same politeness, I ask this reader to present me with anything I wrote where I say that the revolution was likely to be crushed or anything close to that sense. This never happened. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.