The world was horrified last week by images of the victims of an alleged sarin gas attack on civilians in Syria. President Trump was so appalled that he changed his opinion of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, ordering a Tomahawk missile strike against a Syrian airfield.
A few days later, suicide bombers killed 44 people and injured 126 at two Christian churches in northern Egypt on Palm Sunday. The Associated Press called it “the single deadliest day for Christians in decades.”
But there was no military response from the United States; in a tweet, Trump said the U.S. “strongly condemns” the attack, for which ISIS took credit.
Veteran WND journalist Leo Hohmann watched Fox News all day Sunday and saw far more coverage of the Syria gas attack, which had happened days prior, than the Egypt church bombings, which had happened that morning. In fact, it felt to him like a ten-to-one disparity in coverage.
“It’s interesting how 80 or so Sunni Muslims [are] killed by Assad and we have worldwide attention placed upon it,” Hohmann told Jesse Lee Peterson during a recent appearance on the latter’s radio show. “We have dozens of Christians slaughtered every day across the Middle East, and we never hear anything about it. So I guess it’s ‘Muslim lives matter’ in the Middle East. Christian lives do not matter.”
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Hohmann, author of “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” pointed out Assad does not slaughter Christians daily; rather, he permits Christians to worship and go about their lives freely in Syria. For this reason, Hohmann does not support any efforts to oust Assad from power.
“The Assad regime has its problems like every regime in the Middle East,” he said. “It is a dictatorship; we don’t see American-style democracy in the Middle East. But at least under Mr. Assad it’s a secular dictatorship, which means he’s not all that concerned about who you worship or how you worship as long as you don’t try to undermine his regime.”
He noted Assad is a secular Shia Muslim who protects Syrian Christians from Sunni Muslim aggression.
Hohmann thought Trump made a big mistake by attacking the Assad regime. He noted with chagrin Trump had previously indicated he wanted to help the Assad regime put down the Sunni rebellion in Syria, but he seemed to do a 180-degree turn after seeing photographs of the attack. Hohmann suspects Trump has been listening to several purveyors of bad advice on Syria, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In Hohmann’s mind, Assad is not the biggest threat to Syria and the surrounding region. He is a secular dictator who does not enforce Shariah law, and Shariah law is what threatens the lives of Christians in the Middle East.
“They go under many different names, these rebels, but make no mistake, they’re all Shariah-compliant Sunni Muslims who would like to set up a religious state based on Sunni Islam and the Quran, and we know what that means for Christians,” Hohmann warned. “It’s open season on Christians as soon as we get that type of regime. It’s what happened in Iraq. It’s what happened in Syria until the military put it down. It’s what happened in Libya, and it’s what happened in all these Arab Spring states where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to go in and set up a religious Muslim Brotherhood-backed Sunni regime. The Christians get killed and the Sunnis get empowered.”
Hohmann acknowledged Trump did not come across as a globalist at all during his campaign, but after the attack on Syria his status as an independent-minded outsider is in question. If Trump tries to oust Assad and install a new leader in Syria, he’s really not all that different than George W. Bush, in Hohmann’s view.
“If this attack is a one-off, meaning we’re going to bomb this facility and send a message to Assad – but not only to Assad, the other dictators across the world – that you cannot use these chemical weapons – if that was the sole purpose for this attack, I won’t be too critical of the president for launching it,” Hohmann told Peterson.
“However, if this is the beginning of a prolonged war against Assad where we try to do regime change in that country, like we did with disastrous results in Iraq, then I think we can kiss this Trump administration goodbye in terms of what we’re going to see in terms of foreign policy. We’re going to see the continued empowerment of the Sunni Muslim radicals in the Middle East, and I hope that’s not the case. I hope this is just a one-off, to send a message.”
