Jason Jones is a film producer, author, activist, and Christian human rights worker. For the past 25+ years, he has worked to protect and defend the most vulnerable people around the world - from the homeless on the streets of LA, To persecuted Christians in Africa, From women in crisis pregnancies, to victims of "honor killing" in Iran. His team has spent the last year and a half in Gaza and the West Bank, and today we will discuss the facts on the ground, and an obvious dichotomy within the American church on this topic.
https://www.vulnerablepeopleproject.com
AGAIN I LOOKED AND SAW ALL THE OPPRESSION THAT WAS TAKING PLACE UNDER THE SUN: I SAW THE TEARS OF THE OPPRESSED— AND THEY HAVE NO COMFORTER; POWER WAS ON THE SIDE OF THEIR OPPRESSORS— AND THEY HAVE NO COMFORTER.
– ECCLESIASTES 4:1
BONUS ARTICLE: ARE WE DOOMED TO FOREVER WARS?
Syrian Christians and other minorities in the region have well-founded reasons to fear the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Its overthrow was abrupt, orchestrated by militants with ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS, and bore all the hallmarks of another U.S. foreign policy establishment-led proxy regime-change war. Such interventions have repeatedly resulted in the rape, slaughter, and ethnic cleansing of minorities in countries like Iraq and Libya.
Condemning this kind of cynical, proxy-fueled violence has been a central theme of President-elect Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric. His outspoken concern for the plight of Middle Eastern minorities likely played a significant role in his recent reelection, as evidenced by the record number of Syrian and other Middle Eastern expatriates in the U.S. who voted for him.
For years, Western corporate media has served as an accomplice to the same shadowy, unaccountable deep state apparatus that now oversees the Biden administration. One of their tactics has been to euphemistically label even the most brutal jihadist factions in Syria as “freedom fighters” or “rebels,” helping to sanitize and legitimize the West’s regime-change agenda.
In fact, many “freedom fighters” aren’t even Syrian. They’re Jihadists from anywhere and everywhere. Mercenaries. “Death-to-America” types. Barbarians and thugs who rape local women and girls at the first opportunity, then sell them in open markets.
Trump, on the other hand, has always been among those who suspect the establishment’s motives and look out in solidarity for the people on the ground who stand to lose the most in America’s clumsy chess moves and gambles.
Trump’s running mate, likewise, is already raising the alarm about the threats posed to Syrian Christians in post-Assad Syria:
It’s a legitimate concern, and one that Trump already understood before J.D. Vance left graduate school. As Trump wrote in 2013: “Remember, all these ‘freedom fighters’ in Syria want to fly planes into our buildings.”
But now, high off the fumes of their regime-change coup in Syria, the deep state is relishing the opportunity to perform another shift—this one in the U.S., and, if it were possible, even among the Trump team as he prepares to finalize his cabinet and its positions ahead of the January 20 inauguration.
Guys like Lindsey Graham can hardly contain themselves.
Trump has a tall order ahead of him: put the Lindsey Grahams in their place, both within Washington, D.C., and in the various stations with influence over the fate of the Middle East.
But Trump’s victory just over a month ago provides all the political and moral will needed to take action now.
As John Zmirak wrote this week:
In the last push of the 2024 election, Jason Jones traveled to Pennsylvania to meet with American voters in Syrian Christian churches, whose sisters, cousins, and elderly parents now hide in their homes and wait for al Qaeda to come burn their churches down. …Those Pennsylvania voters saw today’s terror coming. Syriac Christian and Trump voter Dennis Atiyeh told Jones, “We love Donald Trump. He is the only politician who actually cares about peace and religious freedom instead of profits for arms manufacturers. The Democrats, the neocon Republicans…they don’t see people. They see little pawns on a chess board, and think that is a game. But the Gospel tells us ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ God bless Trump, if he can bring peace.”As Trump tackles the herculean task of reordering the next few weeks and days for peace, he must not forget his first love—the “forgotten men and women,” as he has often referred to them.
And he must remember that many of the forgotten in Syria are the coreligionists of those he has always championed here in the U.S.
From a Trump supporter’s point of view—and even perhaps from the vantage point of Trump himself—there is something apocalyptic about seeing a patently neocon success story like regime-change in Syria suddenly accomplished under our noses right after we voted against what Trump calls the establishment’s “forever wars” in November.
We might feel a temptation to wash our hands, throw in the towel, and leave the Middle East alone. It’s not a realistic option. It is, in fact, absurd on its face. We in the Trump camp may not have personally caused the tumult that now endangers Christians in Syria, but the officials of our nation did. It is not our right as Americans or as Christians to cut and run in the aftermath.
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