Let’s talk about selective moral outrage – that peculiar phenomenon where the world’s loudest advocates for justice are suddenly silent when confronted with atrocities that don’t fit their preferred narrative.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the global response to the horrors of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. As the details of Assad’s atrocities come to light, it becomes painfully clear how indifferent the so-called social justice warriors on American college campuses are to the mass killings of innocent people – so long as those atrocities cannot be blamed on Jews.
While the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is a legitimate concern, anyone with a moral compass can discern the difference between a war initiated by a terror organization and crimes against humanity like those we are now uncovering in Syria.
Yet, there are zero college protests, zero arrest warrants for Assad, and zero street campaigns against him. The absence of outrage over the industrialized violence and mass killings perpetrated by Assad is striking. The question is: Why?
We have long known that Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, but now that his regime has been toppled, we are learning even more about the horrors of Sednaya Prison.
The horrors of Sednaya
Dubbed Assad’s “butcher room,” this infamous facility, located about 30 kilometers north of Damascus, wasn’t just a prison. It was a meticulously designed system of humiliation, torture, and murder.
Former detainees recount unimaginable atrocities: torture, extrajudicial killings, the dismemberment and dissolution of bodies in acid, the use of an iron press to crush victims and obliterate evidence, and the calculated starvation of prisoners as a means of dehumanization.
Investigations have uncovered piles of corpses and disturbing footage from the prison’s underground chambers, capturing the true cruelty of Assad’s regime. One survivor explained that “one to three people would die inside every day.” Yet, Sednaya is only a fraction of the widespread and systemic brutality that defined Assad’s governance.
Beyond Sednaya, a vast network of mass graves, torture sites, and execution chambers dots Syria’s landscape, each telling its own story of systematic violence. Near Damascus alone, mass graves like Al-Qutayfah and Najha reveal the scale of the slaughter – tens of thousands of bodies buried in attempts to erase evidence of genocide. Over 150,000 Syrians remain missing, with 66 unverified mass graves suspected across the country.
This isn’t random violence; it’s a calculated, industrialized apparatus of repression and extermination.
For over a year now, the international community, Western media, human rights groups, the United Nations, and international courts have been preoccupied with criticizing Israel, scrambling to label its military campaign as “genocide.” Ireland even proposed changing the definition of genocide to justify such charges.
Meanwhile, the atrocities in Syria have been largely ignored. Assad’s regime represents dehumanization on a mass scale, yet the global response has been indifferent at best. Those who claim to champion human rights on the world stage remain conspicuously quiet.
Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, over 500,000 people have been killed, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians targeted by the Syrian regime.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights reports that, as of July 2020, at least 3,196 Palestinian refugees were killed by regime forces. Other estimates place the number of Palestinian refugees who have died due to war-related incidents in Syria at over 4,022. A UNRWA spokesperson highlighted the dire situation, stating, “Palestinians are among those worst affected by the Syrian conflict.”
Yet, the pro-Hamas rallies and encampments express no outrage on behalf of Syrian Palestinians. The intensity of protests we now witness for Gaza is unprecedented compared to reactions to other conflicts, even those with far greater casualties and destruction over much longer durations, such as the Syrian civil war.
Jewish communities worldwide have become all too accustomed to the double standards and antisemitism driving many “social justice movements.” But the selective moral outrage and indifference to the atrocities in Syria reveal a new level of hypocrisy. The disproportionate focus on criticizing Israel, while ignoring Assad’s crimes – even when his regime murdered Palestinians – lays bare the antisemitism at the core of these movements.
The crimes of the Assad regime demand accountability. Sednaya Prison and the broader network of atrocities have exposed a brutal chapter in Syria’s history, one that the international community has largely chosen to ignore.
If social justice warriors truly care about justice, they must broaden their focus beyond selective targets and confront the brutal realities of regimes like Assad’s. Anything less is moral bankruptcy.
The writer is the co-founder and CEO of Social Lite Creative, a digital marketing firm that specializes in geopolitics.