US pays little heed to horror in Aleppo

A Muslim student at New York University says some Trump supporters pulled off her hijab and yelled epithets at her on a bus, then admits it was all a big fat lie. It's disgusting and unacceptable.

But Muslim women in Aleppo are being raped.

Feminists are freaking out because Texas passed a law requiring clinics and hospitals to respectfully bury the remains of babies who have been aborted. It's disgusting and unsurprising from abortion-rights militants.

But babies are being massacred in Aleppo.

Donald Trump attacks the CIA for suggesting Russians hacked into the DNC emails, thereby influencing our domestic political processes even though he himself invited them to hack into Hillary's "30,000" emails during the campaign. It's disgusting and typical of a man who said Vladimir Putin was "doing a great job."

But the Russians are helping the Syrian government murder innocent civilians.

There are things that are happening in this country that don't deserve the attention we give them, from  mentally disturbed liars creating "hate crimes" that never happened, to women who are so insecure about their "reproductive rights" that they are blind to common decency, to a president-elect who can't even spell the word "hypocrisy." These things fill our front pages and our newsfeeds and our smartphones and our water-cooler chatter.

[Besieged residents leave as ceasefire is brokered in Aleppo]

But the world is ending in Aleppo. The flames are engulfing its streets, the bullets are tearing through the bodies of its remaining inhabitants, the earth is groaning under the weight of its new corpses, the air is filled with the screams of its dying.

And we look away, until we are forced to face the reality, a reality show that doesn't have tidy, self-contained episodes and beautiful, Botoxed faces and faux-tragedies like broken engagements. We look, for the few moments or days that we care to devote to the tragedy unfolding on our watch, and then move on to the next sound bite.

Is Alec Baldwin on "SNL" this week? Will Kanye be fitted for a straitjacket? Did Angelina get full custody of the rest of the kids she forgot to adopt from Ethiopia?
I'm disgusted with America this week. I'm not one of those who march in the streets to talk about stolen elections (and has Jill Stein bought an abacus to count the 12.5 votes she's still looking for in Wisconsin?). I'm tired of hearing about the Million Women's March on D.C. (Seriously, ladies, just shut up and start hiking.)

I don't care about any of this, and if you do, I'm sorry but I have no time for you either.

Aleppo, the place Gary Johnson was too stoned to locate on a map, is dying. And history is repeating itself.

When the Armenians were exterminated by Turkey at the turn of the last century, the world pretended it wasn't happening. A few good men like Constantinople U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau tried to alert the United States to the catastrophe, and he even had help from Teddy Roosevelt, who urged President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. Wilson the isolationist did nothing, and the Christians were erased from the Ottoman Empire. The cowardly Turks still deny it to this day. Syria will do the same with Aleppo.

Then, when the Jews were being eliminated, nationality by nationality, from Western Europe, Felix Frankfurter urged Franklin Roosevelt to act. The American government didn't want to jump into the conflict, and until Pearl Harbor, essentially closed its eyes to the genocidal wave across the Atlantic.

Never again, we said.

But again the horror came, in Cambodia, with the killing fields. American diplomats begged our State Department to address the atrocities perpetrated by the communist Khmer Rouge, but as Samantha Powers notes in her book "A Problem from Hell," they were "derided by the American left for falling for anti-Communist propaganda." And the bodies piled up.

In Srebrenica, the Serbs defied the United Nations by gathering 7,000 Muslim men into a football stadium and killing them en masse.

In Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, head of the U.N. peacekeeping forces, sought permission to disarm the Hutu militias before they had a chance to unleash their demonic hatred against the Tutsis, a rival ethnic group, and was rebuffed by his superiors. Our own government blocked the attempts to increase the number of U.N. peacekeepers on the ground. As Powers notes, "some 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days" in 1994.

And Aleppo is disintegrating before our eyes.

There was a ceasefire on Tuesday between the Syrian government and the rebels, and it collapsed as quickly as it was brokered. Innocent civilians were killed in their homes and during evacuations. Another was brokered on Wednesday, and that also will collapse if the past is prologue.

I deal with immigrants from that part of the world in my legal practice, but I meet the lucky ones who escaped before the massacres began. They are the reality that fills my days, flesh and blood stepping out of celluloid and newsprint, into my office waiting room.

But again, they are the lucky ones. The others are still there in Aleppo, which is dying.

The average American cannot make a difference, cannot become a medic and treat the injured, cannot provide housing for the homeless, cannot bring sanity and stability to a city on the edge of the abyss, cannot force our government to finally, do the right thing.

But we can have the grace to pay attention to the dismantling of civilization this time around, and let our Syrian brothers and sisters know they are seen, felt, heard.

We owe this, in the name of 1 million Armenians, 6 million Jews,2 million Cambodians, 7,000 Bosnian Muslims, and 800,000 Rwandans.

Christine Flowers is a lawyer and a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Email, cflowers1961@gmail.com. Twitter @flowerlady61.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email  to commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com.