Syria’s post-Assad government dealt a quiet but devastating blow to decades of propaganda on December 10 by formally registering the first Jewish organization in the country’s history and authorizing the restoration of Jewish property and synagogues confiscated under the Assads.

A seductive narrative continues to circulate in geopolitical circles—often echoed by Western observers—claiming that the Assad regime, despite its brutality, acted as a crucial “bulwark of secularism” in the Middle East. According to this view, without the Assads, Syria would have inevitably collapsed into religious fundamentalism. Yet once historical data and the country’s sociopolitical mechanics are brought into focus, this narrative collapses.

Against all odds — and in the face of overwhelming military force, foreign occupation, and relentless international slander — Syrians overthrew one of the most brutal and entrenched dictatorships of our time. After more than a decade of revolution, they brought down the Assad regime, a hereditary dictatorship that had ruled by massacre, torture, and fear since the 1970s.

In a heartwarming show of international solidarity — or perhaps nuclear trolling — Russia today announced its willingness to give sanctuary to Iran’s enriched uranium. Not Iranian people, of course. Just the radioactive stuff. Human beings from the Middle East, other than current and deposed tyrants and their families, remain notably less welcome in Moscow than uranium hexafluoride.

As Syria embraces hard-won freedom after almost 14 years of revolution and war and over half a century of tyranny, both Israel and Iran are increasingly focused on the same objective: to undermine the new government and weaken Syrian unity.

It was another fine speech. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, with his usual mournful gravity, warned the world this week that the situation in Gaza had reached “the cruellest phase yet.” A humanitarian catastrophe. Famine. Children dying. “A moral outrage,” he called it. And then what? A press release. Another grim statement filed under “Too Late, Again.” If the UN were judged not by the eloquence of its leaders but by the lives it failed to save, its headquarters might as well be a mausoleum.

The UN’s Original Sin: Doing Nothing Loudly

In a statement that might have been mistaken for satire if it weren’t official policy, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian announced this week that Iran would "pause engagement" with Syria "until stability is restored."

The remark, from an interview with Russia Today, also published by Russian state news agency TASS on Friday, comes just over four months after the collapse of the Assads' bloody regime, propped up by Tehran for almost 14 years.