Miley Cyrus and Syria's problem from hell: Column

Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman | USATODAY

The Syria crisis continues to spawn more twists than a pretzel factory. Two things are clear: Footage of families writhing and dying in agony from poison gas attacks by the Assad regime has not stirred Americans' outrage, and without it, no relief for suffering Syrians is in sight.

The signs of America's shrinking attention span abound. Even before President Obama's decision to delay a vote on military intervention in Syria, maverick Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont reported that his constituents place the use of chemical weapons against civilians last among problems Congress should address — far behind global warming.

Miley over murder

Meanwhile, New York magazine details an online survey confirming that Americans were 12 times more interested in Miley Cyrus' racy antics than graphic reports on the Syrian regime's butchery.

This crisis is the latest chapter in the world's uneven struggle against what the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, has called "the problem from hell," an issue the public inevitably prefers to ignore.

It was 70 years ago that Jewish refugee scholar Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" for what Winston Churchill in 1941 had called "a crime without a name." The new word and the millions of innocents butchered by the Nazis during World War II spurred the 1948 adoption of the first international human rights law — the U.N. Convention on Genocide. The U.S. took 40 years to ratify the convention.

Only last year, Obama authorized the interagency Atrocities Prevention Board to become our nation's early warning system for both "mass atrocities" and genocide. To date, the board has done no such thing — not in Syria, not anywhere. Its tragic inertia has done nothing but signal to tyrants that America doesn't care about nameless victims of genocide.

Attempts to ban chemical weapons date to World War I. In the aftermath, the League of Nations tried to ban their use, but Adolf Hitler's death machine had other ideas. Just weeks before the Jewish New Year in 1942, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland informed the U.S. and British governments of the Nazi plan to exterminate Europe's Jews using gas. Both governments were skeptical, and did nothing about it.

In 1988, Iraq's Saddam Hussein used poison gas, against both Iran and Iraq's Kurdish minority. Simon Wiesenthal warned then that, if no action were taken, we would all eventually pay a price. We did when the U.S. went to war with an emboldened Saddam twice in the coming decades. Now, Hussein's horrific crimes against the Kurds have inspired Bashar Assad and company to gas Syrian men, women and children.

Needless negotiation

Whatever the final outcome of the new Russia-U.S. agreement on Syria's chemical weapons, we need to remind new generations that there are red lines worth fighting for. We had better relearn some brutal history lessons from "crimes against humanity" going back before the Holocaust.

What's at stake? If international red lines about the use of chemical weapons on civilians can be crossed with impunity, can a nuclear weapon deployed by a rogue state's proxy terrorists be so unthinkable?

If we don't act against the gassing of innocents today, we better prepare for new atrocities. On that day, we'll forget Miley Cyrus and carbon emissions will lose their drama.

Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where Harold Brackman is a consultant.

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