Russian President Vladimir Putin has a strange way of speaking straightforwardly, without all the artificial and "morally superior" airs one expects from Western politicians.

Earlier, for example, he wondered why Western leaders were supporting cannibals in Syria:

You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Are these the people you want to support? Is it them who you want to supply with weapons? Then this probably has little relation to humanitarian values that have been preached in Europe for hundreds of years.

Putin was referring to the notorious video of a jihadi leader biting into the organs of a Syrian soldier while screaming Islamic slogans.

Now, the straightforward Russian has asked another equally important and straightforward question — the sort of question so full of common sense that most Western politicians never expect to hear a fellow politician asking (and, as usual, one the Western media have failed to report on, though Arabic media is abuzz with it).

In a videotaped interview published today concerning U.S. attempts to go to war in Syria, not only did Putin criticize Secretary of State John Kerry's dissembling concerning the nature of the Syrian opposition, but he also said:

There is another question: if it turns out that the armed rebels are the ones who used weapons of mass destruction, what will the United States do with the armed rebels? And what will it do with those sponsoring the rebels? Will they stop supplying them with arms? Will they start fighting against them?

Indeed. Considering that invading Syria is almost entirely being rationalized in the context of Assad violating the human rights of others, what will the U.S. — Obama, Kerry, McCain, et. al. — do if it turns out that the al-Qaeda led rebels are, in fact, the ones using such weapons, as significant evidence already indicates?

Probably what they are doing now: continue misleading Americans and go to war anyway, since — and once again — this has nothing to do with chemical weapons.

Update: RT posted the video and translation of Putin's questions regarding what the U.S. would do if it turns out the rebels used chemical weapons (here, around the four-minute mark).

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While U.S. leaders continue pushing for war against the Syrian government, today "Al-Qaeda-linked rebels," reports AP, "launched an assault on a regime-held Christian mountain village in the densely populated west of Syria and new clashes erupted near the capital, Damascus, on Wednesday... In the attack on the village of Maaloula, rebels commandeered a mountaintop hotel and nearby caves and shelled the community below, said a nun, speaking by phone from a convent in the village. She spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals."

Arabic news agency Al Hadath gives more information concerning this latest terror attack on Syria's Christians, specifically how the al-Qaeda linked rebels "terrorized the Christians, threatening to be avenged on them after the triumph of the revolution."

Thus al-Qaeda terrorists eagerly await U.S. assistance against the Syrian government, so they can subjugate if not slaughter Syria's Christians, secularists, and non-Muslims — even as the Obama administration tries to justify war on Syria by absurdly evoking the "human rights" of Syrians on the one hand, and lying about al-Qaeda's presence in Syria on the other.

Update: New information including video of attack can be accessed here

Did the Syrian government, or did it not, use chemical weapons — that is the question that will apparently decide whether the U.S. will enter another, messy war, one that may have many long term consequences.

That is the question the media and its talking heads are abuzz with.

And yet, that is also the question that — to any objective, independent thinker — is wholly irrelevant.

Why? Because the fact is, from one end of the world to the other, outrageous human rights abuses — many much worse than the use of chemical weapons — are going on.

As Bruce Thornton recently put it in a FrontPage Magazine article:

[A]ll this rhetoric about “crimes against humanity” and the “responsibility to protect” reeks of hypocrisy and moral preening. The President said, “We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale.” Who’s he kidding? We already have, in Hussein’s Iraq. Change “gassed” to “bombed,” “fire-bombed,” “hacked to death,” “machine-gunned,” and “starved” and you can cover the globe with the victims whose deaths on a “terrible scale” we have “accepted.” We have stood by and watched millions of women, children, and innocent civilians murdered in all sorts of ways equally as, or more gruesome and painful than, dying by poison gas. In Rwanda anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered in 1994, many by being hacked to death with machetes, not to mention the women raped, purposely infected with HIV, and sexually mutilated. We did nothing to stop the killing not because we militarily couldn’t, but because it was not in our national interests and security to do so. Hence we sent in a toothless U.N. to salve our consciences and deflect the charge of callous inactivity. So all those calling for intervention in Syria or anywhere else to prevent “crimes against humanity” should be required to explain just how this unfortunately common slaughter is different from all those others we did not intervene to stop. The fact is, given that we cannot expend our citizens’ lives to protect all the millions of global victims of violence, we must make the decision based not on “international norms” but on the national interests and security of the United States, as these are determined by the citizens of the United States through their elected representatives. In the event, frequently pursuing those interests will end up punishing egregious violators like Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. But the definitive criterion must be how the action concretely protects our citizens and our interests. Specifically answering that question––not appealing to delusional “international norms,” or assertions of deterring future malefactors on behalf of some imagined “global community”––should be the focus of the upcoming Congressional debate.

Concerning Syria, then, the real question is not whether Assad used chemical weapons or not, but rather why his doing so would warrant U.S. military intervention — when so many worse human rights abuses are happening all around the world, each one of which is as well documented as the chemical accusation against Assad is still open to debate.

In short, if there is a legitimate case for invading Syria, U.S. leaders, beginning with Obama, need to start making it, and drop the hypocritical rhetoric about "human rights" concerns — which has become nothing short of insulting to one's intelligence.