"If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" Philosopher George Berkeley asked this question while he was looking for the answers to the notion that perception creates our reality. Berkeley's theory says, yes, it would make a sound even if no one was there to hear it because God hears everything.There is a modern physics version of the question. "Is the moon there when nobody's looking?" Albert Einstein asked that to the quantum physicist Niehl Bohr, and Bohr said "It's not there when nobody is looking." According to Bohr, when we don't look at the moon all that exists is a probability density. When we make an observation of any thing's position, we force the universe to take a stand and the thing pops into existence at a certain place, states the quantum mechanics. The question is about perception and discusses the existence outside the human perception. Can we assume the unobserved things function the same as the observed?Lately, I have been thinking about this interesting philosophical topic a lot. Are things really there or are they not when we don't observe it? For example, there is an accident or a crime taking place and all the ones who are involved are dead, does it still happen or not? If someone was killed in some place, let's say, in Syria, and there was no one to see or hear it, were they still killed? If someone was tortured, raped or dismembered or killed through starvation, and there was no one to see, hear or report it, did it still happen or not? If there was a massacre, for example in Homs, or in Aleppo, and there was no one to survive or witness it, did it still happen? There are hundreds of thousands lost people who were forced to flee from their homes in Syria, if they died in an unknown place, are they still dead?We don't know how Berkeley would answer this question if he lived in this age or how the conversation would be shaped if they lived now. Still, I suggest that they all would say that the victims were tortured, raped, dismembered and starved to death, the massacre existed since there was at least one person to see and hear what was happened: The executer.Some Western opinion-shapers are calling for an alliance with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad against ISIS after the barbaric group executed two U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. With the two horrifying murders, the argument for working with the Syrian butcher came up. ISIS seems to execute more people in Syria and Iraq whenever it sticks. And the argument for cooperating with Assad will resurface again and again with each murder. First, I thought it was a joke but no, they are not kidding. Is this really the way to handle the ISIS situation? Assad may not be killing U.S. citizens and is not sharing gruesome videos of his murders, but he is still the executer who the whole world knows is responsible for more than 200,000 deaths in the last four years while he continues to bomb civilians. The U.N. has also produced evidence that war crimes were authorized in Syria at the "highest level," including those by Assad.When Iraq's central government lost control of Mosul, the U.S. government was disappointed with Nouri al-Maliki who was responsible for the sectarian violence in the first place. The Obama administration's frustration was showing that they would never again believe in Maliki for stabilizing the country. He had one job and yet he failed. So, Maliki was forced to resign. More than that, Assad is the one who is behind the violence in Syria and has paved the way for extremism in the whole region. How can someone offer cooperation with Assad instead of stopping him as well as ISIS? Where were they when hundreds of thousands people were slaughtered by Assad? On the Moon or in a forest?