Feb 27, 2012
The Butcher of Damascus
As the ostensibly cultured, British-educated Bashar Assad continues feasting on the blood of his countrymen (and women and children), I thought back a good long while at the Murder, Inc. legacy of the Assad family.
Hafez, the sociopath father of Bashar, was an efficient killer from the beginning.
His defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, was particularly sadistic to Israeli POWs during the Yom Kippur War. We learned just how bad it was after an elite Israeli counter-terrorism unit captured several Syrian officers, who were then exchanged for the POWs.
Then Hafez himself ordered the flattening (as in, like a parking lot) of Hama, a northern city that had a few too many brave souls critical of the regime back in 1982.
When the old man happily went straight to hell in the middle of a phone conversation with Hosni Mubarak in 1999—thanks to a massive coronary—the gullible West hoped once again that the son would not be like the father.
Bashar, though, kept the country weighted in the seventh-century and the oppressive police state has driven the country insane. As civil war rages all over Syria, we wonder why the world twiddles its thumbs.
Fifteen years ago, writing about the terror war Hezbollah had launched against Israel from Lebanese territory—a choreographed death dance created by Hafez Assad—Charles Krauthammer hit the rocket on the head:
“Syria controls Lebanon and exercises, as the cliché has it, ‘predominant influence’ over Hezbollah, a proxy force that Assad employs against Israel at his pleasure.”
Krauthammer went on to note that Assad knew he would suffer not condemnation from the international community.
In a sense, his son and successor is in the same boat. Sure, there “condemnations,” but Assad doesn’t care.
He knows that the world will sickly condemn Israel, and already one wonders how long before he will turn attention to the Jewish state, in an attempt to divert attention from his killing spree.
(Isaiah 17 tells us that one day—I hope soon—Damascus will disappear overnight. Intriguing, isn’t it?)
The dreadful and late Washington Post reporter Mary McGrory once voiced her displeasure at the one person she considered to be responsible for mayhem and chaos in the Middle East: Benjamin Netanyahu. She actually wrote the following, and it was published, in 2002:
“Netanyahu has a heavy voice and a head shaped like a bullet.”
Huh?
By using that kind of language, “head like a bullet,” she portrayed him as a man of violence. This was not too many years after a news magazine referred to Hafez Assad as a “hard-eyed phoenix.”
Translation: Jews are trouble-makers; the Arabs are resilient and plucky.
What gives here?
If Netanyahu has a head shaped like a bullet, I can say that the mustache sported by the beetle-browed Bashar Assad looks like a Kassam rocket.
British journalist Marie Colvin was blown into eternity this week by Syrian artillery intentionally targeting a media center in the city of Homs, where Assad has ordered that those opposing his regime be murdered indiscriminately.
He is no different than his father.
This week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon accused Syria of “almost certain” crimes against humanity.
Almost? You can read with your own two eyes how morally bankrupt the global body really is.
The General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Assad’s regime to “immediately put an end to attacks against civilians.” A whopping 137 of the 193 member states approved the resolution; boy, that’s resolve in the face of Syrian serial-killing.
No doubt Assad was too busy re-loading and giggling maniacally to notice the resolution.
Or he would have stopped. Right?
Something will have to be done about Syria’s dictator. Just like something will have to be done about Iran’s mullahs.
While the world calls the good guys names, the good guys will refuse a second Holocaust and come out with guns (or software) blazing.
When the smoke clears, the Jews will still be with us. That is, if there is any of us left