The Trial of a Dissident!

Kamal Labwani was interrogated today by the criminal court in Damascus. As is usual in such cases, the charges are pretty bogus and nonsensical, after all, what does contacting foreign state really means?

But Kamal did show the composure and confidence expected of him, as his lawyers noted, who themselves have been in his position not too long ago. Still, the trial of Kamal did not generate much attention in the press. Kamal has been forgotten, or at least, he was lost in that growing avalanche of jailed dissidents. This is why the idea for a freedom rally is now more necessary than ever. We cannot let people like Kamal be forgotten. We cannot let them be lost in the shuffle.

The Making of Armageddon!

The Jordanian authorities are still moving adamantly with their case against Hamas and the Syrian regime. The recent televised confessions of a Hamas suspect may seem like a page out of an old and worn out book, but it does betray a serious commitment to taking this matter to its logical conclusion: a confrontation with the Assad regime. When the Jordanian monarch warned against the rise of the Shia crescent, he was not mincing words or sound-bites. Rather, he was speaking as a true believer in the ultimate necessity of seeing this unholy crescent collapse and fall apart. He is a Hashemite after all. Continue reading →

Crouching Tiger, Duplicitous Lion!

The story of the Little Tiger, Numair al-Assad, ad his gang of bank robbers illustrates well the kind of family politics that is involved in the Assad clan these days.

Here is a man in his early thirties who was caught red-handed on camera leading his gang of thugs and cut-throats on a little heist where a little less than 1 million USD were stolen, a man who was clearly identified, captured by the authorities in full daylight, in an event that was reported even in Syrian media, a man who, despite his relation to the President (a first cousin and all that) was actually put in prison, a man who, therefore, and no matter how inadvertently, could have cleaned up the ashen image of the President by just staying in prison and getting the royal treatment. Instead, the man escapes from prison, with the duplicity of his jailers of course, and not to some far away country, but to his home-turf in the coastal city of Lattakia where he currently roams free, unmolested by anyone and still leading his gang on various heists. Continue reading “Crouching Tiger, Duplicitous Lion!” →

Saber-Rattling & Teeth-Gnashing!

OK. So, a “well-known opposition figure in Brussels” reports that many former Syrian regime members, with military and security expertise, are currently converging on Lebanon and Jordan to establish bases for future anti-regime operations, promising “two explosions for every explosion and two assassinations for every assassination,” all to be carried out with Saudi funding and approval. Continue reading →