Making Love to Satan

Numbers written on the bodies and on white cards told regime bureaucrats the identities of the deceased, when they died and which branch of Syrian authorities had held them, according to a Syrian military-police photographer now outside of Syria. Faces have been obscured at photo source's request. — Numbers written on the bodies and on white cards told regime bureaucrats the identities of the deceased, when they died and which branch of Syrian authorities had held them, according to a Syrian military-police photographer now outside of Syria. Faces have been obscured at photo source’s request.

10,000 Bodies: Inside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Crackdown – WSJ.

Caesar’s revelations referred in the WSJ article might seem old by now to those following developments in Syria at it has been reported months ago, but now, it is the U.S. official investigators who have examined the evidence supplied by Caesar and who are corroborating his story. Indeed, an Industrial-scale campaign of mass slaughter is being conducted by the Assad regime against his opponent, a campaign that was unleashed soon after the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, even in its year-long nonviolent phase.

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Justice for All, or Peace for None!

justice-peace

When the murder itself is not the problem and the identity of the victim is irrelevant; when the identity of the murderer is the thing that prompts reaction and dictates its nature and scale, is it really surprising that we live in mayhem, and that hypocrisy is the guiding ethos of our lives? So long as our support for justice remains selective, the very notion of justice loses its meaning. Those who truly believe in justice have to be consistent in their stands. Syrians, Iraqis, Darfuris, Yemenis, Somalis, Pakistanis, etc. deserve justice no less than the Palestinians, irrespective of the identity of the persecutors involved: ruling regimes, extremist militias or foreign occupiers.

Who Are We? We Are Many!

A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD

Some people have enough moral sense to criticize Israel, but not to criticize anything that Assad and his supporters have done and are still doing. They see ISIS stoning women and chasing away Christians, but they ignore all evidence and testimony of torture, mass rape and mass murder in Assad’s concentration camps. They ignore evidence of collaboration between ISIS and Assad. They ignore Iran’s role in the current mayhem in Syria, Iraq and Gaza, and advocate engagement with her. They defend Russia and ignore her duplicity in war crimes in Syria and Ukraine. Clearly these people cannot truly be concerned with human rights. Their stand by the Palestinians at this stage seems motivated more by ideology than any sense of moral solidarity – an ideology that put Israel and America, and sometimes the West as a whole, at the center of all evil designs in the world; an ideology that, in essence, covets the power that these countries have and longs to appropriate it, rather than be truly dedicated to holding all equally accountable for their misdeeds.

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Fodder is our name

A family rests on the rubble of their home in Jebaliya (Time Magazine)

It took decades for Palestinian to finally win overt support in some mainstream international media outlets. But, and as is often the case with modern-day Arabs, the victory is Pyrrhic in nature and will not translate into any substantive support for the Palestinians’ goal of establishing their own independent state.

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