A Letter to PJ Media from the Reform Party of Syria
As Received by Richard Pollock on Monday at 2:19 PM EDT:
As Syrians continue to be at the receiving end of Assad’s terror machine, the Reform Party of Syria, with all its base of support inside and outside Syria, would like to thank the management of PJ Media for choosing these difficult times to provide us with a platform to expose the atrocities committed against our people.
Special thanks to Mr. Roger Simon, Mr. Richard Pollock, and Mr. Aaron Hanscom and all the staff at PJ Media.
With freedom in Syria, the Levant region would benefit by holding those in power accountable to their people. Accountability is an enabler for peace and a destroyer of rampant terror.
April 23, 2011
RPS Leadership, Members, and Supporters
(PJM’s Syria coverage is here.)
In Egypt during the uprising, people rose in every major city in their hundreds of thousands and took to the streets. It was a numbers game before which Mubarak in the end was helpless. The cross section of people who took part was so great that for the army to have opened fire on them would’ve been to simply shoot at themselves. The protesters did not need petitions nor did they ask for them and all was done in 18 days.
In Syria, a land of some 25 millions, it is a numbers game as well. Assad has seen the lessons of Egypt and taken them to heart. But it is an utterly different situation from Egypt in that forms of sectarianism are playing their part, making it easy to fire on those one considers an “other” and the vast majority of people are sitting this one out.
Assad has the advantage of not having major news bureaus and tourism unmask the killings. In Egypt there were 50,000 Americas alone living and working there and that was its own petition.
Assad cannot be taken down and it is as simple as that. Right or wrong, for better or worse. Assad has no intention of seeing either himself or his family marched into jail cells and those who benefit from his rule will not allow themselves to be deconstructed as has been the case in Egypt.
Syria is not Libya where the entire country lies on the coast in flat ground with nowhere to hide from an eye in the sky. Libya did not have a HQ for the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas as does Syria or have fanatics with missiles like Hizbollah nearby.
With the death of Bin Laden the U.S. may feel emboldened to intervene in Syria but I doubt it. A hornet’s nest may have been stirred by the death of Bin Laden but it will quickly subside – an intervention in Syria will have grave consequences for Lebanon and Israel and the nearby hearts of hatred in Damascus, Lebanon and Gaza will not take U.S. intervention lying down. In the end the same situation as happened in Iraq will take hold with a large and indifferent population occupied while guerillas from around the region converge to assert the dignity of Islam and make an exclamation point in Syria as best they can.
Raw power has shown it can cow Islamic terror but not stamp it out other than by sheer attrition in the way of death. Syria has the same number of people as did Iraq and with similar sectarianism and with Kurds who dream of independence again in the north and an angry Turkey dead set against Kurds on the border. The question becomes then merely a matter of what the U.S. is willing to spend in blood and money.