The Assad regime continued its Hitlerite/Stalinist behavior on Easter Sunday, raiding homes near Damascus. From Reuters: Security operatives in plain clothes wielding assault rifles broke into homes in the suburb of Harasta just after midnight on Sunday, arresting activists in the area, known as the Ghouta, or the old garden district of the capital.
Debka has more:
Saturday, April 23 saw the constantly mounting uprising against the Assad regime finally reaching the Syrian capital Damascus where DEBKAfile reports 300,000 – 15 percent of the city’s dwellers – took the streets shouting: “Bashar Assad you are a traitor!” That day too the Syrian ruler unleashed his security forces for the harshest crackdown yet in order to break the back of the five-week civil uprising. The result: 350 dead, tripling the number of Friday’s bloodbath and thousands of injured.
Early Sunday, secret service thugs hauled thousands of protesters out of their homes. They broke down doors in the Harasta and Ghouta districts of Damascus, dragged their victims out and dumped them on covered trucks which drove off to unknown destinations. Ghouta is the ancient garden quarter of Damascus.
Question for the day: Should anyone ever read Vogue magazine again?
We will never really know what is happening over there as we only get snippets of reports and videos that are posted at great peril. I ahve said before that the only country that could really help and has a stake in the game is Israel. I think they would actually like to help but would help even be wanted if offered? The muslim mind has been so poisened by hatred that muslims have put themselves into this position. It is really a sad state of affairs.
You have contacts that most of us do not Roger I suggest that if there is any organization to the protests going on there that they consider holding out an olive branch to Isael. It might do more to cure the problems in the middle east than all other forms of diplomacy if it can be seen that Israel would help a muslim country throw off the yoke of oppresion.
Things are coming along nicely.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/04/24/%e2%80%9call-the-assad-posters-are-gone%e2%80%9d/
“All the Assad Posters Are Gone”
Michael Rubin 04.24.2011 – 11:53 AM
I just got off the phone with a contact who drove from Syria to Jordan—a frightening trip, he said, as he got pulled out at a checkpoint by masked security officers and barely talked his way out of a far worse situation. The road to Jordan and all the small towns along the way are normally dotted with smiling portraits of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria. Every single mural has been taken down or defaced, my contact said. What’s going on now in Syria appears to be full-scale rebellion.
Tragically, it is a rebellion in a vacuum. If the media catalyzed revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, Bashar al-Assad is determined to ensure they fail to do the same in Syria. In the last few days, journalists from BBC, Reuters, and elsewhere have been arrested and expelled. It seems that Assad is preparing to do something he prefers the world not see. Something tells me what he plans to do will not justify Secretary of State Clinton’s description of him as a reformer.
Thanks for the update. I think the Progroms are about to start or maybe they are already underway. This is a very dangerous time for all the people there.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
–Alexander Solzhenitsyn
In the final analysis, it’s really up to the Syrians.
And how much more possible was it for Stalin to carry out his terror since the Russian people had long been disarmed. As the Founders knew well, an armed populace is a check against a tyrannical government. No, hunting rifles and other small arms are no use against the full force of a modern army. But the widespread possession of firearms may make it more difficult to enslave a populace through ‘secret police’ terror methods.
I agree, the price of freedom is blood and always has been. It’s the hardest thing in the world to give up your life for a future you’ll never see.
Some cultures are up to the task, some aren’t, sometimes the brute force applied cannot be overcome.
Assad sees where Mubarak and his sons are and there is no reason for him to submit to that future. Mubarak failed to be able to apply brute force in the face of such a massive uprising. In Syria it will be a similar numbers games.
Why the hell should we care about these people? When Bush gave Saddam a beating and Gaddafi gave up his nuke, instead of taking advantage of the situation to get rid of their own dictators, the so-called Arab street protested against the Great Satan coming to take their precious oil. Now they try to manipulate the enervated not-so-Great Satan to fight their god damned wars. Why don’t they just drink their precious oil?
The whole world was against Bush because Saddam had stopped his massacres when Bush started the war. Gaddafi hasn’t slaughtered more than the usual number of Libyans before they started their rebellions, Assad hasn’t done anything worse than what he had done before. The rebels are Muslims whose every move is dictated by their Koran, they are not freedom loving democrats. They are another group of power hungry dictators-in-waiting struggling for power. Stay the hell out of their fight.