'Arab newspaper: Why, Arab dictators are worse than the Zionists!'

Ed Morrissey quips, “a Syrian journalist is shocked, shocked to discover that Arab dictators are much more brutal than Israelis have ever been:”

Via Carl in Jerusalem, this can almost literally be called a Road to Damascus moment — or perhaps a Road to Hama moment, as troops loyal to Syrian strongman Bashar Assad are now surrounding the city where his father killed 10,000 people by dropping bombs on them. The Dubai-based Gulf News, which has no problem running Holocaust-denial columns on occasion and accusing Zionists and Nazis of conspiring to create a Holocaust hoax, published a column this weekend in which a Syrian journalist is shocked, shocked to discover that Arab dictators are much more brutal than Israelis have ever been:

In fact, the Sudanese regime killed hundreds of thousands of its own people in Darfur. The so-called Janjaweed gangs in Sudan used to annihilate the people of Darfur like flies simply because the latter clamoured for their basic rights. An Arab satirist once commented that an Arab dictator would not accept the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza even as an appetiser! …

The ongoing Arab intifadas have shown that some Arab rulers can beat the Israelis at their own game. An Arab website recently carried an opinion poll asking readers: ‘Who will be a killioneer?’ Sure enough, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya won the day. Not only did he kill a lot of his own people but also almost flattened many Libyan cities. It brought to mind western cities flattened by Hitler’s forces during the Second World War.

Take Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen. WikiLeaks has revealed that his ‘chairmanship’ gave the green light to American aircraft to bombard civilian areas to quell a local revolt. Add to this, of course, his brutal handling of the Yemeni revolution.

Other Arab despots are reported to have asked their security forces to aim their guns at protesters’ heads. Have you ever seen an Israeli officer torturing a Palestinian civilian to death in the street for everybody to see? Definitely not. Many of us have seen that in some Arab towns lately.