We reject and condemn atrocities, especially when committed by someone who call himself one of us. On the other hand, the propagandists gang like revenire, zoo, citizen, and cut-past ann have been calling for atrocities and celebrating each and every single murder, massacre, and horror inflicted by their master and its army of hyenas.
The international fury at “the human organ eating” opposition fighter (along with all the other furies before it – at the American soldiers’ urinating on the corpses of dead Afghanies) is in itself outrageous because the ultimate insult and basest act EVER is to KILL someone, to rob them of their life, what happens after that is absolutely a non-issue. cutting up a cadaver, eating it, pissing on it, well, it is DEAD, FFS! It is disgusting, yes, but don’t bloody tell me it is morally reprehensible more than having taken the man’s life in the first place! When I die I dont give a damn what happens to my body (and despite my atheism I have to admit harboring admiration for the Arabian custom of burying the dead out in the desert without any markings whatsoever over the tomb, just a little mound of sand that the wind will eventually flatten. Perfect!).
And in this case the cadaver was that of a soldier who died trying to kill others. But was that what the women and children in Bayda were trying to do when they butchered by the Assadist thugs? Just lined up and shot from right to left in front of their other family members.
BTW, Ghufran, sticking a dead fighter’s severed head on a lance was done in all cultures all over the world, not an exclusivly Arab or Muslim or Sunni thing.
I remebered another excellent custom of dealing with dead bodies, that of the Zoroastrians of Persia who left the dead on a mountain top so that vultures and other wild animals would eat them.
“Omar survived what residents, antigovernment activists and human rights monitors are calling one of the darkest recent episodes in the Syrian war, a massacre in government-held Tartus Province that has inflamed sectarian divisions, revealed new depths of depravity and made the prospect of stitching the country back together appear increasingly difficult.”
Paul Owen, in his article of the Guardian, fails to mention that it is the Time who has obtained the tape in April, as stated in the article they published on 12 May, about the cannibalism videotape.
Until 2 PM, answering some readers comments who are questioning the precautions he takes in saying “appears to show” while the person figured is a famous rebel commander and he says what he is doing, he keeps taking HRW for coverture, without any mention of The Time. The chronology seems made up. He says the tape has appeared in the last few days and is being studied by HRW, whom director he calls and quote all day long. Is this meant to provide something “live” to the Mideast Guardian Live blog? How lower will The Guardian fall next time?
He finally mentions The Time, but this time to refer to an article “just published”, but he apparently has not yet read the first article, nor read the news round-up of SC!
http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/
In his comment in the readers comments section, Owen even uses the “more soon” trick, as if for once he was providing first hand information.
Poor Paul and poor HRW, afraid of getting their Gulf and rebel friends upset? Indeed, that would make it quite dangerous for his colleagues on the ground).
A Russian military expert on a Western air attack on Syria: “dozens of destroyed aircraft and coffins covered by star-spangled banners.” 🙂
Judging by the tone of Putin and Netanyahu after the talks, the degree of disagreement between Moscow and Tel Aviv on Syria is much higher than the degree of agreement
Thanks for your reply. My feeling so far is that you are good person, especially since you are NOT an Assad or Hezbollah supporter.
I appreciate your attitude toward Palestine. As much as you support Palestine, most Jews support Israel, so you know how everyone feels. We aren’t different we just the opposite sides of the same coin. Dehumanizing people is the crux of the problem and if we’re ever to live in peace, the first step is to recognize this.
I appreciate your anger at the Israeli government. You have a right. Israel still occupies parts of Palestine (which parts really depend on a final settlement). Palestine is still not a fully defined, sovereign country, and unfortunately, it will take negotiations to reach that point.
But you completely ignored my questions! I don’t mind hearing about how much you hate Israel, but I would appreciate it if you shed some light on some other subjects. I’ll repeat my questions again:
I use Wikipedia because there are often footnotes to click on, etc. If you have better info, feel free to add another link.
As far as Israel/Palestine is concerned, the majority was Palestinian. In 1950, it was about even, 50/50 (non-Wiki source) since many Jews left/were thrown out of arab countries :
The video shows how Alawites in Syria are producing allegedly chemical weapons. They are doing this wearing ABC Suites with German flags on the side.
It is striking to see how a massacre has become politicized. It is even also very interpretative. However, we do understand the views and opinions as they are very influenced by one single video.
Massacres were committed in Syria even before 2010 as we remember the Palmyra prison massacre and Hama massacre both by Hafez al-Assad.
We’re not going with the views that massacres in Syria are related with ethnic cleansing. In our view, even the Al Bayda killings fits within the profile of random revenge tactics when Assad forces loose like in Taftanaz.
The massacre on the coast did not happened so suddenly. We see this monstrous crime as a response on boiling opposition we have monitored weeks before the killings. It also remember us Al Houle (Homs) and Al Tremseh (Hama).
We think that the Al Bayda massacre is just another Al Houle or Tremseh as Assad really don’t care who has been killed as long as he can stay in power.
So, if anyone only speaks about ethnic cleansing of Alawites he or she ignores the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis which is going on for much longer.
Yes. The girl who shared a desk with me in 7 grade was Palestinian. I just assumed they were free to live anywhere. I am not really versed on Palestinian rights on Syria. Are they not allowed to own a house or live or work where they want to? That is a shame if true.
The revolution is not a dinner party, Chairman Mao famously said. Tell that to Khaled al-Hamad, the rogue rebel leader who had himself videoed biting into the heart he had just cut out of a Syrian regime soldier, now circulating wildly on the internet. We don’t actually see him consume the organ, but he appears to tear off a chunk with his teeth.
Actually, Chairman Mao’s dictum wasn’t even honoured in China. During the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, Red Guards in China’s southern Guangxi province took rather literally the order to consume their capitalist reader enemies. According to investigative reports that leaked out in the 1990s, at least 137 people were eaten at banquets ordered by local officials. One woman was recorded by an internal inquiry as having torn the first strip from the roasted body of a school headmaster, her boyfriend’s father, to prove that despite the personal connection she was as “Red” as the best of them.
There is a point to this. Mutilating your enemy’s body and even eating his flesh are not, I think we can agree, good things, but they do have a long history. You can go back to the Iliad for the earliest great description of what happens when the bloodlust is up. As Hector lies dying in the dust, he prays his conqueror Achilles “by his life and his knees” to send his body home to his parents for a decent burial and not leave it for the dogs, but Achilles just glares at him mercilessly.
“Dog, talk not to me neither of knees nor parents,” Achilles says. “Would that I could be as sure of being able to cut your flesh into pieces and eat it raw, for the ill you have done me, as I am that nothing shall save you from the dogs.”
His fellows join in. “The other Achaeans came running up to view his wondrous strength and beauty; and no one came near him without giving him a fresh wound. Then would one turn to his neighbour and say, ‘It is easier to handle Hector now than when he was flinging fire on to our ships’ and as he spoke he would thrust his spear into him anew.”
Finally, and most famously, Achilles makes slits in Hector’s heels and uses ox-hide ties to attach them to his chariot, dragging the corpse around the battlement’s of his foe’s city.
Yet Achilles, though a petulant schoolboy in much of the Iliad, is still a great hero: as, it is said, was the British soldier (more recently) accused of slicing off the ears of dead Argentinians in the Falklands. Students of the Crusades reading of the ongoing and bloody battle over the town of Maarat al-Numaan, south-west of Aleppo, in the current conflict, can hardly fail to recall a previous “clash of civilisations”. During the siege of the same city in 1098, the Crusaders were reported (by their own side: no videos available) to have roasted the bodies of Muslim children on spits and eaten them.
Do these reminiscences lessen the crime? Of course not. But they make me wonder whether the horror caused by this latest video, which has been “shared” it seems far more than any of the other monstrosities this conflict has thrown up, is because such mutilations are now less commonly practised, more unusual, than in the past.
By contrast with the above, the overwhelmingly respectful funerals I have witnessed in Syria over the last couple of years have been rare moments of peace and higher feeling amid the carnage. A colleague the other day, while we were in Syria, described talking to a father who went through the lines to reclaim the body of his son. We were both reminded of the Homeric account above, which is why it was in my mind: after, Priam, Hector’s father, comes to beg Achilles for the body, and with its honourable return and cremation the Iliad ends: “Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of horses.”
There is a tension sometimes between journalistic and moral narratives. Although of course overall we may try to point out the bad so that the good can triumph, within that ambition there is also this: an event is more newsworthy if it is rare or strange. Other, worse, more important horrors are overlooked because they are common. In the town of Baniyas on 2-3 May, there seems to be little doubt that a pro-regime militia swept through two Sunni neighbourhoods slaughtering large numbers of those they found, shooting and knifing many to death. There are photographs – you can find them online – of piles of corpses of little children, aged from two or three upwards. Altogether there seem to have been scores of them.The nature of this crime cannot be fully revealed, because no newspaper, including this one, would publish such pictures. The media are happy to present a pixilated image of a heart-eater, however.
As a result, and of course because we have become so inured to such massacres, the Baniyas incident has received comparatively little international attention. Yet the killing of women and children in war has been regarded as an unspeakable crime throughout history: the Athenians’ massacre of the Milans in the Peloponnesian War caused great shock and debate at home, is referred to as the exemplar of genocide from ancient history, yet even they merely killed the males, and sold the women and children into slavery. That precedent may have often been honoured only in the breach – think of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims Genghis Khan killed as he swept through the Middle East, the same Genghis who is regarded as a hero in the Far East today – but it is still a fundamental principle.
Somehow, as well as honouring the dead, we have to keep our attention focused on the living, otherwise there is no hope. Suggestions on how we journalists can do this, let alone the leaders tasked with responsibility for ending the conflict, are gratefully received.
“So, everyone inside Syria is going their own way, fulminating at each other and with the western powers for not supporting them. The United States (and western Europe) have no good options, and their elites will therefore continue to shout at each other, each suggesting policies that will in fact be ineffective.”
This is not at all plausible for the editorial writers of Le Monde. They look at the visit of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to Moscow as a betrayal. They call it “Western renunciation” of the demand made last August by the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany that the resignation of Assad be the prerequisite for intra-Syrian political discussions.
Of the Western powers, it has been France that has taken the most overtly “interventionist” line. But when France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius gave an interview to Le Monde on May 9, he was asked whether France was not now taking a “wait-and-see position”? He seemed to be uncomfortable in his response, pointing to the fact that France could not resolve the situation by itself. He then outlined four orientations, the first of which was to “continue to push for a political solution,” endorsing to some extent Kerry’s trip to Moscow.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain has been another of the loudest critics of Assad. But he is noticeably shy about any military commitment. He made a now famous statement that he was not proposing any British “boots on the ground” in Syria. It seems no western government is ready to put “boots on the ground.” Even McCain does not advocate this. He merely says that it won’t be necessary because the United States can succeed in its objectives simply by means of a combination of a “no fly” zone, the use of drones, and military assistance to the rebels. However, the U.S. military has said repeatedly that a “no fly” zone is quite a major operation, one that in the end might necessitate the use of “boots on the ground.”
Anyway, today is Nakba Day in Palestine. 3000 Palestinians died in the Nakba. So far, we have about 82000 dead in the Syrian civil war and over 1 million refugees.
Palestinians is Syria, contrary to other Arab countries, have all the rights of the Syrians ( medical, education, family allocations, subsidies, free movement etc..), except the right to vote. The educated ones are conscriptable.
In Arab countries that were generous to accepted refugees such Lebanon and Jordan, they are treated as temporary guests with limited rights. These countries have limited economical means to support such a burden. They are helped by the UN.
No a single rich GCC countries accept Palestinian refugees. They only give them a timed work permit. That means that when the contract is over or they retire, they and their family, have to leave the country within a few days.
Now you can appreciate how ‘generous’ Qatar and KSA are and how ‘inhuman’ Syria is toward arab brothers…
That’s a Institute known worldwide. It is as famous as the Al Raqqa and al Aaazazz Institute for Strategic and Research Studies. How dare you doubt about its polls!
Ethnic-cleansing was Zionists’ planned tragedy to create a Jewish majority homeland. If you don’t want to criticize this Zionist war criminality, then you no credibility to criticize Bashar’s ongoing ethnic-cleansing of Sunnis in Banyas, the coast, and al-Qasir in order to create a friendly Alawi state as a last resort. BOTH should be criticized and combated legally and intellectually. In his well-publicized memoir, Yitzhak Rabin described asking David Ben Gurion about the fate of Palestinians in the Lod/Ramlah area, Ben Gurion poited a gesture with his finger indicating orders to EXPEL them. Rabin goes on to describe his role in expelling 70,000 Palestinians along the Latrun road east. This was only on one area, and-sadly-it make Rabin an ethnic-cleansing soldier. I did hear first-hand accounts of al-Nakbah from my grandparents, and if you-as a human being met them you would have rejected the Zionist ideology justifying stealing and colonizing somebody else’s lands.
Now, we do have reality on the ground and I do believe that everybody in historical Palestine (Muslims, Jewish, Christians…) should have equal rights in a democratic and secular civil state. Surely, it would mean that refugees and their off springs must be given the option to return. It also means ending an immigration policy based on religion. If you want to give every Jew the right to immigrate to this democratic state, you should give it to every Muslim and Christian….NO automatic citizenship just because of religious affiliation…
Hamad says as a Sunni he hates Alawite Muslims, which once again signals of the increasingly sectarian side of the Syrian conflict. UN warned of it as early as in December last year.
“Hopefully we will slaughter all of [the Alawites]. I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip, I am sawing another shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him into small pieces and large ones,” Hamad said in the interview. The rebel was initially reported to have taken out the liver and heart, but later it was concluded that it was a lung he was holding in his hands.
Khaled al-Hamad, a rebel fighter known as Abu Sakkar and commander of the Omar al-Faruq brigade in Homs, Syria, holding the heart of a Syrian government soldier after cutting it out from his dead body.(AFP Photo / YouTube)
Akbar, do not mix the Nekba with what you call the Syrian civil war, which it is not. It is an insurgency against the Assad dictatorship.
The Nekba was perpetrated by people foreign to the region and who have remained so. Being stolen one’s land is worse than losing your life.
And yet, it could have been different had they not come with their ethnic cleansing plans. Palestinians thought they were dealing with a new occupation but the occupiers wanted them out.
I would dearly enjoy discussing the arab-Israeli conflict with you. Maybe later tonight. I am always interested in understanding all sides to a conflict.
Can you tell me why you can’t answer the questions I posed to you from the last 2 posts? Are these questions difficult? I am getting the impression that you simply cannot talk about Israel or Palestine without jumping to the grievances you have against Israel.
We have been spoon fed this crap that we have helped Palestinians and to prove our point we point at other countries mistreatment of Palestinians and how we in Syria don’t do that. Just look at Zoo’s reply…
Buying a house where ever you want is not a right a Palestinian could have in Syria, even working where ever they want is not a right they have. Ask any Palestinian what it takes for them to leave Syria.
You want to judge a society on how accepting it is, judge it on its social integration. As long as there are an “us” and “them” mentality there is no integration.
And Zoo no Syrian let alone a Palestinian has a right for a real vote, this concept has been stolen from us from your hero that you adore so much. But then again a no choice other than an Assad is a perfect choice for a baathist like yourself…
Dave could not provide the source for his ridiculous comment that 95% of Palestinians support the Zionist war on Syria. It seems it would be simple to give a link to the poll doesn’t it?