News is coming out of yet another appalling massacre by Syrian forces– this time in the town of Tremseh, near Hama, with more than 200 killed.
The pattern is by now depressingly familiar– a neighborhood is bombarded indiscriminately, after which the regime’s shabiha thugs move in and slaughter any survivors.
Even the exquisitely neutral “mediator” Kofi Annan placed the blame squarely on Syrian forces.
Referring to the killings as “atrocities,” Mr. Annan spoke in a statement of “intense fighting, significant casualties, and the confirmed use of heavy weaponry such as artillery, tanks and helicopters.”
“This is in violation of the government’s undertaking to cease the use of heavy weapons in population centers”and its commitment to a peace plan sponsored by Mr. Annan.
As in past massacres, the Assad regime is blaming “terrorists.” Oh, and also you-know-who.
Meantime, an information source blasted the news circulated by some bloody media outlets, like al-Jazeera and al-Arabyia, as a bid to manipulate public opinion against Syria and its people and as to bring foreign intervention in Syria on the eve of a UN Security Council session.
The source underscored that the phobia from the foiling of the conspiracy against Syria by some Zionist media channels, which are partners in the aggression against the Syrian People, led these media outlets into a hysterical situation, so that they disseminated lies and fabrications not to mention their old and out of place about Syrian geography scenes of events and demonstrations.
Got that?
If there was ever any brutal advantage for Assad (in terms of sheer intimidation) for allowing massacres like this, surely that is no longer the case. The effect on the Syrian people (not to mention world opinion) is quite the opposite of intimidation.
So why do Assad and his regime keep doing this– even as it pushes their inevitable downfall closer? The story of the frog and the scorpion, as told by Forrest Whitaker in “The Crying Game,” comes to mind:
