Syrian forces killed at least 63 people in attacks against tens of thousands of protesters demanding the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad on Friday, activists said, and some said the final death toll could top 80.
Most were killed in the city of Hama, where 10 to 30 thousand were slaughtered three decades ago to crush a local uprising. If the people of Hama of all places are willing to face the guns, that says to me that the repression isn't working.
Over a thousand civilians have been killed by Syrian forces so far in a failed attempt to silence protesters. It seems like the Syrians are about to go fully postal (tip to Instapundit):
"In what appears to be the latest bid by a government to throttle access to news and information amid growing civil unrest, the Syrian government Friday shut down all Internet services.
Reporters are already banned. Now the amateur videos and reporting via the Internet will be blocked. Clearly, authorities don't want the world to watch what they will do next.
Not that what the authorities have done so far isn't ugly. Torturing and killing a 13-year-old boy surely symbolizes the depravity of the regime:
By now you have probably heard about Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. He was the 13-year-old Syrian boy who tagged along at an antigovernment protest in the town of Saida on April 29. He was arrested that day, and the police returned his mutilated body to his family a month later. While in custody, he had apparently been burned, beaten, lacerated and given electroshocks. His jaw and kneecaps were shattered. He was shot in both arms. When his father saw the state of Hamza’s body, he passed out.
For all the realists out there who want to believe Assad is a closet reformer just waiting to reform if we can prod and reward him in just the right way, this is what his regime does. A thousand dead just shows the scale of how many they'll kill. This one death shows how deep their evil is.
And even if realists are right that a deal is there to be made to get a peace deal between Israel and Syria that will get Nobel Peace Prizes passed out freely, we can't base peace on dealing with monsters who torture children (again, from the Brooks' piece):
In any case, their efforts were doomed. In fact, the current peace process is doomed because of the inability to make a categorical distinction. There are some countries in the region that are not nice, but they are normal — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. But there are other governments that are fundamentally depraved. Either as a matter of thuggishness (Syria) or ideology (Hamas), they reject the full humanity of other human beings. They believe it is proper and right to kill innocents. They can never be part of a successful negotiation because they undermine the universal principles of morality.
It doesn’t matter how great a law professor or diplomat you are. It doesn’t matter how masterly you sequence the negotiations or what magical lines you draw on a map. There won’t be peace so long as depraved regimes are part of the picture. That’s why it’s crazy to get worked into a lather about who said what about the 1967 border. As long as Hamas and the Assad regime are in place, the peace process is going nowhere, just as it’s gone nowhere for lo these many years.
As uncertain as the Arab Spring is in the short run--it could fail in part or even totally--in the long run, reform is necessary to create real partners who can make peace with Israel--and with their own people.
Don't turn away from the freedom agenda in the Middle East just because it might fail in today's wave of unrest. So we must nurture what is growing to increase the odds of success. And even if we fail today, one day the ground may be more fertile. It will look good then if we fought the good fight today even against the odds. And it is the right thing to do. Children should not be tortured and murdered to be sent to their parents as a warning to shut up and stay home.
