Too Many To Ignore

For over a year, Assad's forces have been killing civilians in Syria to maintain Allawite rule. Perhaps 10,000 have been killed, plus security forces and armed opposition. But you know what gets the international community to notice? Not the 10,000 dead and counting, but the spike in the long-term average that the international community can no longer safely ignore:

President Bashar al-Assad faces renewed international pressure to end the bloodshed in Syria but, with peace envoy Kofi Annan visiting Damascus, his government blamed Islamist militants for a massacre in which U.N. observers had implicated his army. ...

In Damascus on Monday, Annan called on the authorities to act to end the killing after what the special envoy called the "appalling crime" late last week at Houla, near Hama, in which at least 108 people, many of them children, were killed.

One wonders if the international community would have noticed if the death toll had been 54. Or maybe just 36.

The sainted international community isn't against people being murdered by a member state of the UN. Just space out the deaths at a low enough level and keep the videos away and it can go on for decades without comment. Ask North Korea.

What prompts the international community to call something an appalling crime is just having the sainted international community's inability to stop a particularly bad day of murdering from being rubbed in their faces.

One must keep up appearances, mustn't one?