It's For The Children™ [stuiec]

Let's all agree that everything Libs do, they do it For The Children™.

Like for instance, when Janet Reno ordered the assault on the Branch Davidian compound, that was For The Children, to protect them from reported abuse -- which made it okay that so many of the children were killed.

Or when Elián González was dragged out of a relative's home at gunpoint and sent back to Castro's Cuba, that was For The Children™ -- we didn't want other Cuban mothers getting the idea that sacrificing their lives to ensure that their children grew up in freedom was a winning strategy.

So let's look at a particular child, shall we, and ask what the Libs ought to do in this case For The Children™. Meet Hamza Ali al-Katib.

Strong content warning, graphic photo.

The torture that the prepubescent al-Khatib appears to have been subjected to is unimaginable. His penis was severed, body is covered in bullet holes and cigarette burns, chest is covered in a massive burn mark, neck broken, kneecaps shattered, and face covered in bruises from repeated punches. Al-Khatib was taken into custody while attending an anti-government protest.

Hamza was 13 at the time of his death.

Now, President Obama hasn't deigned to give the American people much of a justification for why he committed US armed forces to the campaign to protect anti-Qaddafi rebels in Libya, but the one time he addressed the subject, he said, “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

That was back on March 28. Ten days earlier, Syrian security forces opened fire on protesters in Deraa, killing three. That was the start of a pattern of massacre that has snowballed since, claiming well over 1,100 lives -- so far.

And Obama's speech came a full month before Hamza was arrested by Syrian security forces on April 29. He became separated from his parents at a protest in Deraa when the security forces cracked down -- some reports say he was shot and wounded that day before being taken into custody. The authorities were unsympathetic to his parents' frantic attempts to locate him.

His relatives searched for weeks, but failed to find him until eventually they learnt he was being held in a state prison. They then managed to visit him in prison, where he was seen alive and well, but when the family begged the guards to release him on the grounds of his age, their pleas for sympathy backfired.

"The security forces were angry at us, asking how we found out where Hamza was," one relative said in a television interview. "They were infuriated that we had found him. Then they tortured the poor boy for two days."

And so it was that when his father Ali arrived at the prison on May 21, he was told his son was not in custody but in the nearby hospital.

Rather than being in a ward, however, he was in the morgue.

The massive outrage that Hamza's horrific death caused throughout Syria didn't give the Assad regime pause. In fact, they doubled down on murder and massacre.

Reports from Syrians fleeing to Turkey say that in Jisr al-Shughour, on June 4, troops were ordered to kill all the protesters in the city -- but many refused.

A Syrian security officer who fled with the civilian refugees told the Hürriyet Daily News that they received an order by phone Friday to kill all the protesters in the town.

“We received a phone call from the center, and they ordered us to shoot and kill all the protesters,” said Ahmad Gavi, 21, a Syrian soldier who fled to Turkey following the deadly clashes in Jisr Al-Shughour.

“Five soldiers who refused to follow this order were killed immediately in front of me. Then commanders and some soldiers started to shoot each other,” Gavi said. “There were 180 soldiers at the security check post and 120 of them were killed.”

Gavi said he dropped his gun and ran away to Turkey as a refugee. “It was not the protesters who killed the soldiers, it was the commanders who killed them; most of the soldiers ran away with the protesters then,” he said, adding that there are 60 Syrian soldiers in the group that fled to Turkey.

Can America be the world's policeman? No, and maybe we shouldn't be too eager to jump into every conflict that can result in civilian casualties.

But there is a deep hypocrisy to a national policy that says we must use force to remove the Libyan dictator who was already bottled up and no longer causing massive mischief outside Libya, but we mustn't even call outright for the removal of the Syrian dictator who has been causing misery and death throughout the region in conjunction with one of America's most dire enemies, and who is proving every bit as bloodthirsty as his dear Papa, Hafez al-Assad, who in 1982 ordered his army to encircle the town of Hama and obliterate it and its residents with artillery fire.

Even the Arab world sees the depth of depravity of Assad's regime and its murderous actions -- part of a broader pattern of despotic abuses in the region.

An Israeli journalist remarked cynically about two decades ago that the Arab media can easily see a dust particle in the eyes of Israel, and can hardly see a log in the eyes of Arab regimes. In other words, the journalist wanted to expose Arab media hypocrisy, where it ignores the massacres committed by some Arab rulers.

Funnily enough, comparing the number of Arab people killed during the wars between Israel and Arab countries with the number of Arabs killed locally, one will notice that Arab dictatorships have killed more people.

I wonder what the aforementioned Israeli journalist would say after seeing what some Arab despots are doing to protesters. I am sure he might put pressure on the Israeli authorities to be harsher with the Palestinian and Lebanese in the future. Sadly enough, some Arab armies and security services have proved to be much more brutal than the Israeli army.

Barack Obama has waited, not one day, but more than 70 days to act against Syria. The massacre that has ensued due to international inaction has truly reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.

Maybe the Libs really don't care about the children -- maybe For The Children™ is a lazy, stupid slogan that they think makes any further thought unnecessary. So the next time a Lib tells you we have to do something because it's For The Children™, ask them what we should have done for Hamza.

posted by Open Blogger at 08:16 PM

| Access Comments