Assad's Face: The Bloody, The Bad and the Ugly

Today, the human race lost.  Ghyath Matar and Yahya Sharbajy were arrested three days ago in Daryah. Ghyath's body was returned to his family today.  Ghyath is missing his throat.  You do not have to know Yahya and Ghyath.  But knowing them, even knowing of them, makes you a better human being.  In a society dominated by the violence of the regime and its oppression, being a pacifist is not something you can have easily.  Once you know them and you know where they come from, you have one question in your mind, “How can they be so pacifist in such a violent environment.”  Yahya was born on January 21^st, 1979.   He got his share of political imprisonment.  His first concern was to keep the revolution peaceful.  Ghyath and Yahya kept saying, “To be killed is better than being the killer.”  The only weapon Ghyath had was his vocal cords.  Is it for that reason Assad security forces returned his throat separated from his body? When a family member wondered about it the officer told the family in a mocking tone, “Make Shawerma with it.”   

Unbelievable you think!  There is an Arab saying that “the one who has no shame will do anything.”  When we talk about the lies that the Syrian regime propagates, our American friends imagine that the Syrian regime is deforming the reality the same way that some politicians here do.  They think about a media who mixes a story with some lies to make it more exciting or telling half of the truth, etc...

But unfortunately this is not the case of Syrian regime and its media.  Al-Dunia satellite is one of the regime’s media outlets.  Last week, al-Dunia ran a story that I could not even believe without having seen it with my own eyes.  Al-Dunia’s story accused al-Jazeera news of building a huge studio with the help of American and European movies producers.  These studios were set up to mimic the squares and the streets of Syrian cities such as Damascus, Daraa, Hama, Homs, etc...  Al-jazeera, according to the Syrian regime’s media, uses these studios to film fake demonstrations and rallies against the Syrian regime.   Thus, according to al-Dunia all what we have seen since March 15 is nothing else than a conspiracy of al-Jazeera.

This week a video filmed by an anonymous Syrian, widely distributed on you tube, and picked up by the main news channels, shows a group of Syrian soldiers surrounding a wounded civilian on the ground and emptying their revolvers into his shaking body.  The regime media has not come up with a story about this one yet.  Several months ago, a video depicting Syrian soldiers stepping on the back of civilians with their hands shackled behind them and kicking them was broadcasted on a German T.V.   The Syrian embassy organized a campaign against the TV and forced it to apologize.  The Regime’s story was that the video was shot a long time ago in Iraq and the soldiers were Kurdish paramilitary.  The TV apologized to the embassy.  A week after that another video come out again with one of the civilians who was tortured in the first video. The video shows the youth announcing that he is Syrian and showing his identification.  He gave a full recount confirming what was in the first video.  He proved that the regime was straight-forward lying. 

The list of examples of the war on the truth in the Syrian Regime’s media never stops.  The regime’s media, same as the practices of the army, respects no limit and has nothing to do with ethics or credibility.  When I hear or read some so called intellectuals connected to the regime trying to hold the stick in the middle under the pretext of being balanced, I just want to throw up. One cannot consider in any way that understanding the crime of Assad as a political issue. Those who try to frame the Syrian regime’s crimes as political are as much a part of Assad’s crimes as anyone in his security forces.  They are the same as someone who believes that Jeffrey Dahmer’s guilt (a criminal who killed and ate 17 teenagers in Milwaukee, WI, in the early 1990s) is subject to a political debate. 

The assassination of Ghyath did not start three days ago. It was not committed by one hand.  His blood is on the hand of all complacent participants.  I believe when Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."  He was not imagining that one day he will stand holding the door of heaven to Ghyath Matar and his friends.