Saturday, April 23, 2011

Slaughter in Syria

Roger Simon introduces a series of videos on Pajamas Media that give true and gruesomely graphic insight into one of the many Middle Eastern thug-ocracies and their repressive, Stalinist-style policies. This time it's Syria, only the latest in the rolling powder-keg of populist revolts in that unfortunate quadrant. Read Simon's intro first, giving his rationale for offering these horrifying film clips, since he also explains how they were obtained and at what potential cost to the filmers.

One of the frustrating things about modern reporting is the fact that we rarely, if ever, get news footage from countries that have proved to be our implacable enemies over the years. Part of this is due to severe censorship on the part of those governments. Part, sadly, is due to the cowardice of the MSM which doesn't want Americans to know that there's real evil out there. (Ruins the moral equivalency argument.) The MSM themselves often obtain this type of footage, but then they sit on it, offering weak-kneed excuses for not airing it. Simon and Pajamas Media are doing a public service by making these videos available. You'll never see them on CNN.

President Obama's response thus far to these unfolding events has been weak-kneed and equivocal. We'd like to think that he's providing cover for American covert ops in various Middle Eastern countries. But given his behavior thus far on these and other matters, including our shameful lack of cooperation with NATO in Libya, I have to wonder if the President is, once again, playing the post-colonial card to improve our "image" with leftist intellectuals abroad. In other words, all these problems were really caused by British-American imperialism and we have no "right" to intervene as people sort out the evil that we caused. It's a disturbing thought.

PJ Media's footage, airing as it is right now, provides a grimly ironic commentary on this Holy Saturday, the day when Christians await the commemoration of the martyred Jesus' rising from the tomb on Easter Sunday. Hopefully, in a secular sense, the Syrian people themselves will soon experience their own resurrection as a country by toppling the Iranian-backed Assad tyranny.

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