President Obama said in his May 19 speech, that
President Assad now has a choice:Â He can lead that transition [to democracy], or get out of the way.
Since then, security forces have murdered even more Syrians, including the well-documented case of a 13-year old boy who was brutally tortured to death.
Yesterday, Syrian buses transported rioters to the Israeli border in the Golan. They were paid to be there and to throw themselves at the border, with promises to pay even more to the families of any who were killed. Syrian TV reported that 19 (some reports say 23) were killed by Israeli soldiers, and the US media dutifully repeated this. But all we know for certain is that some rioters were killed when their Molotov cocktails ignited a brush fire which caused old, unstable Syrian mines to detonate.
Assad is trying to use the old trick of deflecting opposition to his regime by creating anger against Israel. But it isn’t working. Anti-Assad dissidents know who is killing, raping and torturing them, and it isn’t Israel.
Here is a video of Syrian security men planting weapons and ammunition on the bodies of protesters that they’d just killed. I won’t embed it, but if you have a strong stomach you can see it here.
So you would think that by now the Obama Administration would be calling for Bashar al-Assad to be thrown out and prosecuted as the mass murderer that he is. Not quite. Here is the statement by Secretary of State Clinton on Thursday (remember, last month she famously referred to Assad as a ‘reformer’):
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday the international community needs to be more united in pressuring the Syrian government to end its lethal crackdown on demonstrators. Clinton says the legitimacy of President Bashar al-Assad’s government has “nearly run out.â€
Clinton says a Human Rights Watch report this week, framing Syrian actions against protestors as crimes against humanity, is in line with the State Department’s own reporting on the events.
She is lamenting the lack of an international consensus for stronger steps against the Assad government, including a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Damascus…
“If he cannot end the violence against his own people, take meaningful steps to start a process of reform, then he needs to get out of the way. And every day that he stays in office and the violence continues, he’s basically making that choice by default,†she said.
One gets the feeling that someone else is perpetrating the violence! How many chances are we going to give this butcher?
But suggestions abound that the US is going easy on Assad to … get ready … help Israel, which supposedly wants Assad to stay in power! The Zionist conspiracy, apparently, is pulling strings at the friendly State Department, as well as influencing friendly Russia and China to oppose sanctions in the Security Council. Sure.
The administration is hanging on to Assad for its own mysterious reasons, and it’s not Israel’s fault. Here is a letter published today in the Wall St. Journal:
For the second time, a recent Journal article (“Syrian Violence Tests U.S.,” page one, June 3) asserts that Israel has expressed fears of instability in Syria if leader Bashar al-Assad is overthrown. I emphatically denied this the first time (“U.S. Seeks to Raise Heat on Syria,” page one, April 25) and categorically deny it again. Israel has expressed no such concerns. Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region. The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.
Ambassador Michael Oren
Israeli Embassy
Washington
We can’t know that the Devil we don’t know won’t be worse than the one we do. We can’t know that Syria might become a radical Sunni regime in alliance with other radical Islamic Sunni regimes perhaps the one which will perhaps emerge in Egypt. But the Devil we do know is bad enough to want him to be gotten out.