Replies to post #922 on 'Idea of the day' trading in and out for profit

[Ike Latif]

The evil the men do! Bashar humiliation accorded to Blair..See who is talking of bombing of innocents, no one has bombed indiscriminately their own citizens than these very people? When they talk of bombing they should be shown the clippings of Hama murders...Al Jazeera can be sent those stories, the murder of muslims by its dictators and their own strong man..

<The Syrian President, standing just a few feet away from him, was warming to his task. He condemned the bombing of Afghanistan, which was causing “thousands” of civilian casualties.
Palestinian “freedom fighters” were not terrorists, he said, they were like the French resistance under Charles de Gaulle. It was Israel, not Syria, that was “prosecuting state terrorism”. >

Starting on February 2, 1982 and lasting 27 days, President Asad ordered the shelling of Hama, one of Syria's major cities some 150 miles north of Damascus. According to the Syrian Human Rights Committee that operates outside of Syria a third of the city was completely destroyed. Some 30,000 to 40,000 civilians were killed. Another 15,000 were never accounted for. Why?

Only a few months earlier on October 6, 1981, members of the Muslim Brotherhood had assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. The Brotherhood had been founded during the 1930's in Egypt by Hassan Al-Banna. He allegedly was killed on orders of Egypt's General Gamal Abdul-Nasser. Sadat too was a general and so was Asad. The destroyed district of Hama had become a major center of the Brotherhood in Syria. Clearly Asad struck massively and brutally to prevent the same from happening to him. The present President uncle Rifa'at was the chief enforcer of the Hama massacre. Yet in later years he began to drift towards the Brotherhood. He grew a beard and went regularly to mosque. But this time Hafez decided the Brotherhood could be useful rather than dangerous and himself approached them. He showed his changed attitudes by having Rifa'at placed under house arrest in their home town Latakia on Mediterranean shores.



Iqbal Latif