Sun. 18 Sept. 2011
WEASEL ZIPPPERS
Ø Syrian Anti-Regime Cleric: “Tear Christians Into Pieces And Feed Them To The Dogs…………………………………….1
DAILY BEAST
Ø I Got Arrested by the Secret Police………………………….2
THE NATIONAL
Ø Fighting for Syria from Beirut with information………..…..6
JERUSALEM POST
Ø Israel, Egypt, Turkey - shifting sands…………………...…..9
OBSERVER
Ø A Palestinian state is a moral right…………………………14
NYTIMES
Ø Technology that protects protesters…………..…………….18
NYTIMES
Ø Leadership Crisis……………………….…………………..21
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Syrian Anti-Regime Cleric: “Tear Christians Into Pieces And Feed Them To The Dogs…
Syria’s another country destined to become an Islamist-ruled hellhole once Assad falls.
Weasel Zippers (American blog)
16 Sept. 2011,
Rome, September 16 — A Syrian sheikh who has been exiled to Saudi Arabia and has become one of the voices of the uprising against Assad, urges his followers, in television sermons that have been broadcast in Syria as well, to ”tear apart, chop up and feed” the meat of all supporters of the current regime ”to the dogs,” including all Christians. The fundamentalist turn part of the Syrian opposition is taking is denounced on the website Terrasanta.net, of the Franciscan Custody.
Many Syrian Christians, the website reads, are terrorised; in some cities, like Homs, they are even afraid to leave their houses. Some churches have already been burned down. These appeals to hate were made in this context by sheikh Adnan al Aroor, who is described in a profile of television network Al Arabia as a ‘moderate Sunni’, a ‘symbolic figure’ for the anti-Assad activists, a man who invites people to ‘peaceful and non-violent’ rebellion.
The sheikh broadcasts on the Islamic satellite channel al Safa, which has its headquarters in Saudi Arabia. The channel is very popular in Syria. In one of the sheik’s sermons that have been examined by the editorial staff of ‘Terrasanta’, al Aroor explains that Syrians can be divided into three groups: ”the first includes people who are for the revolution and against Assad. When the President falls, the winners will look with favour on this group.
The second group consists of people who are not for nor against the revolution. They can expect no privileges from the new regime.
The third group opposes the revolution and backs Assad. The meat of these people — in the words of Al Aroor — will be ”torn apart, chopped up and fed to the dogs.” This is an explicit threat to Christians, who have always been considered to be protected by the current regime.
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I Got Arrested by the Secret Police
A journalist's harrowing brush with Syria's feared secret police offers a window into that country's system of oppression—where even your cabdriver can't be trusted.
Khalik Ali (he works for 'the Independent'. He’s unobjective and bad)
The Daily Beast (American newspaper founded in 2008, in 2011 it becomes part of the Newsweek),
Sep 17, 2011,
After arriving at a dusty roadside coach stop following the six-hour journey from Beirut to Aleppo in northern Syria, I stepped off the bus and out into the hazy late-summer sunshine.
It felt like the middle of nowhere. The coach stop was miles from the center of Aleppo, and I had to find the next bus that would take me on to Damascus, about another six hours south.
I was also anxious. With journalists banned from entering the country, I was only one Google away from some grunting border guard discovering I was not just a student “on my way to visit some old friends."
The bus journey had already given me my first direct glimpse of the brutal methods being used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad to crush Syria’s nationwide insurrection. The tanks I saw nestled among the trees in the rolling hills around Hama could well have been the same ones that pummeled the city just before Ramadan in July, killing nearly 100 civilians.
Elsewhere, at Al-Rastan, a large town about 15 miles south of Hama, we had passed squads of shabby, unshaven shabiha militiamen guarding the motorway turnoff. No doubt some of these loyalist regime ultras, whose name means “ghosts” in Arabic, had been involved in the operations that have killed dozens of protesters in the town since March.
So when I was accosted by a taxi driver after getting off the bus in Aleppo, I was keen to get on with the journey and link up with my contacts in Damascus.
But something was up. My driver, a gravelly-voiced Syrian with wrinkles that looked as though they had been scored with a box cutter, began asking me questions as we made our way around the outskirts of Aleppo. “Are you American?” he asked. “Are you here on business?”
When he drove right past the bus station for Damascus and then turned down an isolated residential lane, I began to panic. Ordering him to stop the car, I leapt out and demanded he open the trunk and give me my bag. But instead of getting my rucksack, he stepped out of the car and made a call. I tried listening in, but every time I got close he would walk away. By now it was obvious what was happening—my driver was working for the secret police.
Together they frog-marched me to a nearby office, all the while my rat-faced driver smugly hissing through his mustache about me being a kazaab, or liar.
After finally getting my rucksack and briskly walking the 500 yards back down the road toward the bus station, I tried to buy a ticket to Damascus. The man in the booth said nothing. In a look of helpless exasperation, he slowly buried his face into one hand and ran his fingers through his hair. Somebody had gotten to him before me.
A moment later I saw my scowling taxi driver darting toward the ticket booth with a companion, a portly man in a checked shirt. Together they frog-marched me to a nearby office, all the while my rat-faced driver smugly hissing through his mustache about me being a kazaab, or liar.
In the office, beneath a large photo of President Assad—the man whose bloody crackdown I had come to report on—the questioning began. Why had I come to Aleppo? Who did I know in Syria? My rucksack was unpacked, my receipts leafed through, and at one point my pot-bellied inquisitor demanded to know what my iPod was.
For all of Assad’s so-called economic reforms since he took control of his father’s hermetic republic in 2000, the global reach of Apple Inc. had clearly yet to make much of a splash.
Midway though the questioning my driver came in, shook hands with the police chief, and skipped off out the door. After about 40 minutes, I too was on my way. Following a call to another, presumably more senior Baathist official, I was told I could leave. I even got an apology on the way out.
In the end, mine was a comparatively trivial brush with Syria’s secret police. But it provided the tiniest glimpse into a security apparatus that appears, for now at least, to have scared the opposition movement into submission.
In the capital—which activists agree will have to succumb to the protest movement if there is any hope of toppling Assad—demonstrators openly admitted that the government currently has the upper hand. During a meeting in Qaboun, the restive suburb of eastern Damascus where dozens of protesters have been killed since March, one man laughed when asked why large-scale demonstrations had not materialized in the capital. “The people are too scared,” he said. “The secret police are everywhere.”
Another activist was even more direct during a conversation in the plush Old City restaurant Naranj—a favorite of President Assad. “We have given up on Damascus,” he explained. “The people here are too soft.”
But on a tour of the capital it is easy to see why. The telltale signs of Assad’s police state are everywhere, most noticeably the huge numbers of street stalls that have sprung up across the city center in recent months. Activists say the stalls are manned by security personnel, some hiding knives and sticks beneath their rugs and unleashing them at the slightest sign of any protest.
Two of the main roundabouts in Damascus, which demonstrators have identified as potential Tahrir Square–style meeting points, are guarded by scores of plainclothes shabiha—a dire warning to any would-be revolutionaries hoping to foment trouble in the capital.
“We are divided,” said one activist in his 20s. He added that some demonstrators were thinking about whether they should be taking up arms. “People are looking for contacts and finance,” he admitted.
Around 100 miles north of the capital, the central Syrian city of Hama feels even more tense. Nearly 30 years after Assad’s father killed up to 20,000 civilians in his notorious response to an armed Muslim Brotherhood uprising, the city seems to have returned to a war footing. Armed soldiers stand guard behind sandbag turrets dotted around the city center, while tanks point their gun barrels toward residential neighborhoods from fields on the outskirts.
“More than 3,000 people have been arrested here since everything began,” said one activist, a middle-aged father of four. “We cannot demonstrate in big numbers because of the shabiha and secret police.”
Yet despite the ruthless security crackdown, which human-rights groups say has claimed more than 2,600 lives since March, it seems probable that Assad’s attack on his own people has unleashed a genie that he cannot possibly rebottle.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday predicted that the Syrian regime would fall because of Assad’s violent response to the uprising. "The era of autocracy is ending,” said the former Assad ally. “Totalitarian regimes are disappearing."
Regional diplomatic pressure on the Baathists is growing, and analysts have questioned how long the costly security crackdown can continue, following the recent EU decision to ban all Syrian oil imports.
Many activists said they believed the violent wave of state repression could not continue forever. They agreed that when it stopped, Syria’s streets would come alive once more.
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Fighting for Syria from Beirut with information
Zoi Constantine
The National (publishing from Abu Dhabi),
18 Sept. 2011,
BEIRUT // Kinan moves around the city constantly looking over his shoulder, regularly changes his mobile numbers and switches apartments every few weeks.
Just six months ago, the Syrian man in his late 20s was a journalist in Damascus, watching from afar as uprisings were gaining pace across the Arab world.
Now, he is part of his own country's quest for democratic change, one of a number of activists who fled to Lebanon and now gather and disseminate information about the crisis in Syria.
Kinan - whose name has been changed to protect his identity - has been documenting crimes including deaths, injuries and detentions, and disseminating the information. Human rights groups estimate that more than 2,500 people have been killed since the Syrian government's crackdown on protests began in March.
Lighting yet another cigarette, Kinan blends in well at the bustling Beirut cafe. But he looks more harried than others, his head darting around.
Working from Beirut is not without its risks, he says. Like other Syrian activists in Lebanon, Kinan is concerned about what he sees as the long arm of the Syrian security services.
He glances at calls coming through to his two mobile phones, the numbers for which he changes frequently to deter detection. He stays with friends and colleagues, but insists on moving every three or so weeks - just in case.
Kinan arrived in Beirut in April, after he was tipped off that he was about to be arrested.
Five months on, he is still here, still working almost non-stop to circulate information, video and images on the crisis in Syria.
"We are just an echo - the real sound is coming from inside Syria," he said.
Most days are spent on the phone, on Skype and in front of his laptop, maintaining his connection to contacts in towns and cities across Syria, and then liaising with journalists, human rights groups and activists outside the country.
"I'm an activist, but I'm a journalist at the end of the day. I need to get the accurate information out; there is no need to exaggerate. The situation is bad enough as it is," he said.
While continuing to focus on online activism, Kinan also started getting involved in smuggling items into Syria - satellite phones, modems and cameras.
"Anything that could help citizen journalists to get the information out of Syria," he said. "So, now I'm a smuggler, an activist, a journalist, a security technician, an editor, translator, refugee...I almost forgot how my life used to be before."
While he has not been threatened directly during his time in Lebanon, Kinan says a fellow Syrian activist was briefly detained recently by Lebanese security services. He claims they blindfolded and interrogated him before letting him go.
Kinan's concerns are not necessarily unfounded. Some of his fellow activists have moved on from Lebanon, seeking asylum elsewhere. And in the five months since the uprising started, several Syrian nationals have been apprehended or gone missing in Lebanon.
Shibli Al Ayssami, one of the founders of the Syrian Baath Party, is believed to have been kidnapped during a visit to Lebanon earlier this year.
Mr Al Ayssami, who is in his 80s and has lived outside Syria for many years, allegedly was taken in the city of Aley in May. He has not been heard from since.
In February, three Syrian brothers disappeared in Lebanon, reportedly after distributing pro-democracy flyers.
Still, Nadim Houry, Human Rights Watch's Beirut director, believes the threat for Syrians in Lebanon has been somewhat overstated.
Syrian opposition supporters staying in or working from Lebanon tend to remain within communities where they feel they are protected, he said.
"There is no doubt that many activists don't feel safe, in large part because they feel that the Lebanese state is not willing to protect them," he said.
"The Lebanese state is not going after them. The threat is that the Lebanese state has not taken steps to guarantee their safety. They feel the Syrian security services have a long reach into Lebanon."