Article

2012-01-29 Syria-Lebanon-Iran

Syrian troops storm areas near capital of Damascus

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by Frank G 2012-01-29 18:19|| || Front Page|| [11 views ] Top

#1 should've had a question mark on "betting on option 2"

Posted by Frank G 2012-01-29 18:25|| 2012-01-29 18:25|| Front Page Top

#2 what's a Sunday without indiscriminate killing in Islam?

Given that Alawites aren't actually Muslims, I think it's more a case of infidels selectively killing Muslims. From Wikipedia:

In 1970, then-Air Force General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, took power and instigated a "Correctionist Movement" in the Ba'ath Party.[30] His coming to power has been compared to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russiaan unprecedented development shocking to the majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries."[27]

In 1971 al-Assad became president of Syria, a function that the Constitution allows only a Sunni Muslim to hold. In 1973 a new constitution was published that omitted the old requirement that the religion of the state is Islam and replaced it with the statement that the religion of the republic's president is Islam. Protests erupted when the statement was altered,[31] and to satisfy this requirement in 1974, Musa Sadr, a leader of the Twelvers of Lebanon and founder of the Amal Movement who had earlier sought to unite Lebanese Alawis and Shias under the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council without success,[3] issued a fatwa stating that Alawis were a community of Twelver Shia Muslims.[32][33] Under the authoritarian but secular Assad government, religious minorities were tolerated, political dissent was not.

Pan Arabism has been a fig leaf behind which the Syrian Alawite minority wielded power against the Sunni majority. The reason it did so was because the French refused to establish Latakia, homeland of the Alawites, as an independent country, despite the desperate entreaties of Hafez Assad's father. This is the real problem with the dissolution of the European empires - to make lives simpler for their foreign offices (and perhaps to avoid the expense of multiple embassies), they grouped large numbers of mutually incompatible peoples together in sprawling countries several times the size of the average EU member, paving the way for the persecution and large scale massacres of ethnic or religious minorities who were the traditional prey for their historical blood enemies. It's the equivalent of putting a rapist and his victim in the same home after his release from prison.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2012-01-29 20:23|| 2012-01-29 20:23|| Front Page Top

#3 Geez, Zhang, that's kind of harsh. It's like saying they can't help themselves or something. Like the time the Israelis left one of the zoo doors open and some Christians massacred some Muslims. The fault is with the zookeepers, right?

Posted by Richard Aubrey 2012-01-29 22:05|| 2012-01-29 22:05|| Front Page Top

00:13 Bugs Glomoque3110
23:34 Bugs Glomoque3110
22:35 Barbara
22:23 JosephMendiola
22:18 JosephMendiola
22:05 Richard Aubrey
22:02 JosephMendiola
22:00 Richard Aubrey
21:43 JosephMendiola
21:35 Iblis
21:26 JosephMendiola
20:50 NoMoreBS
20:23 Frank G
20:23 Zhang Fei
20:19 Pappy
19:28 Procopius2k
19:27 Frank G
19:26 manversgwtw
19:25 Procopius2k
19:21 Procopius2k
19:20 Procopius2k
19:07 JosephMendiola
19:06 Abu Uluque
19:01 Abu Uluque