The Wall Street Journal made a good point in today's editorial "Assad and the Ayatollah"(Subscription required) on how there are a group of folks in the Middle East like Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani who teach their fellow Muslims to reach for a path of moderation and on the other hand you have rabble-rousers like Syria's Assad (and the four imams from Denmark who went to the Middle East and distributed phony cartoons, that never appeared in the Danish paper, to start trouble which we currently have. (Oh those imams want to install sharia law in Denmark as well.) who prefer to see things of the West destroyed in a fit of rage to deflect from their evil ways. Take a look at what the editorial board had to say:
The Ayatollah has been a voice of sense and moderation throughout the conflict in Iraq, so his reaction now comes as no surprise. Compare that to the behavior of Bashar Assad's Syrian regime. In Damascus, "demonstrators" stormed and burned down the embassies of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Chile without the Syrians lifting a finger in their defense. We put "demonstrators" in quotation marks because no real protest could last 15 minutes in that dictatorship without official sanction. It has also been reported that Syrian nationals played a role in the attacks on the consulates in Lebanon.You got to hand it to the folks at the WSJ for hitting it smack dab on the head with the current goings on.
The assault in Damascus comes straight from the Middle East Autocrats' Playbook: Deflect popular discontent with your own misrule by directing hostility toward foreigners, especially Israel and the U.S. But it is a sign of cynicism and perhaps desperation that this Baathist and secular regime should now do so against European states -- traditionally neutral with respect to Syria -- and on behalf of a supposedly injured religion. In 1982, Mr. Assad's father inflicted a rather graver injury on Islam when he massacred 20,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood at Hama.
Another Baathist -- Saddam Hussein -- also tried to fly an Islamic banner in the waning days of his rule, so perhaps the Assad gang is running out of tricks. In the meantime, it's encouraging to know that in most places where democracy is taking root, voices of moderation are at least occasionally being heard.
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