While the Obama Administration and NATO forces chase Moamar Gaddafi around Tripoli, the Syrian regime continues to slaughter the brave democracy protesters on the street.
This latest report is horrendous.
The Assad regime arrested a 13 year-old boy. They beat him, burned him, shot him in the knees and cut off his genitals. Then they murdered him.
Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was just a child.
(Warning of Graphic Content)
The Washington Post reported:
The boy’s head was swollen, purple and disfigured. His body was a mess of welts, cigarette burns and wounds from bullets fired to injure, not kill. His kneecaps had been smashed, his neck broken, his jaw shattered and his penis cut off.
What finally killed him was not clear, but it appeared painfully, shockingly clear that he had suffered terribly during the month he spent in Syrian custody.
Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was 13 years old.
And since a video portraying the torture inflicted upon him was broadcast on the al-Jazeera television network Friday, he has rapidly emerged as the new symbol of the protest movement in Syria. His childish features have put a face to the largely faceless and leaderless opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime that has roiled the country for nine weeks, reinvigorating a movement that had seemed in danger of drifting.
It is too early to tell whether the boy’s death will trigger the kind of critical mass that brought down the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia earlier this year and that the Syrian protests have lacked. But it would not be the first time that the suffering of an individual had motivated ordinary people who might not otherwise have taken to the streets to rise against their governments.
The Syrian regime openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah. The regime passes Iranian weapons to terrorist organizations. Syria threatens Israel. The regime hosts terrorist leaders.
Now the evil regime is killing its own people.
Maybe Obama will lecture them again.
