The Syrian 'Massacre of the Innocents'

Regardless of which side is to blame, it must not distract from the tragic reality of those who lost their lives.

By Hamid Dabashi
Al-Jazeera

".....Any government, first and foremost, must both represent and protect its citizens. That is the very raison d'être of any government. The ruling regime in Syria does neither. The Assad regime was buried along with those holy innocents.

Yes there are many foreign elements who are abusing the Syrian uprising to their advantage: The Americans, the NATO countries, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, even the morally and politically bankrupt al-Qaeda they say. But the final triumph of Syrian people is the defeat of all these treacheries.

The terms of engagement with the future of democracy in our world are not any longer merely politcial but in fact entirely ethical. The discourse must and is radically shifting from the politics of power to an ethics of defiance. This defiance is identical in its opposition to NATO military intervention anywhere from Afghanistan to Libya, with its own civilian (including children) casualties, as it is to the corrupt and degenerate regimes that rule over our people's life, liberty, and destiny.

We are given a false choice to make between a bloody ruling regime in Syria or the horrid Taliban in Afghanistan, and the even bloodier NATO intervention in one or the other. The choice must begin with the facts on the ground, and now buried in graves, facts staring humanity in the eye, and we must never allow any story, any narrative, any spin, any version, whether by the murderous ruling regime in Syria, or by the even more treacherous militarism of NATO, or by the ghastly opportunism of Russia or the Islamic Republic of Iran to gloss over those innocent bodies. Not just the Syrian regime, its "opposition", NATO, ad nauseam - but the entirety of humanity is accountable to that murderous scene. "