Committing massacres does not aim at winning wars. On the contrary, massacres distort and harm the image of their perpetrator, thus shortening his time in power. The only aim of the massacres' perpetrators is to cleanse the country and annihilate the enemies by removing them from the political map and the people's map. The slaughterers (those who perpetrate the massacres) believe that their enemies are nothing but barriers to their ‘wise' rule, their wild dictatorship and their excessive dominance. And because the absolute ruler is convinced that he is the only one that can be trusted with the country, his motto becomes: me or my enemies. His enemies are often his own people and this is the real reason behind the committed massacres. We had previously heard about the massacres of Deir Yassin, Jennin, Sabra, Shatila, Qana, and Gaza. We also heard about the massacres of the Serbs in Bosnia especially Srebrenica, which constituted a milestone in that barbaric war; and the massacres committed by the Hutu tribe in Rwanda against their adversaries, the Tutsis, and the massacres perpetrated by the Americans in Vietnam and the massacres of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The perpetrators of these massacres would acquit themselves from the blood of their victims and they would accuse the media of distorting their ‘immaculate' image. Nevertheless, these massacres never brought about the victory of the slaughterers. On the contrary, the stains of shame remained on the forehead of the perpetrators throughout history. Slaughterers seldom pay attention to the chapters of history. They believe that history starts and ends with them. Thus, they twist the stories and they flip the facts and they openly distort realities. This distortion is so insolent as to accuse the victim of killing itself with the aim of distorting the image of the ruler. Thus, the official Syrian story concerning the Houla events does not hesitate to state that the people of these villages – which are mostly Sunni villages – have actually massacred one another while the surrounding Alawite villages were looking at them with pity and trying to rescue them from their own selves! The insolence of this tale is further highlighted because it contradicts with the assertions of the international observers who visited Houla and who said that the regime bombarded the town with tanks. In addition, this tale is not in line with the previous sectarian practices of the regime that aimed at displacing the people who were deemed enemies and killing those who could not be displaced ever since they started calling for toppling the regime. The outcome of the battles of Baba Amro – where the Syrian president paid a visit after liberating this area from its people – represents the biggest proof to that. The massacres' perpetrators also believe that they have the upper hand because the world is incapable of acting. This is what the Israelis did when they committed massacres aimed at displacing the Palestinians from their towns and villages. And this is what the Serbs did to the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo, not to mention the actions of the Lebanese sects that carried out displacement campaigns during the civil war with the aim of ‘cleansing' the regions and re-sketching the demographic map of the country. What mainly allows for over-excessiveness in committing one massacre after the other while the world is watching the blood and remains of the victims on televisions, is that the massacres' perpetrators feel that no power in the entire world can stop them. The international tools, including the resolutions of the Security Council, are ineffective. No power in the world can prevent a ruler from carrying out massacres against his people whenever he wants to. This ruler only has to secure the loyalty of one or two countries in the Security Council in order to commit whatever atrocities he wants. This is the case of the Syrian regime presently. The world is incapable of preventing the massacres; and the ‘morality' of the regime and its previous actions do not confer reassurance with respect to its actions vis-à-vis its people. The populations that were plagued with such rulers have no other solution but to shout ‘We have only you, O God.' But then, we blame them for becoming Salafists!
