Youtube Video Worth a Million Words

It starts predictably with protesters marching and chanting. Soon, shots are heard, protesters scatter, the image turns sideways and upside down, too shaky for a clear image only to settle to a static street level view. The road is deserted, a young man lies prone in a pool of blood, a few feet away. He is staring straight at the camera with vacant, near lifeless eyes, slight movements of his head the only palpable sign of life . When the shooting stops, hoarse cries arise, in a mix or horror, fear and disbelief they shout repeatedly: "Allahu Akbar" and "Ambulance, we need an ambulance". The frenetic images return; as the camera pans back and forth over the chaotic scene, you see protesters scrambling to help the injured, several are carried hastily away from the open road, some with horrific wounds. We also get a quick final glimpse of the young man, still lying in the street, now face down, lifeless. Fear and horror turn to seething anger with shouts of "Bashar, you son of a bitch, this was peaceful!"

I must have watched dozens of these shaky pixilated Youtube protest videos taken by Syrian citizens. It is not that I have macabre voyeuristic urges, I just need to see, sitting in safety thousands of miles away, what the people of Syria are enduring. Many of these video clips were too difficult to watch but none have affected me as much as that of the recent demonstration in Izraa described above. I am not sure why, was it the haunting look of the dying young man who could have been my son's age or the sheer horror I heard in the voices of the survivors? No one, and I mean no one, protesting peacefully deserves such a fate. If for most readers, this last statement is self-evident, it is not apparently for some defenders of the regime who will come up with any number of reasons as to why these people deserve such treatment.

Of course, as the various news websites stipulate, the authenticity of these videos clips cannot be verified. However, it is the sheer number of these videos, their rawness, their redundancy and their consistency in telling the same horrific story across every demonstration in multiple towns that make them totally believable. What you clearly see is that the protesters consist of mostly young to middle-aged men, unarmed, representing a cross section of Syrian society, demonstrating peacefully. Has there been vandalism and some violence on the part of the protesters? Of course there has been. But again, to the regime apologists I say that neither tearing up posters of the president nor toppling statues constitute capital offenses in any self-respecting country. What is astounding, is that after enduring over five weeks of unprovoked mayhem at the hands of security forces, that the protesters have not resorted to an open, violent insurrection.

If an image is worth a thousand words, videos clips are worth a million and this massive archive of moving images, as imperfect as it is, is a damning indictment of the Syrian regime.