Here, via MEMRI, is a statement read by lawyer Sheik Ali Issa Al-Ubeidi on March 21st, and posted on the internet:
Transcript here.
Just 29 years ago, in the last major threat to the Syrian Baathist regime, some 20,000 people were killed in the attack by government forces on the city of Hama - possibly "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East". The world barely blinked.
Now such a brutal response is scarcely imaginable. Of course there'll be violent repression, whatever the eventual outcome, and there'll be deaths. But no government now, surely, would dare to massacre its citizens with such casual brutality and expect the rest of the world to sit back and watch. The threat that Gaddafi might pull off something similar in Benghazi was enough to mobilise international action.
That's the achievement of liberal interventionism.
Mick Hartley 
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