Last weekend, Syria’s brutal regime incited hundreds of people to breach Israel’s border.  As the New York Times and others have pointed out this was clearly an attempt by Syrian leadership to deflect attention from the repression and murder of their own people.

This second orchestrated attempt in three weeks to create an international incident at Israel’s northern border is an act of state-sponsored terrorism. Syria has maintained a state of war with Israel for the past 60 years.  It should go without saying that no nation on earth could, or would, permit the deliberate breach of its border by a hostile regime. Israel acted with far more restraint than any nation on earth under the same circumstances which has yet to be acknowledged by the international community or the world media.

Meanwhile, citizens of the Syrian city of Hama are bracing for more assaults by the Syrian military.  Hama is the same city that was completely destroyed by the late President Hafez el Assad murdering 10,000 residents in 1982. At that time, the world stayed silent in the face of Syrian brutality.  Some 30 years later, Assad’s son, President Bashar el Assad, is attempting to divert the world’s attention from his repressive acts by fomenting violence at the Israeli border masquerading as a freedom march. Bashar Assad is betting that the Western press will focus on the six protesters who were killed crossing a “hot” border rather than spotlight the hundreds who have been exterminated by the Syrian military in the last two months.

David Brooks’ op-ed from the New York Times published Friday captures the nature of Assad’s reign.

“All governments do bad things, and Middle East dictatorships do more than most. But the Syrian government is one of the world’s genuinely depraved regimes,” Brooks writes. “Yet for all these years, Israel has been asked to negotiate with this regime, compromise with this regime and trust that this regime will someday occupy the heights over it in peace.”

Please circulate this article on Facebook or via email to your friends and colleagues. Twitter is a powerful tool to share news as well. Visit www.twitter.com to sign up for a free account. If you already have one, use hashtags, including #proIsrael, #Syria and #ArabSpring to have your voice included in conversations about the topics you care about.

This post has been contributed by a third party. The opinions, facts and any media content are presented solely by the author, and JewishBoston assumes no responsibility for them. Want to add your voice to the conversation? Publish your own post here. MORE