Aya Mohammed al-Hussein suffered severe burns when a small shard of hot shrapnel burst through the roof of her home.
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"ALEPPO, SYRIA—With enough oil to export, Syrians used to get their fuel cheap, and a mother warming her child by a diesel space heater had nothing to fear.Now there is nothing simple about surviving to see the next day.
On Jan. 26, Syria’s civil war turned one of the most basic human needs, the want for heat against the cold, into a weapon that seared 9-year-old Aya Mohammed al-Hussain deep into her soul.
She was sitting alone in her one-room house around 3 p.m. when dictator Bashar Assad’s forces randomly lobbed three mortar bombs into their neighbourhood."
( By: Paul Watson Star Columnist, Published on Wed Feb 06 2013 )
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Bashar al-Assad is the President of Syria, Regional Secretary of the Ba'ath Party and he has has a net worth of about $550 million. He has been criticized for a disregard for human rights, economic lapses, and corruption. He is also an outspoken critic of the United States and Israel.
In Syria websites such as Wikipedia Arabic, You Tube and Facebook were blocked from people accessing them from 2008 until February 2011. U.S. President Barack Obama signed an Executive order to place sanctions against Bashar Assad in an effort to pressure his regime "to end its use of violence against its people and begin transitioning to a democratic system that protects the rights of the Syrian people." This order took place on May 18, 2011, due to this order Mr. Assad and nine other officials were added to a list with travel bans and asset freezes.
Not enough it seems to quell Mr. Assad's lust for power and demaoguary
The word demagogue, meaning a leader of the common people, is an ancient Grecian term originally with no negative connotation, but eventually came to mean a troublesome kind of leader. Even though democracy gave power to the common people through electoral processes, the Demagogues were a new kind of leader who emerged from the lower classes. Demagogues relentlessly advocated action, usually violent, immediately and without deliberation. Demagogues appealed directly to the emotions of the poor and uninformed, pursuing power, telling lies to stir up hysteria, exploiting crises to intensify popular support for their calls to immediate action and increased authority, and accusing moderate opponents of weakness or disloyalty to the nation. All politicians in a democracy must make occasional small sacrifices of truth, subtlety, long-term concerns, or other matters that don't have immediate popular impact or else they will lose the popular support which is the base of their political power.Demagogues do these things relentlessly and without self-restraint.
Democracies are instituted to ensure freedom for all and popular control over government authority; through their popular appeal, demagogues exploit the freedom secured under democracy to gain a level of power for themselves that overrides the rule of law, thereby undermining democracy. The Greek historian Polybius thought that democracies are inevitably undone by demagogues. He said that every democracy eventually decays into "a government of violence and the strong hand," leading to "tumultuous assemblies, massacres and banishments.
Throughout history, the word demagogue has been used to disparage any leader thought to be manipulative, pernicious, or bigoted....That kind of refers to many world leaders today, or to say in a more accurate way, usurpers of democracy.
The term "Usurp" has been around since about 1275 A.D. and is defined as:
- to seize and hold (a position, office, power, etc.) by force or without legal right
- to use without authority or right; employ wrongfully: to commit forcible or illegal seizure of an office, power
A common trait of such people is that they have guns for brains.
