Thos. Friedman & his March14 friends: "Syrians are Ignorant & Stupid!"

"There is a (joke) making the rounds among Lebanese Facebook users about a Syrian democracy activist who was stopped at a Syrian Army checkpoint the other day. He reportedly had a laptop and a thumb drive on the seat next to him. The Syrian soldier examined them and then asked the driver: “Do you have a Facebook?” “No,” the man said, so the soldier let him pass. You have to feel sorry for that Syrian soldier looking for a Facebook on the front seat ... ... 

Because Syria is such a keystone nation, there is a tendency among its neighbors to hope that the Assad regime could be weakened — and therefore moderated — but not broken. Few dare trust the Syrian people to build a stable social order out of the ashes of the Assad dictatorship.... “We have an obligation of solidarity with people in distress said Michel Hajji Georgiou, a writer at Beirut’s L’Orient Le Jour newspaper and one of the drivers of the Cedar Revolution ... ... Hanin Ghaddar, editor of NOWlebanon.com,  added that she recently returned from New York City, where she ran into rival demonstrations in Central Park between people who insisted that horse-drawn carriages there were just fine and animal-rights activists who argued that these street carriages endangered horses: “I thought, ‘Oh, my God! I just want to live in a country where you have the luxury to worry about animal rights,’ ” not human rights. “We are still so far from that luxury.”