Rent-a-Protestor, Syrian style
YnetNews reports that Syria's dicator Bashar Assad apparently paid people to rush the border with Israel (via Weasel Zippers and Commentary):
Protestors for hire? Demonstrators along the Syria-Israel border were paid thousands of dollars by President Bashar Assad’s regime to take part in Sunday’s riots, Syrian opposition activists charge.If he really bribed them in dollar currency, then it's your tax money at work, unless he paid them with dinars. This is apparently how he can deflect some of the flak he gets from within - by turning people against Israel with the anti-semitism that unfortunately can affect even the opposition - and divert attention from the violence he's subjecting the public to in Syria.
Israeli officials later reinforced the claims, accusing the Syrian regime of encouraging protests along the northern border.
Sunday’s riots were an attempt “to divert attention away from the massacre in Syria,” one official charged. “The Syrians will be held accountable for these events.”
Late Sunday, Syrian officials claimed that 23 people were killed and 350 were wounded after the IDF fired at protestors aiming to rush the border fence earlier in the day. However, the army dismissed the figures, claiming that they were inflated.
Washington-based members of the Reform Party of Syria said intelligence sources close to the Syrian government in Lebanon informed them that the protesters on the Syrian side of the Druze community of Majdal Shams were in fact poverty-stricken farmers paid by the Assad regime.
According to the sources, the farmers migrated over the last few years from drought-stricken northeast Syria to the south. They reached the Israel-Syria border on Sunday in the aims of reenact “Nakba Day” events, the sources said.
The Syrian opposition group claimed that each farmer was promised $1,000 for showing up at the rally and $10,000 to their families if they are killed by IDF fire.
Labels: anti-semitism, islam, Israel, jihad, syria, terrorism
