Ayoon Wa Azan (Justice the Syrian way)

Sometimes, the only thing I can do is salute justice, the Syrian way. Before a zealous supporter of the Syrian opposition calls for my death, I rush to say that I am not talking about the Syrian revolution. I am just using Syria as an example of ‘justice’ in many Arab countries, and their ‘soft’ methods in interrogating suspects. I thought of the need for Syrian-style justice, as I followed in London the trial and sentencing of two men: One who had raped and murdered a 5-year old girl; and another who raped a 12-year old girl. I also followed the controversy over the arrest of three men at a guesthouse for sexually assaulting young children, and over the many teachers who are convicted of sexual harassment before being reinstated in their schools. In Britain, like the rest of Europe and the West, there are broad sexual freedoms, making the frequency of brutal crimes against children rather incomprehensible. Offenders convicted of such crimes often serve only a few years in prison, before leaving only to commit more heinous sex crimes. I called for Syrian justice after I read that Mark Bridger, the man who murdered the child April Jones, refused to disclose where he had buried her body to allow her family to hold a funeral and bury her with the deceased members of her family. If this criminal were in Syria, he would have been received with a bellow from behind, and electrodes from the front, and would have confessed even before being asked any questions, and perhaps even confessed to other people’s crimes under torture, which I think he deserves. I continue with the story of a former British pilot who deliberately rammed his car into a tree at 90 km/h to kill his wife who was not wearing a seatbelt. The man had also sabotaged the airbag and it subsequently failed to open. Why did the husband do it? Because the wife had left him; so I ask him this: What could have been better than that? The wife left him in peace, and he killed her instead of thanking her. On the other hand, there was another British story, this time about a young woman who broke off her engagement. Her former fiancé reacted by stabbing her ten times, but she survived miraculously. The man did not know how lucky he was when the wedding was called off, because he had not tried marriage. If he had, he would have probably thanked the woman and maybe even sent her flowers. True, there are thousands of happy marriages, but the other kind of marriages is more abundant. As the joke goes, a journalist once asked a man about the secret to his happy marriage that lasted 50 years, and the man answered: Speak up; I’m deaf. Better than all of the above is Russian President Vladimir Putin. After 30 years of marriage, he took his wife Lyudmila, a former air stewardess, to a ballet concert, where he told her he wanted divorce…without any collision with a tree or knives. Another, more important news story I read was that the British authorities arrested six British jihadists (no Arabs among them) who were planning to blow up the headquarters of the English Defense League (EDL), a British far-right group. Before that, assailants, possibly from the EDL, burned down a mosque, while teenagers burned an Islamic school, after two extremists of Nigerian origin killed a young British soldier using meat cleavers. Every action has a reaction, and every act of terror will be returned in kind. In the end, the innocent pay the price. Finally, the Bilderberg group conference ended just as it began, amid media secrecy that fueled speculation among proponents of conspiracy theories, who hold that the conferees rule the world in secret. There were among the participants the heads of international banks and oil companies, as well as Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, George Osborne, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Tim Geithner, former U.S. Treasury secretary, and Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund. I would have dismissed the conspiracy theory were it not for the fact that the attendees also included Henry Kissinger, in the flesh. I will not shout out ‘scum,’ as some of the demonstrators outside did, but I will call for Syrian-style justice, if only for some of those who were present at the meeting. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.