Baladi News - (Ayman Mohammed)
Those who lack deeply rooted history, have a huge amount of hatred against the ones who recount the stories of history as frequently as they mention their fathers and ancestors.
Hafez Al-Assad, the former head of the Syrian regime and the luckiest bastard of all times, was fortunate enough to rule Syria, the heart of the world. However, the man whose family origins cannot be traced, is one of those who abhor history. Out of its spite against the originality of Syrian people, the old regime launched a very violent campaign on the modern Syrian history, trying to erase all the facts that expose its inferior pillars. For this purpose, the regime burned a lot of historical books that tell stories of the virtues of modern Syrian figures.
This campaign had very bad consequences on ordinary Syrians who do not know a lot about their own history. If you ask one of them about the birth date of Hafez Al-Assad, he would answer immediately, but if you ask them about Faisal, King of Greater Syria, they would not utter a word. History school books and media only praise the one and only leader, who indeed did not come with any great achievement.
Bashar Al-Assad, the chip of the old block, seems to follow suit. However, history is not a man to kill, or a building to tear down. Rather, it is a memorized in the hearts of people who will rise again someday.
“Orient News”, the channel that preferred to side with the Syrian people rather than the regime, started to broadcast a series titled “Syria’s Political Encyclopedia” in order to enrage the despotic regime that thought it succeeded to obliterate people’s history.
The series, which started a few weeks ago, re-present history in the form of stories that tell people what the regime has tried to conceal. It gives account of great figures and events from the modern Syrian history in an attempt to remind people of their noble past before Al-Ba'ath regime came to power.
These short clips narrate the glorious deeds of Yusuf al-'Azma who refused to surrender to the French colonial empire and Salah ad-Din al-Bitar who was assassinated by Hafez Al-Assad’s intelligence in Paris because of an article against the regime. They also tell the story of Ibrahim Hananu, the hero who was acquitted on all counts thanks to the great pleading of solicitor Fathallah Alsakkal, a sentence that would not have been decided if Assad’s regime had been the judge. The series also takes us to the old streets of Damascus, which were bombed by the French occupation forces, to witness that they were much more merciful than Assad’s regime who destroyed most of Syria.