Michel de Montaigne, 'On Cannibals', 1580:
so shocked by savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead as by those who torture and persecute the Living...I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him dead; to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, to roast it by degrees, and then give it to be trampled and eaten by dogs and swine - a practice which we have not only read about but seen within recent memory, not between ancient enemies, but between neighbours and fellow-citizens and, what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion - than to roast and eat a man after he is dead.”
Jackson Diehl on
Jerusalem
"No other city on earth
has such a dark history of murder, rape, pillage and torture. On dozens of
occasions its walls have been festooned with the heads of its victims. The
19th-century novelist William Makepeace Thackery, one of many disillusioned
visitors, wrote that “there’s not a spot” in Jerusalem “at which you may look
but where some violent deed has been done, some massacre, some visitors
murdered, some idol worshipped with bloody rites.”
Spiegel Online reported on August 26 2013:
"Evidence clearly suggests that Syria's president has deployed chemical weapons. The latest poison gas attack should set aside once and for all any reservations about military intervention. The credibility of Western countries is on the line..."
I have already blogged on Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat on September 3 2011.
I am going to repeat the picture from that post.
Artist: Ali Farzat
The picture is devastating.
Look at gory limbs (the right foot and the right hand) of the victim of the torture on the ground, instruments that have been used to accomplish it and finally look at what the guard is doing.
He is watching a mushy soap on TV with tears flowing down his cheeks!
