The Butcher and the Surgeon

They call Bashar al-Assad "son of the butcher," but he is merely a butcher twice removed.

The original butcher of Syria was Abul Abbas al-Saffah, the last appellation meaning "shedder of blood." In 750 C.E., al-Saffah marched into Damascus and overthrew the Umayyad Caliphate. Concerned about a possible Umayyad resurgence, he invited the remaining family members to a conciliatory dinner and clubbed them to death before the first course.

A more recent Syrian butcher was Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, who massacred 20,000 to 30,000 people in Hama on a single evening in 1982, then killed the livestock. Hafez intended his oldest son, Bassel—as murderous and conspiratorial as his father—as his successor. But Bassel had a playboy side and died driving a Maserati at 150 miles per hour. The Syrian leadership blamed the Mossad, and the mantle of successor was laid upon the thin shoulders of Hafez's next-oldest son, Bashar. When Hafez died in July, 2000, Bashar was in London, enrolled in a post-doctoral program at the Western Eye Hospital. He was—maybe still is—an ophthalmologist, an eye surgeon. Ayman Zawaheri, head of al-Qaeda, is a pediatrician. Adherence to the Hippocratic oath does not prevent one from being a thug.

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