Syrians are free (EN)

A famous Jewish-Romanian Christian Orthodox theologian and martyr of political persecution under the fascist and communist regimes, Nicolae Steinhardt, famously wrote after years of suffering for his beliefs that the essence of freedom is the physical courage in the face of death.

By this measure, a significant part of the Syrian people have already tasted and achieved freedom in an absolute sense that many in the 'free world' will never come even close to experiencing. Standing up in peaceful protest for months in spite of the Assad regime's murderous crackdown, they show once more that human nature can overcome itself and reach to something higher.

This is what the regime has been doing these days in the city of Homs.
And this is how protesters responded last night in the city center:

Revolt and martyrdom (EN)

Notwithstanding the attempts (sometimes rather pathetic, like this one) to make sense of the momentous developments in the Arab world, the events there (as I argued before) remain largely incomprehensible for many Westerners.

Among others, it is mind-boggling how the protests can continue for weeks in places like Syria or Yemen, in the face of atrocious repression by desperate governments clinging to power.

I would argue that any serious effort to understand what motivates such resilience of protests should look at the cultural and especially religious background of the Arab societies, which makes so many of their youth ready for martyrdom to a degree nowhere to be seen in our time anywhere in the (post-)Christian West. The Tunisian revolt was actually sparked by such a self-inflicted act of martyrdom.

Once the barrier of fear has been broken, the fact - reinforced with fresh examples on a weekly basis - is that Muslim youth in Arab countries are far more willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause, and this willingness is nurtured and sustained in time for a lot longer than one can even imagine nowadays in Western societies. And religion plays a huge role in this: Arab revolts are re-ignited every Friday by the prayer in mosques, they follow a ritualistic pattern as much as a political one.