They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

BEIRUT, Lebanon

There is a story making the rounds among Lebanese Facebook users about a Syrian democracy activist who was stopped at a Syrian Army checkpoint the other day. He reportedly had a laptop and a thumb drive on the seat next to him. The Syrian soldier examined them and then asked the driver: “Do you have a Facebook?” “No,” the man said, so the soldier let him pass.

You have to feel sorry for that Syrian soldier looking for a Facebook on the front seat, but it’s that kind of regime. Syria really doesn’t know what’s hit it — how the tightest police state in the region could lose control over its population, armed only with cellphone cameras and, yes, access to Facebook and YouTube.

You can see how it happened from just one example: Several Syrian dissidents have banded together and from scratch created SNN — Shaam News Network — a Web site that is posting the cellphone pictures and Twitter feeds coming in from protests all over Syria. Many global TV networks, all of which are banned from Syria, are now picking up SNN’s hourly footage. My bet is that SNN cost no more than a few thousand dollars to start, and it’s become the go-to site for video from the Syrian uprising. Just like that — a regime that controlled all the news now can’t anymore.

I don’t see how Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, can last — not because of Facebook, which his regime would love to confiscate, if it could only find the darn thing — but because of something hiding in plain sight: Many, many Syrian people have lost their fear. On Friday alone, the regime killed at least 26 more of its people in protests across the country.

(More here.)