The server this site resides on was recently hacked by a group claiming to be the Syrian Revolution Soldiers. My Weblog was hijacked and became the canvas for a expletive-filled rant aimed at putatively indifferent Americans.

I’m actually sympathetic to the plight of the Syrian people, but hacking in to Web sites isn’t the way to publicize the civil strife, and blaming America at random for the shortcomings of U.S. foreign policy in this region is unhelpful and off-putting. Neither the hack nor the inflammatory rhetoric of the Syrian Revolution Soldiers is going to win their cause any friends. In fact, it strikes me as counterintuitive: why not attack some Russian servers? Stick it to the Assad regime’s enablers.   At least, in my case, the blog is not a platform for commerce. The damage is not monetary. 

Roughly 175,000 people have been killed as a result of the civil strife in Syria. Two million people have been displaced from war zones. On the basis of population, the largest refugee camp in Jordan would now rank as that country’s third largest city. The World Health Organization has just identified Syria as one of the countries who have allowed polio to spread beyond its borders, declaring the situation part of an international public-health emergency.