In “Innocents Abroad,” 1869, which established his reputation as a writer, Mark Twain described Syria under the Ottoman Turkish Empire: “Then we called at the tomb of Mahomet’s children and at … the mausoleum of the five thousand Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks. They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful.
All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the ‘infidel dogs.’ The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste.
Yet another jarring history lesson on George Bush’s Religion of Peace!