by Jerry Gordon and Mike Bates (May 2012)

“April is the cruelest month,” a line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, was very much in evidence given the eruption of conflicts in the troubled Muslim realms of the Middle East and North Africa. The yearlong rebellion in Syria against the minority Alawite Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad reached a bloody climax with more than 11,000 slaughtered in the streets of Homs, Damascus and Daara by security forces.  more>>>