What would you do if you were a Jew who suffered from the Nazi atrocities, survived, and then was told “Not to be too fixated on Hitler”.
This is exactly what Leslie Gelb told Syrians in his article in the Daily Beast titled “Face It, Obama. Without Assad, You’ve Got No Strategy in Syria“.
[Tweet “In one stroke of a pen, Leslie Gelb insulted millions of Syrians”]I know many people who write about the Middle East. In fact, some of the most brilliant intellectuals I know, or knew, are experts on the region (Professor Bernard Lewis and the late Fouad Ajami come to mind). However, I have never met Leslie Gelb before. If I ever get the honor of meeting him in the future, I will be extending him an invitation to go live, with his family, in Aleppo for a month. Free of charge. Right under the barrel bombs of Baschar al-Assad Gelb believes we are “too fixated on him”.
There is no harsher anti-Semitic insult (Syrians are Semites too) than to tell someone to accept living with their butcher. I would never dream of asking a Jew “not to be fixated on Hitler too much”. No more disturbing of an insult than this insult to the Jewish people. So Gelb insulting Syrians, American-Syrians, and everyone who suffered from the terror of Assad over the last 44 years is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
Maybe Gelb needs a lesson in the affairs of the region! Maybe he needs to understand Assad before writing about him. Maybe he needs to know that it was Assad who forged ISIS. Newsweek investigate it thoroughly and the U.S. State Department made it official. In fact, every US intelligence agency under the sun knows Assad is behind the formation of ISIS. This is why so many western leaders have said publicly, in one form or another, that Assad was part of the problem, not the solution. Gelb thinks a mass murderer who forged ISIS and who has gassed his own people is THE solution.
As a journalist or a scholar, you cannot be any lazier when you find the solution to a problem in the problem that caused you to look for a solution. The worst kind of scholarly journalism, I say.
Fear from ISIS and the Islamic State may drive people to lose control of their faculties. We should all fear ISIS and its terror, but we should never lose sight of how, who, and why ISIS was formed in the first place. We should never lose sight that every terror organization since Hafez al-Assad ascended to power in 1970 has been forged, supported, and empowered by the Assads.
I challenge anyone to provide me a name of any Arab terror organization the Assads did not help or protect in Damascus. From Ahmad Jibril, to Hamas, to Hezbollah, to ISIS, to al-Qaeda, to Fatah al-Islam, and on and on and on… The aim was not to keep an eye on them as the Assads convinced many western intelligence agencies. The aim was to proxy them to terrorize their enemies and harm US interests on behalf of the Soviets, and now the Iranians.
For Gelb to rely on the very source of all terror in the region to fight terror shows just how ignorant people can be when they write well, have a total command of the English language, are well-connected, but are clueless about the subject matter at hand.
Anyone in the future who deems it politically and morally correct to ask any Syrian who suffered from the Assad terror “Not to be fixated on Assad” will have to deal with my pen. If you are one who gets confused by terrorists who wear ties and their wives parade in $5,000 shoes, I will remind you that terror is class free. Its lowest common denominator is a vest or an IED that a rich or a poor terrorist can afford.
[Tweet “Assad to Syrians is what Hitler was to Jews”].The scales would have been different had it not been for the exposure of YouTube. During the Hama siege of 1982, Hafez and Rifaat al-Assad may have butchered some 30,000 Syrians in 2 weeks just to kill some 400 Muslim Brotherhood terrorists.
At this rate, in almost four years, Assad would have killed 3,000,000 Syrians. Assad is our Hitler, and only technology saved us from total annihilation.
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