Daily Mail, December 16 2002

When President George W Bush declared his ‘war on terror’, he effectively announced that the practice of cosying up to state sponsors of terrorism was now at an end.

Tony Blair is supposed to be America’s ally in this struggle. Yet today, he is rolling out the red carpet for a man who sits at the very epicentre of terror, the Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Terror is absolutely central to Syria’s policy. It sponsors Hezbollah in Lebanon, which not only carries out terror attacks against Israel but before September 11 had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group.

At a rally in Lebanon last month, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called on Palestinians to ‘take suicide bombings worldwide’. Yet the man being feted in London this week has forged a far closer relationship with Hezbollah even than his father, the late President Hafiz al-Assad.

Syria also hosts the headquarters of Islamic Jihad and numerous other terrorist organisations. As Damascus radio said earlier this year, ‘Syria has turned its land into a training camp, a safe haven and an arms depot for the Palestinian revolutionaries’.

Last week in an interview with the Times, President Assad declared that he actually supported Palestinian ‘suicide’ bombers. Yet this is the man who will dine with the Prime Minister in Downing Street today, meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace tomorrow and attend the Lord Mayor’s dinner.

As a Jew who believes that Israel is a principal victim of the terror sponsored by Syria and others, I am appalled by this honouring of a man with so much blood on his hands. But many others must also be wondering just what is going on.

The answer is that President Assad is New Labour’s kind of guy. He and his wife have great PR because hey, they don’t even look or sound like Arabs. The President is an ophthalmologist who studied medicine in England, no less. Mrs Assad is actually an Englishwoman who started life as plain Emma from west London.

The Times reported that he didn’t look like a ruthless dictator – no doubt because he didn’t sport military fatigues, or goose-step across the room.

But of course, far from being a New Labour dream the Assads are the first family of a backward country with extensive poverty, absence of human rights and second-class status for women.

Yet this charmer with the bedside manner has apparently beguiled the Prime Minister into believing that here is a man who is going to lead Syria out of the dark ages and with whom Britain can therefore do business. Just how gullible can you get?

This state visit is presumably intended as a reward for President Assad’s support for the UN resolution on Iraq. But this was clearly a tactical manoeuvre. In November, Syria’s Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shar revealed that it had voted for the resolution to divide President Bush’s administration and prevent war against Iraq.

In other words, this was a spoiling exercise. And indeed, in last week’s interview President Assad warned that the campaign to topple Saddam would have ‘catastrophic consequences’ for the region.

Now, intelligence sources are claiming that Syria is actually surreptitiously arming Iraq. It is reported that more than 52 crates containing new air-defence systems and spare parts have been smuggled from Syria into Iraq since last December, enabling the Iraqis to upgrade their air defence capabilities. And Syria is also said to have allowed Saddam to open an oil smuggling route through the port of Latakia.

Well, what a surprise. But do many in Britain actually care? For a disturbing number of people still can’t see the point of taking military action against Saddam Hussein. They think there is no link between the Iraqi dictator and al Q’aeda, and so he poses no terror threat to the west.

I happen to believe such a link does exist. But even if it did not, the threat from Saddam is still plain. He repeatedly declares his intention to become leader of the Arab world. Weapons of mass destruction would help him achieve this ambition.

This would mean that despite his secularism he would become leader of the Islamic jihad. The people who brought us September 11 would then be equipped with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Mr Blair has grasped that we cannot sit by and wait for this to happen. Hence his support for President Bush. But this obscures significant differences between the two. For Mr Blair appears to believe that Islamic fascism is susceptible to reason, and in particular to the force of his own personality.

This hubris has already led him into humiliation. Last year, shortly after the murder of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze’evi by the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Mr Blair went to Syria to tell President Assad to renounce violence. He got his reply at a press conference when he was forced to listen to the Syrian leader defend Palestinian terror attacks on Israel.

So why on earth is he honouring this man in this way? The main reason is that he is desperate to demonstrate that Britain has no quarrel with Islam or the Arab world as such. But this spectacularly misses the point. The west has indeed no quarrel with Islam, one of the world’s great religions and civilisations.

It is rather that certain Islamist groups and their state backers have declared war in the name of Islam against the west in general and the Jews in particular -- and not just those in Israel.

President Assad himself makes no distinction between hatred of Israel and hatred of the Jews. In a disgusting remark when he visited the Pope last year, he said: ‘The Israelis are trying to kill all monotheistic religious principles on the basis of the same mentality that led to the betrayal and torture of Jesus, and the same mentality through which they tried to kill the Prophet Mohammad’.

His defence minister Mustafa Tlass is the author of ‘The Matzah of Zion’, a grotesque anti-semitic libel which claims that the Jews drink the blood of children. This obscene publication, now in its eighth reprint, is doing a roaring trade in the Arab world. Earlier this year, President Assad extended Mr Tlass’s term for another two years in appreciation of his services.

Mr Blair’s refusal to acknowledge all this in public is more than shameful. It serves to perpetuate terrorism. His failure to take a principled, public stand against the sponsors of terror and the anti-semitism that fuels it is taken as a sign of weakness, to be exploited by terrorism’s many godfathers.

Such grovelling appeasement also perpetuates ignorance and confusion among the British people, with the resulting lack of support for action against a terror network whose nature and reach are simply not understood. It has led too many to believe that Israel is the cause of world terror, rather than recognise that Israel is the principal target of a genocidal onslaught against the Jews and a wider war against the west.

Realpolitik is the art of the possible. Naivety and hubris merely make leaders look ridiculous or compromised – and leave their countries dangerously exposed.

Posted by admin at December 16, 2002