The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research cordially invites you to its
23rd Anniversary Gala
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Congregation Shaar Hashomayim
450 Avenue Kensington, Westmount, Quebec, CanadaDISTINGUISHED KEYNOTE SPEAKER
MOSHE ARENS
Former Israeli Defense Minister and Ambassador to the U.S.
Also Featuring
Prof. Barry Rubin
Outstanding internationally-renowned Middle East analyst
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SYRIA: WHERE MASSACRE IS A FAMILY TRADITION
Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2011
Pity the Syrians as they face the Assad regime’s tanks and artillery and snipers. Unlike in Libya, there is no Arab or international “mandate” to protect them. Grant Syria’s rulers their due: Their country rides with the Iranian theocracy and provides it access to the Mediterranean. It is a patron of Hamas and Hezbollah. And still they managed to sell the outside world on the legend of their moderation.
True, Damascus was at one time or another at odds with all its neighbors—Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Israel—but it managed to remain in the good graces of the international community. It had made a mockery of Lebanon’s sovereignty, murdered its leaders at will. Yet for all the brutality and audacity of the Syrian reign of terror and plunder in Lebanon, the Syrians were able to convince powers beyond that their writ was still preferable to the chaos that would engulf Lebanon were they to leave.
In the same vein, Damascus was able to pull off an astonishing feat: Syria was at once the “frontline” state that had remained true to the struggle against Israel, and the country that kept the most tranquil border with the Jewish state. (As easily as Syria’s rulers kept the peace of that border, they were able to shatter it recently, sending Palestinian refugees to storm the border across the Golan Heights.)
It was the writer Daniel Pipes who rightly said that Syria’s leaders perennially wanted the “peace process” but not peace itself. Their modus operandi was thus: Keep the American envoys coming, hold out the promise of accommodation with Israel, tempt successive U.S. administrations with a grand bargain, while your proxies in Lebanon set ablaze the Lebanese-Israeli border and your capital houses Hamas and all the terrible Palestinian rejectionists.
Syria could have it both ways: ideological and rhetorical belligerence combined with unsentimental diplomacy and skullduggery. The Iranians wanted access to Lebanon and its border with Israel. The Syrians sold it to them at a price. They were unapologetic about it before other Arabs, but they kept alive the dream that they could be “peeled off” from Iran, that theirs was a modern, secular nation that looked with a jaundiced eye on the ways of theocracies.
Syria’s rulers were Alawites, schismatics, to the Sunni purists a heresy. Yet as America battled to put a new order in Iraq in place, Syria was the point of transit for Sunni jihadists from other Arab lands keen to make their way there to kill and be killed. The American project there was being bloodied, and this gave the Syrians a reprieve, for they feared they would be next if Washington looked beyond Iraq for other targets.
It was that sordid game that finally convinced George W. Bush that the Syrians had to pay a price for their duplicity. The American support for the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon then followed, and the Syrians made a hasty retreat. In time they would experience a seller’s remorse, and they would try to regain what they had given up under duress.
Barack Obama provided the Syrian dictatorship with a diplomatic lifeline. He was keen to “engage” Tehran and Damascus, he was sure that Syrian radicalism had been a response to the heavy hand of the Bush administration. An American ambassador was dispatched to Damascus, and an influential figure in the Democratic Party, Sen. John Kerry, made it his calling to argue that the young Syrian ruler was, at heart, a “reformer” eager to sever his relations with Iran and Hezbollah.
The Arab Spring upended all that. It arrived late in Syria, three months after it had made its way to Tunisia and Egypt, one month after Libya’s revolt. A group of young boys in the town of Deraa, near the border with Jordan, had committed the cardinal sin of scribbling antiregime graffiti. A brittle regime with a primitive personality cult and a deadly fault-line between its Alawite rulers and Sunni majority responded with heavy-handed official terror. The floodgates were thrown open, the Syrian people discovered within themselves new reservoirs of courage, and the rulers were hell-bent on frightening the population into their old state of submission.
Until the Arab Spring, nothing had stirred in Syria in nearly three decades. President Hafez al-Assad and his murderous younger brother Rifaat had made an example of Hama in 1982 when they stamped out a popular uprising by leveling much of the city and slaughtering thousands. Now, the circle is closed. President Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother Maher, commander of the Republican Guard, are determined to subdue this new rebellion as their father did in Hama—one murder at a time. In today’s world it’s harder to turn off the lights and keep tales of repression behind closed doors, but the Assads know no other way. Massacre is a family tradition.
It took time for the diplomacy of the West to catch up with Syria’s horrors. In Washington, they were waiting for Godot as the Damascus regime brutalized its children. In his much-trumpeted May 19 speech from the State Department—“Cairo II,” it was dubbed—President Obama gave the Syrian ruler a choice. He could lead the transition toward democracy or “get out of the way.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has since used the same language.
But one senses this newfound bravado is too little too late. With fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and now Libya, few leaders in the U.S. or Europe want to see the Assad regime for what it truly is. Yet the truth is there for all who wish to see. Ask the Syrians deserting their homes and spilling across the Turkish border about the ways of Bashar and his killer squads and vigilantes with their dirty tricks. They will tell us volumes about the big prison that the regime maintains.
Arab bloggers with a turn of phrase, playing off the expression of “only in Syria,” have given voice to the truth about this dreadful regime. Only in Syria, goes one formulation, does your neighbor go to work in the morning and return 11 years later. Only in Syria does a child enter prison before entering school. Only in Syria does a man go to jail for 20 years without being charged and is then asked to write a letter thanking the authorities upon his release. The list goes on. At last, in Damascus, the mask of this regime has fallen, so late in the hour.
(Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.)
‘WE’VE NEVER SEEN SUCH HORROR’
Leon Wieseltier
National Post, June 10, 2011
The reformer has responded to the democratic stirrings in his country with a war against its children. The murder and mutilation of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb is only the most shocking instance of Bashar al-Assad’s mercilessness.
The Syrian uprising originated in March as an expression of anger at the arrest and torture of 15 boys, who were accused of scrawling anti-government graffiti in the town of Dara’a, which has now earned a place of honour in the geography of modern dissent. (The crowd that demonstrated for the release of the boys was fired upon, lethally, by Syrian security forces.) In April, witnesses reported that the hooligans of the mukhabarat were beating children. One man who was caught in the crackdown in Dara’a recounted that he shared a cell with 370 people and 70 of them were children.
I take these terrible particulars from “We’ve Never Seen Such Horror”: Crimes Against Humanity by Syrian Security Forces, a remarkable report issued by Human Rights Watch last week. The document gives evidence also of the Assad regime’s other obscene acts against its people. A crowd chanting, “Peaceful, peaceful,” was met by “an ambush.” “Security forces were everywhere,” a witness said, “in the fields nearby, on a water tank behind the checkpoint, on the roof of a nearby factory, and in the trees, and the fire came from all sides.” Another person on the scene recalled that “they were deliberately targeting people. Most injuries were in the head and chest.”
There was also organized government violence against medical workers: “I saw a man who tried to pull the wounded guy away, but security forces continued to shoot.… They again shot the wounded guy, this time in the head, and hit the rescuer as well.… Another man tried to take a dead body away on the motorcycle, but as he tried to approach, he got shot in the shoulder, then again in the leg, and when he fell off and other people made a move toward him, a sniper hit him in the head, and I believe he died.”
The conclusion reached by “We’ve Never Seen Such Horror” is that, “Human Rights Watch believes that the nature and scale of the abuses committed by the Syrian security forces, the similarities in the apparent unlawful killings and other crimes, and evidence of direct orders given to security forces to ‘shoot-to-kill’ protesters, strongly suggest these abuses qualify as crimes against humanity.”
The day after Human Rights Watch accused the government of Syria of crimes against humanity, Hillary Clinton declared that “the legitimacy that is necessary for anyone to expect change to occur under this current government is, if not gone, nearly run out.” Nearly? What else does the Syrian tyrant have to do to persuade the Secretary of State that the purpose of his regime is not reform?
The clumsiness of this administration in the saga of Arab democratization sometimes seems irremediable. Only a few weeks ago the President delivered a grand address at the State Department in which he re-oriented American policy, which had been chilly and slow, firmly in the direction of the promotion of democracy. Some even called it Obama’s neoconservative moment. The President rejected “a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of [American] interests” (which he weirdly imputed to the Bush administration) in favour of “a set of core principles”—universal rights, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, gender equality, and “the right to choose your own leaders”—and proclaimed that “our support for these principles is not a secondary interest—today I am making it clear that it is a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions.”
Obama’s speech was stirring, but it was strange. Nothing in his response to the Arab revolts—or almost nothing: he was indeed moved by the fate of Benghazi, though the fate of Tripoli seems to exercise him less—prepared one for the intensity of its idealism. Having been unaccountably cool, Obama became unaccountably hot.
About Syria, he remarked that “the Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy. President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.” Of course Assad had already demonstrated by his actions that he rejects such a choice. Obama’s “get out of the way” about Assad reminded me of his “must go” about Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The President is still dogmatically spooked by American support for regime change, even when it is not the work of Americans, but of Syrians or Libyans (or Iranians). As Assad’s atrocities multiply, I see no “concrete actions,” no consequential American response to them.
This is, strictly speaking, doubly unfortunate, because the undoing of Bashar al-Assad would vindicate both our values and our interests. Foreign policy crises come in three varieties. There are those that broach American values but not American interests, and those that broach American interests but not American values, and those that broach American values and American interests. Sometimes the values-interests calculus is not clear, but the question of American action still turns on some interpretation of it.
I know of nobody who believes that we should not act when our interests (or our vital ones, however they are defined) are at stake but our values are not. Most of the debates about humanitarian intervention, by contrast, the quarrels between “realists” and “idealists,” concern those cases, and they are sickeningly plentiful, in which our values are at stake but our interests are not, or at least not significantly. But Syria is one of the easy cases in which we have moral and strategic incentives for action.
The moral case against Assad is obvious; but his defeat would represent also a defeat for Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas—all allies of Syria—and therefore a strategic achievement for us and our allies. He thwarts our regional designs at every turn. He impedes an Israeli-Palestinian peace. He aids and abets terrorism. He turns to North Korea for a nuclear facility. We should do whatever we can to assist his people in deposing him.
I recognize the view that stability in Syria may be preferable to the political and religious and tribal chaos that may ensue from Assad’s fall, but the days of stability in Syria seem to have passed. The unbelievably brave people in the streets of Syria’s cities and towns do not deserve to be so lonely in the world. If a new Middle East is being born, its attitude toward America and Americanism will be substantially determined by what it remembers about our part in its birth.
DARKNESS IN SYRIA
Matt Gurney
FrontPage, June 7, 2011The chaos in Syria, Israel’s northern nemesis and a major geopolitical actor in the Middle East, has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The situation is rapidly approaching that of an outright civil war, and in such an eventuality, it is unclear who would replace the Assad regime, if it can be pushed from power at all. Although the nature of the Syrian opposition movement is deeply uncertain, recent reports have demonstrated that the Muslim Brotherhood is definitely within its ranks.
Over the last several weeks, largely nonviolent protests against the ruling regime of Bashar al-Assad have been brutally put down by professional troops and security forces, with heavy casualties to civilians. Current estimates put the number of civilian dead at approximately 1,100, though that number is impossible to verify. As if that were not bad enough, on Monday, news broke that Syrian military forces were ambushed while responding to a call for help from a town where fighting had broken out. Again, the death toll cannot be verified, but state-run media reports 120 soldiers were killed. The government has vowed to respond with force to this attack, which, if true, represents the first major attack on Syrian forces by the protest movement. Whether or not the government’s death toll is accurate, the fact that there was fighting in the town of Jisr al-Shoghour has been confirmed by anti-regime activists and residents of the town. Who is responsible is unknown, but none of the possible answers are reassuring.
According to residents of the town, the troops were sent to Jisr al-Shoghour after fighting broke out among units of the security forces. Defections of officers and men into rebel units have also been reported—including some in other nearby towns. While it is important to stress that none of this can be confirmed, if the reports are accurate, it would appear that at least some units of the Syrian military have broken away from the government. Having reportedly equipped themselves with heavy weapons from local military armories, they then wiped out the military reinforcements sent to put an end to their insurrection.
This is a familiar story. It was only several months ago that a popular uprising in the Libyan city of Benghazi quickly drew over several units of Muammar Gaddafi’s armed forces. A Libyan rebel government, with a military composed of defectors and deserters from Gaddafi’s forces, quickly formed, and has been fighting a civil war against Gaddafi for several months. The rebels are now backed by the air and naval forces of the NATO alliance. The uprising against Gaddafi was triggered when security forces loyal to the regime used violence to put down peaceful protests. The comparisons to the deteriorating situation in Syria are strong indeed.
Much like the situation in Libya, there is uncertainty over the goals and motives—even identity—of those who would stand against the Assad regime in a civil war. Syria has been ruled by the Ba’ath Party, which itself is headed by the Assad family, for 40 years. No opposition has been permitted, no democratic movements allowed. Who would speak for Syria’s rebels?
There are possibilities, but none are attractive. The Assad family are Shiite Muslims of the Alawite sect, and the overwhelming majority of Syria’s population are Sunni, setting the stage for a split of the country along religious lines (though it should be said that the protests thus far have not taken on overtly sectarian tones). There are other large minorities in Syria, including a tenth of the population that is Christian and nearly as many that are ethnically Kurdish. It should also be noted that according to early reports, the crackdown by security forces has been conducted by units dominated by Alawites—furthering concern that the collapse of Syria into civil war could rapidly become a fight along religious and ethnic lines as military units of one religion or ethnicity turn against other units composed of members of a different sect. Such a civil war would raise the grim specter of widespread ethnic cleansing along the lines of what was seen in the Balkans during the 1990s.
The possiblity of an ethnic or religious civil war is alarming, but is not the only unpleasant possibility to consider. The Muslim Brotherhood has long been an enemy of the ruling regime and the Assad family. In 1982, the Syrian military attacked the Brotherhood stronghold of Hama, virtually destroying the city. Civilian deaths in that operation ranged from a low estimate of 10,000 to a high of 80,000. The annihilation of Hama marked the end of the Brotherhood’s terrorist insurgency against the Assad family and drove its leadership into hiding or exile. But it has continued to call for an end to Assad’s rule (even receiving funds from American taxpayers) and for elections to replace him—elections it would of course participate in. CNN has reported that witnesses to the fighting in and around Jisr al-Shoghour claim the violence involved members of the Muslim Brotherhood attacking government forces. And the Canadian Press reports that a recent meeting of Syrian opposition leaders in Turkey included a representative of the Brotherhood. While its strength is unknown, the Islamist organization is clearly interested in a role in a post-Assad future that many believe to be imminent.
In an excellent column, The New York Times’ David Brooks heaped scorn upon the brutal Syrian regime, whose depravity is now on full display to the world. He also singled out for ridicule those who would have expected Israel to ever reach a fair and lasting peace treaty with those who machine-gun their own civilians or torture small boys to death and send the body to the family. Mr. Brooks is exactly right. But if Assad should fall in the days to come, and should Syria collapse into civil war or fall under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, Israel will be no better off.
(Matt Gurney is a columnist and editor at the National Post.)
THE SECTARIAN LOGIC OF EVENTS IN SYRIA
Jonathan Spyer
Jerusalem Post, June 3, 2011
Hezbollah has been caught off balance by the uprising in Syria. Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s recent words of solidarity with his embattled ally in Damascus led to the burning of the Lebanese Shi’a Islamist leader’s image by angry Syrian crowds during last Friday’s demonstrations.
The movement’s stance on Syria reveals a basic contradiction between Hezbollah’s practical interests and the image it likes to project of itself. This contradiction in turn may reveal the inherent limitations of the Iranian, Shi’ite-led “resistance bloc” in the overwhelmingly Sunni Arabic-speaking world.
On a practical level, it is not difficult to see why the fall of the Assad regime would be a disaster for both Hezbollah and its Iranian patron. Syria is the secure conduit through which Tehran is able to arm its Lebanese proxy on the Mediterranean.
Significant elements of Hezbollah’s armory are stored safely under Assad’s care. The M-600s and Fateh-110 missiles, which might provoke an early Israeli strike if deployed in Lebanon, wait in secure facilities across the border for the appropriate moment.
But Syria is much more than a storehouse for Hezbollah. Since the accession of Bashar Assad, the relationship between the two has become increasingly symbiotic. Hezbollah was the instrument whereby Syria was able to regain influence in Lebanon following its inglorious retreat in 2005. Syria provided a vital logistic hinterland for Hezbollah during the 2006 war.
There are suspicions that the two may have cooperated in the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.…
Both Assad and Nasrallah use the language of “resistance,” yet the two are today united in resistance to the plainly expressed will of the Syrian people. There is a deeper logic at work here than simply the timeless spectacle of dictatorial regimes and movements having the emptiness of their rhetoric made apparent. The Iran-led bloc may have presented itself as the voice of regional authenticity and resistance.
But if one looks at its component parts, it rapidly becomes apparent that this was and is largely an alliance of Shi’ite (or at least non-Sunni) Arab forces behind a large, non-Arab Shi’ite state.
The core members of the alliance are Iran, the Shi’ite Hezbollah, the Alawite-dominated Assad regime, and the Shi’ite movement of Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq. Iran has sought to make gains from the current ferment in the Arab world. But its arena of activity has been limited mainly to areas of majority- Shi’ite population, such as Bahrain. Outside the narrow bands of Shi’ite Arab communities, there is a built-in suspicion of the Iranians.
The Iranian war on Israel is intended to disprove these suspicions, and this has seen some success. But the kudos gained by Shi’ite elements for fighting Israel do not seem to be easily transferable to other areas.
The single major exception to the largely Shi’ite complexion of the Iran-led bloc was and is Hamas. The Hamas enclave in Gaza was maintained by Iranian money and weaponry. But one of the most noteworthy fallout events from the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt has been Hamas’s apparent attempt to reorient away from the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis, and back toward Sunni Arab Egypt.
The (Sunni) Emirate of Qatar, meanwhile, which has flirted with the resistance axis in the past years, has directed its hugely influential Al Jazeera network firmly against the Syrian regime in recent weeks. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, too, has grown critical of Assad and is hosting gatherings of the Syrian opposition.
Syria, in short, is hemorrhaging Sunni friends. Its Shi’ite ones, by contrast, have fewer options and are staying loyal. So Hezbollah’s and Iran’s cleaving toward their Syrian ally has the look of a non-Sunni alliance closing ranks to defend itself against a ferment in the Sunni Arab world.…
From Israel’s point of view, the built-in limitations of the Shi’ite-led resistance bloc are good news. The less good news is that rival centers of anti-Western and anti-Israel Sunni power are emerging in the region.…
The “Shi’a crescent” itself [is not] about to collapse. At the moment, its unrivaled capacity for brutality looks set to keep its Syrian client in its seat. But its claim to represent the forces of Arab “resistance” to the West and Israel has taken a heavy blow as a result of the turmoil in the Arab world. And meanwhile, a rival “Sunni crescent,” with a rival claim to this mantle, is in the process of being born.
