(ANTIMEDIA) An Israeli minister called for the assassination of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday, claiming Assad “does not have a place in this world,” the Times of Israel reported.
Speaking at a conference outside Jerusalem, former Israeli Defense Force general and Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Galant said that in light of recent allegations from the U.S. State Department that Assad has carried out mass executions and burned the bodies of his victims, he must be killed.
“The reality of the situation in Syria is that they are executing people, using directed chemical attacks against them, and the latest extreme — burning their corpses, something we haven’t seen in 70 years,” Galant said, referencing the Holocaust.
Galant is not the first member of the anti-Assad alliance to attempt to paint Assad and former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler with the same brush. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer did so in early April (albeit quite embarrassingly, as Spicer tends to do.) Galant said Assad’s actions in Syria amount to nothing less than a “genocide,” with “hundreds of thousands killed.”
“In my view, we are crossing a red line. And in my view, the time has come to assassinate Assad. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
Even though targeted assassinations are not legal under international law (which appears to be irrelevant considering U.S. and French bombers directly targeted Muammar Gaddafi’s motorcade in Libya, paving the way for al-Qaeda-linked rebels to sodomize him with a bayonet before killing him), Galant added that “anyone who murders people and burns their corpses does not have a place in this world.”
According to the Times of Israel, Galant likened the assassination of Assad to cutting off the “tail of the snake.” After that, he said, “we can focus on the head, which is in Tehran.”
This statement is quite telling considering a leaked email from the Hillary Clinton archive shows one of the reasons these powers want to topple Assad is to undermine Iranian influence and to ensure Israel retains its nuclear monopoly in the region.
Clearly, Israel has no serious concern regarding Assad’s alleged human rights abuses. Its interests in Syria are purely geostrategic and include the need to confront the so-called threat of Iran, Syria’s closest ally, as well as concerns regarding Syria as an oil and gas transit route (not to mention Israel’s desire to grab what is left of Syria’s oil).
During Operation Cast Lead, Galant oversaw the IDF’s assault on the Gaza strip between December 2008 and January 2009 — a three-week armed conflict that saw the death of 1,400 Palestinians, according to Amnesty International. This death toll included some 240 police officers, which the U.N. found to be illegal because the police force was a civilian agency and should not have been targeted. Some 5,000 were injured, and many were maimed for life.
Further, the State Department’s recent allegations that Assad commits mass executions and then burns the bodies in a crematorium don’t really add anything new to the debate. From the Associated Press:
“The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not prove the building is a crematorium, but show a facility consistent with such use, Jones [Stuart Jones, a top U.S. diplomat] said.” [emphasis added]
Even the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is run by a lone Syrian political dissident, said the Observatory lacked sufficient information about the supposed crematorium, as noted by AP.
Also worth noting is the fact that according to Stuart Jones, Assad’s men burn executed bodies in the crematorium to “cover up the extent of mass murders taking place.” This is convenient considering we would never know for sure if the U.S. State Department’s allegations are actually true or not, given the bodies would no longer exist.
Galant’s claim that Assad has committed genocide against his own people and has no place in this world also seems to run contrary to the fact that the vast majority of Syrians live under Assad’s rule and have been completely disillusioned by the brutality and extremity of the groups who hijacked Syria’s so-called revolution.
It certainly wouldn’t be unheard of for a Middle Eastern dictator to execute political dissidents (indeed, America’s closest allies routinely do this); but the State Department has not provided direct proof of this claim or the claim that Assad uses a crematorium to burn the bodies. Galant’s statement that Assad should be assassinated out of humanitarian concerns is not only an illegal suggestion but also a move that only benefits Islamic extremists. It is also extremely hypocritical to see a man who is part of a government that bombs disabled people — and allied to another government that is massacring Iraqis by the thousands — want to execute a man in order to restore humanity in Syria.
As such, we should continue to remain extremely skeptical about any solutions to the Syrian conflict that these warmongers promulgate.
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