Syrian President shows his true hatred of Israel

One is almost tempted to feel a pang of sympathy for the new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. After all, the man has only just finished overthrowing one of the Middle East's most durable dictatorships, and already he finds himself on the conference circuit, dispensing wisdom to the assembled worthies at the Doha Forum. Yet any such sympathy evaporates the moment the Jew hating scumcrumpet opens his mouth.

Al-Sharaa, formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was the leader of al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra. In other words, he is a jihadi terrorist commander in the Syrian Civil War, and now wears a suit and meets with world leaders.

"Israel has become a country that is in a fight against ghosts," Sharaa told the Qataris, with all the confidence of a man who has never had to worry about rockets falling on his own cities. 

"Israelis," he continued, use "their security concerns, and they take October 7 and extrapolate it to everything happening around them." One cannot imagine a more tone-deaf formulation. The events of October 7 were not some collective hallucination cooked up in a Tel Aviv focus group; they were the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and for this thug to call it an hallucination is an obvious lie. To describe Israel's perfectly rational determination never to let it happen again as "fighting ghosts" is the sort of moral inversion that has become the regional specialty of the Jew haters.

But Sharaa was just warming up. 

Israel, he informed his admiring audience, "often brings its crises to other countries and tries to evade taking responsibility for the 'horrifying massacres it committed in Gaza'." This from the leader of a regime whose forces have, in the mere blink of an eye since seizing power, been accused by the United Nations and Syria's own minorities of targeting Druze in Sweida and Alawites in Latakia. 

Naturally, the Syrian president presented himself as a paragon of peaceable intent, much like the scorpion convincing the frog to carry him across the pond. Since toppling Assad, he has sent a "positive message regarding regional peace and stability," and his regime "does not seek conflict, including with Israel." How unfortunate, then, that Israel has repaid this olive branch with "extreme violence," a thousand air strikes, four hundred incursions, and so forth. 

One might ask why, if Damascus is so very peaceful, Israel feels compelled to treat Syrian airspace as its own private highway. Perhaps because the new Syrian authorities have shown no particular eagerness to evict the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah remnants, or any of the other charming guests who made Syria such a delightful neighborhood under the previous management.

The Doha Forum, of course, is laughably billed as a "neutral platform." Its Qatari hosts insist it exists to promote dialogue on everything from conflict resolution to economic inequality. This year's theme, "Justice in Action: Beyond Promises to Progress" has a pleasantly earnest ring to it. Yet when the star speakers include a Syrian warlord lecturing the region's sole democracy on "horrifying massacres," a Turkish foreign minister pondering how best to separate Israelis and Palestinians "along the border," and a Qatari prime minister explaining that the current pause in Gaza is not a ceasefire because Israeli forces have not yet withdrawn completely, one begins to suspect that "neutrality" in Doha is rather like "peace" in Damascus: a word with highly elastic meaning.

Qatar's Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani was particularly instructive. "We are at a critical moment," he intoned. "We cannot consider it yet a ceasefire. A ceasefire cannot be completed unless there is a full withdrawal of the Israeli forces, (until) there is stability back in Gaza, people can go in and out, which is not the case today." 

In other words, Hamas may fire rockets and bullets whenever it pleases, but Israel must retreat unconditionally, or the whole thing is invalid. The same Qatar, let it never be forgotten, that has bankrolled Hamas for years, housed its leaders in five-star hotels, and now presides over a conference where Israel is ritually denounced by every speaker who matters.

And yet, in a final touch of surrealism, this same gathering, funded by a state that remains Hamas's principal financial and diplomatic sponsor is playing host to prominent American conservatives, including Tucker [Tuck You] Carlson. For many in Israel and the Jewish world, the spectacle of Western figures lending their presence to an event staged by a regime that has October 7's blood on its checkbook is simply incomprehensible. Senator Ted Cruz's sardonic “#QatarFirst” hashtag rather said it all.

One leaves the Doha Forum with the distinct impression that "justice in action" means something very specific in that part of the world: the continued demonization of the Middle East's only liberal democracy, the rehabilitation of its enemies, and the polite preterence that none of this has anything to do with the pogrom of October 7, 2023. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose – only now with better canapés and a more expensive backdrop.

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