Israel Matzav

What Assad and his advisers think of the United States

The private email of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's media adviser has been hacked, and it has been yielding a treasure trove of interesting bits of information. One deals with how Assad's adviser sees America. Tom Gross reports.

Hundreds of emails from Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s office have been leaked after a cyber attack by the hacker group “Anonymous”. One of the emails contains a document preparing Assad for his interview with ABC TV’s Barbara Walters last December.

In his interview with Walters, Assad denied that Syrian citizens were being killed. “We don’t kill our people. No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person,” Assad told Walters.

A week before the interview, Sheherazad Jaafari, who works as a press attaché at the Syrian mission to the United Nations in New York, sent a long email to former Al Jazeera journalist Luna Chebel, who now works in Assad’s bureau. Jaafari, who helped set up the interview with Walters, is also the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the UN, Dr. Bashar Jaafari.

The younger Jaafari wrote: “It is hugely important and worth mentioning that ‘mistakes’ have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organized ‘police force.’ American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are ‘mistakes’ done and now we are ‘fixing it.’ It’s worth mentioning also what is happening now in Wall Street and the way the demonstrations are been suppressed by policemen, police dogs and beatings.”

Jaafari also recommended that Assad say: “Syria doesn’t have a policy to torture people, unlike the USA, where there are courses and schools that specialize in teaching policemen and officers how to torture.”

She continued: “It would be worth mentioning how your personality has been attacked and praised in the last decade according to the media. At one point H.E. was viewed as a hero and in other times H.E. was the ‘bad guy’. Americans love these kinds of things get convinced by it.”

Jaafari also stressed that Facebook and YouTube are important to “the American mindset”.

Emphasis mine.

I hope they find some emails that tell us what he thinks of Obama. Heh.

Labels: Bashar al-Assad

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:42 PM