United Nations has awarded tens of millions in 'aid' contracts to Assad cronies
The United Nations has awarded tens of millions of dollars in aid contracts to people associated with the Assad regime, including the dictator's wife Asma, and close Assad associate Rami Makhlouf. According to Britain's Guardian, many of the persons who received the contracts are subject to United States and European Union sanctions.
The UN says it can only work with a small number of partners approved
by President Assad and that it does all it can to ensure the money is
spent properly.
“Of paramount importance is reaching as many vulnerable civilians as possible,” a spokesman said. “Our choices in Syria
are limited by a highly insecure context where finding companies and
partners who operate in besieged and hard to reach areas is extremely
challenging.”
However, critics believe the UN mission is in danger of being compromised.
They believe aid is being prioritised in government-held areas and
argue UN money is effectively helping to prop up a regime responsible
for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.
UN insiders admit the relief mission in Syria is the most expensive, challenging and complex it has ever undertaken.
But the contentious decisions it has had to make are now exposed for
the first time by a Guardian analysis of hundreds of contracts it has
awarded since the operation began in 2011.
This shows that:
The UN has paid more than $13m to the Syrian government to boost
farming and agriculture, yet the EU has banned trade with the
departments in question for fear of how the money will be used.
The UN has paid at least $4m to the state-owned fuel supplier, which is also on the EU sanctions list.
The World Health Organisation has spent more than $5m to support
Syria’s national blood bank – but this is being controlled by Assad’s
defence department. Documents seen by the Guardian show funds spent on
blood supplies came directly from donors who have economic sanctions
against the Syrian government, including the UK. They also show the WHO
had “concrete concerns” about whether blood supplies would reach those
in need, or be directed to the military first.
Two UN agencies have partnered with the Syria Trust charity, an
organisation started and chaired by President Assad’s wife, Asma,
spending a total of $8.5m. The first lady is under both US and EU
sanctions.
Unicef has paid $267,933 to the Al-Bustan Association, owned and run
by Rami Makhlouf, Syria’s wealthiest man. He is a friend and cousin of
Assad, and his charity has been linked to several pro-regime militia
groups.
Contracts have been awarded across UN departments with companies run by or linked to individuals under sanctions.
These contracts show how the United Nations operation has quietly secured deals with individuals and companies that have been designated off-limits by Europe and the US.
On top of this, analysis of the United Nations own procurement
documents show its agencies have done business with at least another 258
Syrian companies, paying sums as high as $54m and £36m, down to
$30,000. Many are likely to have links to Assad, or those close to him.
If the Obama administration and the Europeans had expended even half the effort on Syria that they have expended on the 'poor' 'oppressed' 'Palestinians' over the past five years, it is hard to believe that the situation would be this bad. But they don't. Unfortunately for Syrians, "No Jews = No News" and the news that Jews have actually been saving Syrians almost isn't being reported anywhere outside of Israel.
ProAssad media photoshopped Asma Assad's head onto Angelina Jolie's body and said she's helping Syrian refugees. LOL! pic.twitter.com/NzWV6IEsUl
— كريم بيجيتا (@SaiyanSyrian) March 5, 2014
Yes, that's the Kerry's and the Assad's dining together in a Damascus restaurant in better times. On Sunday, Kerry compared Bashar al-Assad to Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein.
Asma al-Assad takes a beating in the British media. Yes, she really does sound like Marie Antoinette (Hat Tip: Shy Guy).
But as Asma Assad shelters in a bomb-proof bunker to avoid the horrors erupting within Syria – and to escape the US missiles expected soon to rain down on the country – she has become more of a Marie Antoinette figure, shopping for extravagant designer goods, food and health products online as the country collapses around her.
While more than 100,000 men, women and children have been killed and nearly two million Syrians have fled the country since March 2011, Asma, 38, recently splashed out on some Bohemian crystal chandeliers from Prague.
She also regularly orders Western food in bulk for her three children as she doesn’t want them to eat only Syrian food, according to an insider.
And in photographs posted on her Instagram account only last week, she is shown wearing a new blue £80 Jawbone UP on her right wrist – a device designed to help wearers keep track of how many steps they take and calories they burn.
The spending seems to have accelerated along with the killing in Syria. Last year, leaked emails showed she had ordered furniture – including five chandeliers – worth £270,000 from a shop on London’s King Road as her husband’s brutal quelling of the Syrian rebellion intensified.
Because of sanctions, the goods are imported to Syria through Lebanon.
...
He added: ‘She is convinced her family will rule Syria for years to come. And she is particularly interested in growing the family wealth and making sure they keep it.
'She wants to be certain her son, Hafez, will take over as president one day, even if this means hiding him in a school or college in Switzerland or Britain for a time.’
Of her recent purchases, Mr Nour said: ‘Asma Assad has no heart. She is obsessed by how chic and beautiful she looks. She continues to lead a life of utter luxury. That’s all that matters to her.’
Other insiders, who do not want to be named, claim that Asma now travels with at least three Republican bodyguards whenever she goes out and is prevented from seeing any Western news, or from surfing the internet, in case she finds coverage of the Syrian crisis ‘depressing.’
Another critic of the regime, who cannot be named for political reasons, said: ‘Asma still loves her shopping and buys as much as she can to keep her mind off the chaos around her. The idea that she is under Assad’s control and can’t leave is nonsense, but her ability to watch Western media is strictly controlled.’
In a lengthy Facebook post 'liked' by numerous children and grandchildren of the Syrian elites, Hafaz al-Assad, the 11-year old son of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has dared President Obama to attack his country (Hat Tip: Jack W).
It is impossible to confirm whether the Facebook account does, in fact, belong to the son, Hafez al-Assad,
and aspects of it invite doubt. For example, the owner of the account
wrote that he was a graduate of Oxford University and a player for a
Barcelona soccer team, neither of which would be likely to appear on the
résumé of an 11-year-old boy in Damascus.
But those claims could also be read as the ambitions of a child, and
there are reasons to believe that the account may actually belong to
Hafez.
The owner of the account wrote that he was a graduate of a Montessori
school in Damascus, a detail of the Assad children’s lives that Vogue
magazine reported in a February 2011 profile
of their mother, Asma al-Assad. That article portrayed them as typical
suburban children who played with remote control cars and watched Tim
Burton movies on an iMac as they lounged around the family home,
described as running “on wildly democratic principles.” It has since
been removed from the Vogue Web site, but Joshua Landis, a well-known
scholar of Syrian politics, posted a copy to his blog.
Perhaps most significantly, the Facebook post said to have been
written by Hafez al-Assad has been “liked” or commented on by several
accounts that appear to belong to the children or grandchildren of other
senior figures in the Assad administration. Among them are accounts
that seemingly belong to two children of Deputy Vice President Mohammed
Nassif Khierbek, Ali and Sally, and to three children of a former deputy defense minister, Assef Shawkat, who was killed in a bombing in July 2012.
The accounts said to belong to the children of Mr. Shawkat — one of his sons, Bassel, and two of his daughters, Anisseh and Boushra
— appeared to be authentic, according to a Syrian journalist from
Damascus who has extensive knowledge of the country’s ruling elite and
spoke on condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. Mr. Shawkat was
married to the sister of Bashar al-Assad, making these three children
cousins of Mr. Assad’s son Hafez, who is believed to be the author of
the Facebook post.
Many of the people who commented on the post had changed their
profile pictures to show portraits of the Syrian leader or his father,
also named Hafez, who ruled the country for three decades before Bashar
al-Assad took power in 2000. Several of them referenced the author’s
relationship to the two President Assads. One referred to the author
by a diminutive and familiar nickname, “Hafouz,” and complimented him
for his strength and intelligence, writing that such a feat was
unsurprising for the son and grandson of the past two presidents.
Another commenter wrote: “Like father like son! Well said future President!”
And the post itself?
“They may have the best army in the world, maybe the best airplanes,
ships, tanks than ours, but soldiers? No one has soldiers like the ones
we do in Syria,” the post’s author wrote of the United States military.
“America doesn’t have soldiers, what it has is some cowards with new
technology who claim themselves liberators.”
The author then compared the potential American airstrikes to the
2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a
close ally of the Assad regime in the current conflict. Many in the Arab
world saw Hezbollah as the victor of the 2006 clash.
“I just want them to attack sooo much, because I want them to make
this huge mistake of beginning something that they don’t know the end of
it,” he wrote. “What did Hezbollah have back then? Some street fighters
and some small rockets and a pile of guns, but they had belief, In
theirselves and in their country and that’s exactly what’s gonna happen
to America if it chooses invasion because they don’t know our land like
we do, no one does, victory is ours in the end no matter how much time
it takes.”
Any US military step will probably serve as a “slap” to the Syrian
regime, but won’t go as far as toppling President Bashar Assad from
power.
Hence, it would be an act of self-destruction on Assad’s part to drag
Israel into the conflict, for any direct Syrian retribution against
Israel would endanger the very existence of the embattled regime in
Damascus.
With Assad in control of around 40 percent of Syrian
territory, dragging Israel into the Syrian civil war would tip the
scales in the rebels favor, and would be an act of madness on the part
of the Syrian dictator.
Ultimately, the last thing Assad needs at this juncture is to provoke an
Israeli response against him, and so long as he is guided by a
self-preservation instinct, it is reasonable to assess that he will not
attack Israel after a US strike.
Well, maybe. Unless Assad, egged on by Iran, decides that he can reunify his country by attacking the common enemy of the regime and the rebels: Israel. And it doesn't speak to the question of what Syria's real dictator might decide to tell Bashar to do.
The assessment that Bashar will not attack us may be for domestic consumption to avoid panic in Israel. Gas mask demand has jumped 400% here since Assad attacked his own people with chemical weapons last Wednesday.
Bashar al-Assad is living his worst nightmare. Worse than Asma taking over his fiefdom. Worse than the Free Syrian Army biting off chunks of his capital. Bashar has been attacked by Israel and has no way to respond.
Syria vowed to retaliate, but the threats of retribution were seen by
many as exceedingly mild, drawing criticism and mockery from rebels and
opposition leaders who called it proof of President Bashar Assad's
weakness and acquiescence to Israel.
In a televised interview Monday, Syrian Defense Minister Gen. Fahd
Jassem al-Freij indicated that Syria may not be planning to retaliate at
all. He said Israel attacked the research center near Damascus because
rebels were unable to capture it. He called the rebels Israel's "tools."
He was asked by Syrian state TV why Damascus does not retaliate against Israel.
"The Israeli enemy retaliated. When the Israeli enemy saw that its tools
are being chased and did not achieve any (of their) goals, they
interfered," he responded. "It was a response to our military acts
against the armed gangs," al-Freij added. "The heroic Syrian Arab Army,
which proved to the world that it is a strong army and a trained army,
will not be defeated."
In surprisingly candid remarks, al-Freij said that rebels have made
Syrian air defenses across the country a focus of their attacks over the
past months, attacking some with mortars while attempting to seize
others in order to incapacitate them.
In response, he said the Syrian leadership decided to station them all
in one safe place, leading to "gaps in radar coverage in some areas."
"These gaps became known to the armed gangs and the Israelis who
undoubtedly coordinated together to target the research center," he
said.
He suggested the army was overstretched and finding difficulty retaining
control over several positions across the country, adding they had to
abandon some areas to minimize casualties.
Ahmad Ramadan, a member of the opposition Syrian National Council
executive bureau, dismissed accusations by Syrian leaders that the
Israelis were doing the rebels' bidding.
On Tuesday, I reported on a claim by Joan Juliet Buck, the woman who wrote the infamous profile of Asma al-Assad in Vogue shortly before the Syrian people revolted, that Buck had been duped.
If Buck was unhappy, as she says she was, with Vogue’s plans to run the piece, or with the headline Vogue gave it, she had options other than compliance and silence. She could have pulled the piece before it ran, or publicly recanted and apologized as soon as it came out. Instead, more than a year later, she now explains: “I didn’t want to write this piece. But I always finished what I started.”
By these lights, she was the victim. Faithful to Vogue, faithful to her own work ethic (and her desire to see the ruins of Palmyra). They made her do it!
And having produced that gusher of propaganda, having been outed and humiliated by subsequent events in Syria, she now presents a much revised tale that is first of all a defense of herself as a culture-loving dupe.
The truth was there to see all along. Plenty of it was right under her nose, though she chose to not share details of that with her readers until now — including in her apologia a raft of disturbing incidents and signs she witnessed in Syria, but omitted from her Vogue story last year. Beyond that, there has been abundant documentation available for years on the horrors of the Assad regime’s assassinations, surveillance, torture, and terror techniques. Even before the violence that erupted into public view in the streets of Syria last year, there were reports on offer everywhere from Amnesty International to the State Department web site, to the testimony of Syrian defectors, the bomb craters in Lebanon, etc.
Credit Joan Juliet Buck that she has shed her infatuation with the “fun” first lady of Syria. But her current confessions, coming this late in the day, dwelling as they do on how she was “duped,” seem less about setting the record straight on Syria than about distancing herself from responsibility for one of the most mortally embarrassing pieces of journalism produced in recent times.
In her own convoluted defense, Buck describes the rationale with which she took on the Syria assignment. “I was curious…Syria gave off a toxic aura. But what was the worst that could happen? I would write a piece for Vogue that missed the deeper truth about its subject.” She then delivers to her readers the bizarre journalistic creed: “I had learned long ago that the only person I could ever be truthful about was myself.”
There was no way of knowing that Assad, the meek ophthalmologist and computer-loving nerd, would kill more of his own people than his father had and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children.
In December 2010, there was no way of knowing that the Arab Spring was about to begin, and that it would take down the dictators of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.
There was no way of knowing, as I cheered the events in Tahrir Square, that I would be contaminated because I had written about the Assads. There was no way of knowing that this piece would cost me my livelihood and end the association I had had with Vogue since I was 23.
I met the devil and his wife, with full fashion-magazine access to their improbable fishbowl apartment where they lived out their daily lives on display to the eyes of thousands, like a Middle-Eastern version of The Truman Show. They showed off their fantasy lives for me.
Assad told me just who he was, but I didn’t use it; he repeated it a year later to Barbara Walters, but no one heard him.
The Assads’ PR firm, Brown Lloyd James, took care of my visa. In the offices, flat-screen televisions mounted on walls played only Al Jazeera—one of their clients, along with Gaddafi’s son Saif and the government of Qatar. Lloyd and James were absent, but Brown turned out to be Peter Brown, a bearded Englishman with a languorous voice who’d once managed the Beatles.
Asma al-Assad was about to sign an agreement with the Paris Louvre, about Syrian antiquities. We sat with Brown’s associate Mike Holtzman. I wanted to know about the ancient cities, Aleppo, Damascus. They brought in their intern, a 22-year-old named Sheherazade Ja’afari, the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. She and Holtzman would be in Damascus with me.
...
Asma unwittingly gave me a glimpse into the Assad way of thinking: “I told my kids yesterday there’s a journalist going to be writing about me,” she said, “and my eldest, Hafez, asked, ‘What’s she going to say?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he asked, ‘How can you get her to write about you if you don’t know what she’s going to say?’?”
...
I was told there was no crime in Damascus. A few days later, on a pretext involving wooden spoons, I returned to the souk alone except for a driver I could not shake. I think I saw why there was no crime.
A mysterious metal box on wheels was parked outside the souk. It was about seven feet long, six feet high, with one barred window in the back. Its surface was dangerously unfinished, raw, full of metal splinters. It looked like a mobile prison. Later, I asked a local about the box. He said he’d never seen such a thing.
...
Back in my hotel room, I found the Ethernet cable ripped out of my laptop so violently that the plastic tab on the end had broken off.
...
I sat in the hotel bar with the French ambassador and asked what was really going on in Syria. He took the battery out of my Syrian cell phone and then did the same with his. This must have set off an alert, because suddenly Sheherazade materialized in front of us.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Aren’t you sick?” I asked. “Go back to bed.”
...
The next day Sheherazade took me to Ma’loula, the village where they still speak Aramaic, the language of the Bible.
She said: “We don’t want you to talk to the French ambassador.” “You can’t talk to me that way,” I said.
When I opened my laptop at the Vienna airport on the way back to New York, an icon on the screen announced itself as the server for someone named Ali.
I arrived in New York on Dec. 21, 2010, and quarantined the compromised laptop.
...
I handed in the piece on Jan. 14, the day President Ben Ali fled Tunisia. “The Arab Spring is spreading,” I told Vogue on Jan. 21. “You might want to hold the piece.”
They didn’t think the Arab Spring was going anywhere, and the piece was needed for the March “Power Issue.”
I got an expert to clean Ali out of the laptop. “They weren’t very skilled, but they were thorough,” he said.
...
On Feb. 11, Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt. I cheered, inspired and touched by Tahrir Square. There were protests in Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Bahrain, then, unbelievably, in Libya.
I asked Vogue’s managing editor if we could meet to discuss how to handle the Assad piece. A meeting was held, without me. I was asked not to speak to the press.
On Feb. 25, as Libyan protesters demanded an end to Gaddafi, my piece on Asma al-Assad went online at Vogue.com. They had excruciatingly titled it “A Rose in the Desert.”
I was attacked as soon as it went up. How dare I write about Asma al-Assad? By describing Syria’s first lady in Vogue, I had anointed her.
Syria stayed quiet until the middle of March, when a small incident set off the horrifying massacres that have now gone on for 17 months. In a town called Daraa at the end of February, 15 children broke the country’s silence. I don’t know if it was the euphoria of the Arab Spring or if they had been empowered by the Green Team from Massar.
The boys, ages 9 to 15, wrote, “The people want to topple the regime” on the walls of their school.
The police arrested them. When they had not been released after two weeks, their families staged a protest on March 15.
At a second protest, on March 18, Syrian forces fired on the crowd and killed four people.
The boys were released from prison. Their families saw that they had been tortured and took to the streets. On March 23, a grenade was hurled into a crowd of protesters in the Daraa mosque.
Assad’s forces began to kill Syrians every day. They fired on mourners at funerals, men gathered in mosques, women and children in the street.
They arrested more children. They tortured more children.
On April 29, a chubby 13-year-old boy named Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was arrested during a protest in Saida, near Daraa.
On May 24, Hamza’s mutilated body was returned to his parents. The report by Al Jazeera said: “The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned the corpse, it bore the scars of brutal torture: lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face, and knees. Hamza’s eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly. On Hamza’s chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.”
Asma al-Assad had said that “Massar” meant destiny.
Bashar al-Assad blamed the uprising of the Syrian people on terrorists from both al Qaeda and the United States.
Through 2011, I wondered about Asma al-Assad, the woman who cared so much about the youth of Syria. How could she not know what was happening? How could she stand by and do nothing while the Syrian regime ate its young?
In May of 2011, Vogue took the piece off its website. I kept my word and did not speak to the press. At the end of the year my contract was not renewed.
I was now free to react to the Syrian carnage with the only medium I had: Twitter.
The London Telegraph has published an album of pictures of the Assad family that was planned to make them look like a normal family. Like the Vogue spread that came out just before the uprising.
And the transfer of a media report on the managing editor of the newspaper «Gmehoriet» Turkish Ottko Shaker Auxerre, who conducted the interview, saying al-Assad during the meeting, the journalist, said that his three children «are shocked by what they see on the Internet from the scenes of violence in Syria», pointing out that «colleagues children in school expressed their fear of the kidnapping of children ».
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Tuesday, June 12.
Extreme makeover, Assad edition
Bill Carter and Amy Chozick of the New York Times explore the way the Assads sought to remake their image in Syria’s Assads Turned to West for Glossy P.R.:
The campaign to make the ruling family the face of a more Westernized and open Syria began in 2006, when Mrs. Assad approached the public relations firm Bell Pottinger in London. Tim Bell, a co-founder of the firm and a former media adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said Mrs. Assad contacted the firm after several first ladies, including Laura Bush, began to hold annual meetings and conferences. “She wanted to be a part of that club,” he said in a phone interview.
Yesterday, the New York Times ran a lengthy article about the favorable PR enjoyed in the west by the Assads. The story focuses on Barbara Walters, Joan Juliet Buck and Anna Wintour and their enabling of this murderous regime.
The article is fine by itself but it demonstrates a lack of institutional self awareness. Back in 2007, the New York Times published an op-ed by Ahmed Yousef a spokesman for Hamas. The public editor at the time, Clark Hoyt, responded to criticisms of that decision in a column, the Danger of the one sided debate.
David Shipley, one of Rosenthal’s deputies and the man in charge of the op-ed page, said: “The news of the Hamas takeover of Gaza was one of the most important stories of the week. ... This was our opportunity to hear what Hamas had to say.” I agree that Yousef’s piece should have run, even though his version of reality is at odds with the one I understand from news coverage. He wrote blandly, for example, about creating “an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences” with Israel without mentioning that Hamas is officially dedicated to raising “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” which would mean no more Israel. Op-ed pages should be open especially to controversial ideas, because that’s the way a free society decides what’s right and what’s wrong for itself. Good ideas prosper in the sunshine of healthy debate, and the bad ones wither. Left hidden out of sight and unchallenged, the bad ones can grow like poisonous mushrooms.
This is nonsense. If it's important to get the views of Hamas, interview a spokesman in a news story and point out why his claims are false. Giving him op-ed space is allowing him to conduct his own PR campaign. It was as wrong of the New York Times to give Yousef the column as it was for Barbara Walters to intercede on behalf of Assad's spokeswoman.
Yousef isn't the only Arab despot or despot's representative to avail himself of the New York Times's generosity. Qadaffi of Libya got was extended a number of opportunities to present his regime in the best possible light.
Fawning treatment of world leaders — particularly attractive Western-educated ones — is nothing new. But the Assads have been especially determined to burnish their image, and hired experts to do so. The family paid the Washington public relations firm Brown Lloyd James $5,000 a month to act as a liaison between Vogue and the first lady, according to the firm.
This web of politics and public relations ensnared Barbara Walters recently. After she conducted an aggressive interview with Mr. Assad on ABC News in December, she offered to provide recommendations for Sheherazad Jaafari, the president’s press aide and the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, who was applying for a job at CNN and admission to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Ms. Walters issued a statement on Tuesday expressing regret for her actions, which she called “a conflict.”
Ms. Jaafari, 22, who has been accepted by Columbia, had worked as an intern at Brown Lloyd James. Last year, she expressed her feelings about the Assad family in an e-mail to Mike Holtzman, a partner at the firm who, according to his online profile, advised the Clinton administration on trade issues and worked in the State Department during the Bush administration.
“I have always told you — this man is loved by his people,” Ms. Jaafari wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained by the British newspaper The Guardian. Mr. Holtzman replied: “I’m proud of you. Wish I were there to help.” Mr. Holtzman did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
The Assads were in many ways ripe for celebrity treatment by the news media. The president, who was trained as an ophthalmologist, received part of his education in Britain, where he met his wife, a Briton of Syrian descent who grew up in London and worked as an investment banker in New York.
Andrew Tabler, a Syrian expert with the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies in Washington who once worked for a charity sponsored by Mrs. Assad, summed up the appeal the Assads had for some news outlets: “He speaks English, and his wife is hot.”
If that's the case, why do rulers like the Assad's and the Jordanian royal family and the 'Palestinians' get better coverage than Israel. After all, our Prime Minister speaks English.... Well, there's more to it than that.
Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said this kind of interview is highly sought after. “In a strange way, political leaders, presidents and prime ministers who are highly repressive and restrictive are good ‘gets’ for these types of interviews, precisely because there’s no fair media coverage in their countries,” he said.
You mean if we targeted journalists (Syria has killed 13 in the last 15 months) we would get better coverage? Or at least Bibi could get a fawning interview with Barbara Walters? Okay, she didn't see it as fawning.
Ms. Walters’ interview, broadcast in December, made worldwide news, with Mr. Assad issuing claims that he was not responsible for the Syrian military and that people were not being killed by his government.
Ms. Walters said, “I went to Syria and conducted what was a very tough and strong interview that President Assad did not like.”
Really? Let's watch a bit of that interview. Let's go to the videotape.
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”.
And you know what? Jaafari's right. The American - and European - media want to humanize non-western leaders. They have a need, a craving to feel that non-western leaders are 'like us' because otherwise, they cannot relate to them, and if they cannot relate to them, they feel that they have failed. So they seek leaders who like one who 'speaks English and his wife is hot' and try to convince themselves that they are 'just like us.' By definition, regardless of who Israel's leader is and how 'hot' his (or her) spouse is, we will never get that treatment because we are considered western and that sort of leadership is taken for granted. The Western media has nothing to report on leaders like North Korea's Kim Jong-un, and would much rather pay attention to the likes of Bashar al-Assad or Jordan's Abdullah, both of whom speak fluent English and have attractive spouses.
Can this be changed? I'm not sure it can (unless you are going to ban the families of dictators from Western universities - a thought especially in light of what happened with Walters and Jaafari). But look at the picture below. Whom would you like to interview? Whom would you least like to interview?
The one in black is Ahmadinejad's wife. The other two are the wives of Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri. Guess who is more likely to get positive media coverage (okay, none of the husbands are fluent English speakers).
Britain's Channel 4 to show #MrandMrsAssad documentary blaming Assad's for killing
Britain's Channel 4 is going to show a documentary on Monday evening that blames Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma for the killing in Syria.
The programme shows intimate footage of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his wife Asma that helps explain why the West bought the idea they were true modernisers.
When Bashar took the reins of power after his father's death in 2000, the West was drawn into a hope and belief that Syria would be a new force for change in the Middle East. The Assads were seen as a glamorous couple with modern Western morals and values; he was hailed a reformer, she was the 'Rose of the Desert'.
Key leaders and figures in the West welcomed the young couple, convinced that the softly spoken London-trained ophthalmologist and his beautiful British-born former investment banker wife would bring reform and modernisation to a country that had been run by an iron-fisted dictator for nearly 30 years.
But it seems the West was duped. Instead of a transparent and progressive leadership, what has emerged during a year-long bloody uprising is evidence of the regime's gross systematic human rights abuses, including widespread killings and torture, while the Assads look on.
Defectors from Syrian intelligence and security agencies, used by the regime to crush the 14-month-long revolt, told Dispatches that Assad's cousin, Brigadier-General Atef Najib, issued "shoot-to-kill" orders against civilian protestors in Deraa, in April last year. "Kill quotas" were reportedly issued to snipers tasked with assassinating pro-democracy activists, the defectors told Channel 4.
Channel 4 said it is also alleged that Assad's brother Maher, a senior army commander, was among senior figures operating out of a secret command center in Deraa when orders were issued to contain a protest march by all means necessary. More than 100 civilians were shot dead. Maher is also accused of ordering the indiscriminate mass-punishment of the entire male population of a troublesome town, al-Moudamya, later the same month, according to the Dispatches investigation.
The Channel 4 documentary also will screen footage of Assad and his London-born wife, Asma, relaxing and joking together in 2009.
In it, the president says: "Every mistake (that) happens in this government, you are responsible, not somebody else. Not the minister. Not the prime minister. At the end you should be responsible."
The documentary also examines emails which, according to Channel 4, indicate that the Assads were aware of the arrest of individuals as part of the crackdown on anti-regime activists. In two separate cases, they appear to have personally intervened to secure the release of detainees.
About a month ago the European Union, showing it will not be trifled with, barred Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma, and other women in his immediate family from shopping for luxury goods in Europe. For some reason, going cold turkey on Dior, Armani and Prada failed to bring down the Assad regime or to end its vicious attacks on the civilian population. Now the Europeans, presumably with the staunch support of the Obama administration, have imposed an across-the-board ban on the sale of luxury goods to Syria — and yet, somehow, the killing continues. The imposition of the luxury goods ban was cited in a New York Times editorial with all the solemnity usually reserved for naval blockades — as good an example of any of how we have gone to dreamland. In the dream, a vicious dictator, fighting for his own and his family’s lives, will somehow come to the bargaining table because he is down to his last Montblanc pen. Of course, more practical measures and boycotts have also been adopted, but it is always good to remember that severe boycotts were imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime for about 12 years — and it still took an invasion to bring him down. There is a lesson here.
"Never again" is a challenge to defend the fundamental right of free people and free nations to exist in peace and security -- and that includes the State of Israel. And on my visit to the old Warsaw Ghetto, a woman looked me in the eye, and she wanted to make sure America stood with Israel. She said, "It’s the only Jewish state we have." And I made her a promise in that solemn place. I said I will always be there for Israel.
QUESTION: There are some press reports that (inaudible) Turkey is blocking Israel’s participation to next NATO summit. And the U.S. side is not happy with that. It’s disappointed and trying to convince Turks not to block Israel to NATO. Do you have any comment on that – on those reports? MS. NULAND: Well, I think you know for quite some time now, we have been continuing to talk to both our ally Turkey and our ally Israel about the relationship that they have with each other, to encourage them to continue to get back to a place where can have conversation with each other, where they can work well together. We think it’s important to both of them, and it’s certainly important to the region. With regard to arrangements for the NATO summit and partnership events, as you know, Israel is one of NATO’s partners in the Mediterranean Dialogue. I don’t have anything particular to announce on partnership planning at the moment. Those discussions are continuing as we head towards the May summit in Chicago. QUESTION: So Israel may participate in some? MS. NULAND: Again, we’re still working on what the partnership arrangements are going to look like for the summit, so I’m not going to comment on them from here as those conversations continue. There are many aspects of how the partners may or may not participate in the NATO summit that are still being worked on. QUESTION: Well, are you comfortable with the Turkish position? MS. NULAND: Again, I’m not going to comment on internal deliberations going on at NATO about arrangements for the summit from this -- ... QUESTION: You are. If you can’t come out and say that the United States wants Israel to participate, its main ally in the Middle East and you won’t come out and say that the Administration wants them to participate in whatever event is going in Chicago, that’s – that is going to be seized on. MS. NULAND: Matt, at the last summit in Lisbon, there was zero partnership participation with the exception, I think, of ISAF partners. At Lisbon there were some partnership events, and I don’t know whether all partners were included. I think they were not.
David Kirkpatrick wrote a despicable article about Egypt's decision to terminate its natural gas deal with Israel. The gist of the article was that since the deal was never approved by the Egyptian people it was of questionable validity. And, yes, Kirkpatrick suggested the same about Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Egypt claimed that Israel had not paid for gas in four months. Still Kirkpatrick insists on describing the deal to the detriment of the Egyptian people, and they're not going to take it anymore.
Lawsuits and criminal investigations have accused Mr. Mubarak and his associates of corruption for depriving Egypt of a fair market price for the gas sold to Israel. And since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster last year, unknown attackers have bombed a gas pipeline in the Egyptian Sinai more than a dozen times, apparently to disrupt the flow to Israel.
In any case this leaves out some important details (and conclusions). Barry Rubin observed:
Oh, by the way, the Egyptians have now said they will not sell natural gas any more to Israel. The pipeline that had been providing 40-50 percent of Israel’s natural gas and has been attacked numerous times by Islamist attackers in Sinai will be closed permanently. The $460 million invested in the pipeline project, mostly by Israeli, is gone forever, plus Israel will have to find a substitute source until its own offshore wells come online . While this is supposedly a commercial decision, it is obviously a response to public pressure and the sabotage campaign that the Egyptian government doesn’t care enough to stop. The New York Times dishonestly reported that the issue is just a “payment dispute.” Well, let’s see. Natural gas wasn’t delivered most of the time so Israel didn’t pay. Egyptian leaders and media said the gas shouldn’t be sold to an enemy and that to do so was treason. Sounds like a threat to those operating the natural gas industry there. The pipeline was attacked almost a dozen times and put out of commission without a major effort by Egypt’s army to defend this national economic asset. And they also demanded that Israel pay more than had been agreed, thus violating the contract. But by the time the Times’ article finishes the problem is made to sound as if it is all Israel’s fault. Just wait until Egypt escalates anti-Israel actions and the Times blames Israel for those also. There are two important lessons here. First, any commitment made to Israel by an Arab partner is easily deemed invalid by the latter (and that would include any potential Israel-Palestine peace treaty). The United States may soon have the same experience in Egypt. Second, while a key Egyptian complaint has been that they wanted higher prices, Egypt will now lose the income from the pipeline, make investors reluctant from fear that their deals might also go up in smoke, and the country will be materially worse-off.
Kirkpatrick's article was even worse than I first thought.
I want to add regarding Richard Cohen's piece on Syria: Can anyone think of any reason why the same would not apply to Iran?
Devastating video petition and letter to Asma al-Assad
This is very powerful. It was tweeted by the US embassy in Damascus (which is not in Damascus right now), which said that it was not behind it, but completely supported it. It's devastating.
If she's really the dictator she makes herself out to be, perhaps this will get her to order her husband to call off the dogs.
European Union states are set to ban Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s wife Asma from travel to and shopping in the EU, diplomats said, cranking up pressure on his government to end a bloody crackdown on popular unrest.
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In recent weeks she became the focus of media attention when a trove of emails between her and her husband obtained by Britain’s Guardian newspaper appeared to show them shopping for pop music and luxury items while Syria descended into bloodshed.
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The EU has responded to Syria’s violence with a broad range of sanctions, which include a ban on Syrian oil imports to Europe and measures against the Syrian central bank and other companies and state institutions.
On Friday, it is expected to take new steps. For Asma, they will mean she will no longer be able to travel to the EU or buy products from EU-based companies, in her own name.
I doubt this will have much effect. Asma has enough clothes to last a long time. And her parents - who are not sanctioned - live in London and can still fly to Syria (via Cairo or Istanbul according to sites I checked) and bring her anything her heart desires.
Video: Syrian first lady Asma Assad talks about massacre in Homs
Here's Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad talking about the massacre in Homs.
Let's go to the videotape.
Do you really believe that Asma al-Assad said that about her husband's army's atrocities in Homs?
A video blogger reedited segments from a CNN interview Syria's First Lady Asma Assad gave in 2009 during Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza to make it seem as if she is in fact referring to the current violent crackdown in her own country.
In the remixed video uploaded to Youtube, Assad is seen declaring that "the barbaric assault on innocent civilians has been horrific,” and, “this is the 21st century, where in the world could this happen?" as images of the massacres in the city of Homs are displayed.
In its report of the video satire, the New York Times said it was not clear who made the remix, but that it was uploaded to YouTube last week by an anonymous video blogger who had posted video of a protest in the Syrian capital, Damascus, in January. Before that, the same person uploaded a series of brief comedy sketches, apparently shot in Britain.
Asma seems a bit of a hypocrite now doesn't she? I hope her husband realizes she's not talking about him. Otherwise, it will be 'off with her head.' Heh.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
