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the tehran-damascus axis briefly explained to tom lantos

By streiff Posted in Democrats — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Hat tip to Anton Efendi at Across the Bay

While we've been watching the utter buffoonery of Nancy Pelosi dragging US foreign policy through the dirt another bit of silliness has slipped under the radar.

Tom Lantos, who though insufferably liberal can usually shake himself out of his torpor to be level headed in regards to the Middle East, succeeded in beclowning himself also. His wasn't a willful, premeditated beclowning, but rather the type of beclowning that happens when a not-ready-for-prime-time staff sends their boss off without bothering to research who he is meeting with or the history of that person.

Read on.

For those who don't know Lantos is a Jew, born in Budapest. He was, according to his bio, active in the anti-fascist resistance in World War II Hungary and was persecuted by the communist government of Hungary before he immigrated to the US.

During the visit to Damascus he confronted Bashar Assad:

Tom Lantos, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he asked Mr. Assad how someone “of his intelligence and knowledge of the world could have common cause with President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has denied the Holocaust and calls for the elimination of Israel.”

Now it is true that Bashar Assad has not publicly called for the elimination of Israel but what he has said this

"We say we adhere to a just and comprehensive peace that returns the land to its original owners, and the return of refugees and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital."

Now there may be some way Israel can continue to exist under this formula but I'm just not capable of imagining it.

And while he has not crudely and publicly denied the Holocaust we do have this nugget from the trip of Pope John Paul II to Damascus in 2001:

On the other hand, Assad claimed that Israeli policies are like alleged Jewish attacks on early Christians and persecution against that religion's founder, Jesus. "They tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Mohammed." Thus spake Syria's British-educated, reportedly Internet-loving, and supposedly reform-minded president.

Presumably, and if so unfortunately, the pope was too polite to respond appropriately.

Such statements are not really out of character for the young Assad. Aside from his fire-breathing rhetoric at the last Arab League meeting, he referred to Israeli society as "more racist than the Nazis." In addition, Syria's veteran defence minister, Mustafa Tlas, has long held that Jews murder Christians to use their blood in making Passover matza.

So why is Lantos surprised that Assad and Ahmadinejad are working hand-in-glove carrying on a relationship extant since 1979?

Does he really think that Assad and Ahmadinejad have different views on either the Holocaust or their own version of the Final Solution to the problem of Israel?

Has there been anything about Bashar Assad's reign that is not at least as, if not more than, brutal and thuggish than Ahmadinejad. A better question would have been why Ahmadinejad is making common cause with a cretin like Assad.

Can't his staff pull its collective head out of its fourth point of contact long enough to at least prep their boss on Bashar Assad, his statements, and his actions?