Syria Quotes
There was a major revolution ongoing in Syria with different Arab Muslim factions slaughtering each other. The government side was particularly vicious shelling and using poison gas unarmed civilian enclaves in areas where the regime was not popular. Many nations called for humanitarian intervention. Netanyahu opposed any interventions while other politicians like President and former prime minister Shimon Peres disagreed and thought that Israel and other nations should intervene on humanitarian grounds and prevent the Assad government from butchering its own non-combatant civilians.
The Syrians hate the Lebanese and vica versa, After the Lebanese Civil War, Syria took advantage of the weakened nation to send troops to occupy and control Lebanon politically which it did for over a decade.
The Federation did not last very long. al-Quwatli had served as President twice and had twice been deposed by revolutions.
He had advocated the removal of the Assad regime in Syria which had been murdering its own citizens. However Assad had kept peace with Israel and many in America and Israel feared that if Assad fell, the Iranians would be strengthened and perhaps be the dominant force in Syria. And theocratic Iran had vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. The interviewer had asked Peres if it might be a better strategy for Israel to support Assad?
In the Middle East conflict over Palestine, both Jews and Arabs claim that they were among the early citizens of an organized society. But some Arabs see the Jews as outsiders who were given Palestinian land to compensate for the Holocaust. This quotation is cited to illustrate that both Jews and Arabs were established in Palestine from earliest times and were recognized as such by historians writing around the time of Christ.
Objecting to the United States supporting the Kurdish Peshmerga forces attacking ISIS in Syria when they were affiliated with the PKK an organization that used terror tactics to gain independence for Kurds in Turkey.
Paul tended to be one of the very few Republicans who did not favor American intervention in Syria.
This Arab nationalist leader was actually a Christian Orthodox by religion. He also tried to make the Baath party a secular state and he was a strong advocate of free speech and democracy. When the Islamic fundamentalists became important in Mid East Politics, the Baath Iraq Government under Saddam Hussein claimed, with no evidence, that Aflaq converted to Islam on his deathbed, thus making his philosophy more acceptable to the vast majority of Arabs.
