“Syria Comment” — Syrian history, politics, religion

The sponsor, Joshua Landis, is “Co-director, Centre of Peace Studies, University of Oklahoma”. I imagine he must be a professor and a Ph.D, proficient in Arabic, but if so he has chosen not to mention any of this next to his picture.

http://joshualandis.com/blog/?p=411

Here’s a partial quote. There are some caveats at the full link which should also be viewed if interested:

“Intelligence Online reports from Damascus on the Israeli raid on Syria last month: (Via Laura Rosen, War and Piece thanks to FLC)

In attacking Dair el Zor in Syria on Sept. 6, the Israeli air force wasn’t targeting a nuclear site but rather one of the main arms depots in the country.

Dair el Zor houses a huge underground base where the Syrian army stores the long and medium-range missiles it mostly buys from Iran and North Korea. The attack by the Israeli air force coincided with the arrival of a stock of parts for Syria’s 200 Scud B and 60 Scud C weapons.

The parts were shipped from North Korea aboard a container ship flying the Panamanian flag. The U.S. Navy wanted to board the ship in Morocco’s territorial waters but Rabat vetoed the operation. The parts were loaded aboard six trucks in the Syrian port of Tartus on Sept. 3 and took three days to reach Dair el Zor. The trucks and their loads were destroyed the moment they arrived at the underground base. A unit of military police that escorted the convoy was also wiped out in the attack.

Damascus immediately appealed to several Palestinian groups with strong ties to Syria to retaliate. But Hamas, whose strategy chief Khaled Meshal lives in exile in Syria, refused to act. That was also the case of Hezbollah, which sent its political adviser, Hussein Khalil, to Damascus to signify the movement’s reluctance to strike back at Israel.

Khalil, who met with the head of Syrian military intelligence, gen. Assef Chawkat, as well as the official in charge of Lebanese affairs in the president’s office, gen. Mohamed Nassif, claimed that Israel would launch a new invasion of southern Lebanon if Hezbollah began firing at Israeli targets….”

Are you saying that Maher Arar was sent to Syria to aid their nuclear program?

“Maher Arar is a 34-year-old wireless technology consultant. He was born in Syria and came to Canada with his family at the age of 17. He became a Canadian citizen in 1991. On Sept. 26, 2002, while in transit in New York’s JFK airport when returning home from a vacation, Arar was detained by US officials and interrogated about alleged links to al-Qaeda. Twelve days later, he was chained, shackled and flown to Syria, where he was held in a tiny “grave-like” cell for ten months and ten days before he was moved to a better cell in a different prison. In Syria, he was beaten, tortured and forced to make a false confession.”

http://www.maherarar.ca/

If two other students beat you up for trying to sneak a knife into school, do you complain about it at assembly?

I’m not sure whether Arab-Israeli citizens are exempt from this rule, though.