Barack Obama is going full throttle with his wrong-headed policy of appeasement and capitulation: The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it was sending an American ambassador back to Syria, after a four-year gap. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “This strongly reflects the administration’s recognition of the role Syria plays, and the hope of the role that the Syrian government can play constructively to promote peace and stability in the region.”
CNN reported that Syria’s ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, said essentially the same thing – that “the decision reflects the genuine desire by the United States to reverse Bush administration policy and engage Syria, which he said would be good for both nations and for the region.”
What’s wrong with this? For one thing, Syria is on the U.S. State Department’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. It has been on that list since December 29, 1979, when the list was created. What has changed? The United States has not had an ambassador in Damascus since February 2005, when the Bush administration recalled its ambassador and expressed its “profound outrage” over the assassination of the Prime Minister Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, a foe of Syrian hegemony over that country.
Of course President Bush withdrew the American representative – because Syria was assassinating the leaders of Lebanon, was and is supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and was meddling in Iraq and Lebanon. Again, what has changed? Only our president.
Obama’s latest handover of Lebanon to Syria has generated outrage and frustration among reformers and freedom lovers in the Middle East. And that’s understandable: When John Bolton was at the United Nations, we held Syrians accountable for their assassinations of pro-Lebanon political figures and anti-Syrian cabinet ministers and journalists. It was a U.N. investigation in 2006 that found links between Syrian President Bashar Assad and company and the assassinations of anti-Syrian politicians and journalists in Lebanon, including Hariri, Bashir Gemayal and others. Syria fully intends to marginalize and neutralize the small Christian population of Lebanon and install Islamic rule, and Hezbollah is complicit in this effort. Hezbollah is not Lebanese – it is an Iranian foreign legion. It’s ironic that the loser in Iran’s disputed presidential election, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, was a founder of Hezbollah. He is not at all the champion of freedom that some in the West like to imagine that he is.
Syria also remains a lethal threat to the rest of the world. Remember that it was a nuclear bomb making factory in Syria that Israel took out on September 6, 2007 – and the North Koreans provided that factory. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn a blind eye to the fact that, for the Islamic world, the mere existence of Israel is enough to sanction countless murders of Jews and calls for the “removal of Israel.”
Nor is that likely to change. The world is spinning out of control since the U.S. switched sides (against itself, I might add) and elected a jihad president – the world’s policeman is off duty. Now that Obama has given the Islamic supremacists in Damascus and Tehran all but a free pass, the barbarians are killing without fear of reprisal. The Islamonazis can kill anyone they want, murder with utter abandon, and the world yawns – or speaks about some ambiguous humiliation to which the jihadists are legitimately responding.
This, of course, is not new. This has for quite some time been Democratic Party policy: to side with America’s enemies. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit with Assad (where clearly a deal with the devil was made), I interviewed the courageous Egyptian blogger who calls himself “Egyptian Sandmonkey.” He said: “I was in Turkey a couple of weeks ago and I met a couple of Syrian activists. They told me one thing that was really funny about the Pelosi visit. After Pelosi came to Syria two things happened. People on Syrian TV were saying, ‘We forced the Americans to knock on the Damascus gate!'” Even worse, he noted that “the day after Pelosi’s visits there were immediate arrests of Syrian activists. That was the fruit she yielded. ‘Oh, the Americans came over and they said they have a different foreign policy and they’re more interested in placating Bashar’s ego.’ And he went out and got [arrested] everyone he wanted because he knew he had an ally in Washington that wouldn’t pressure him as much.”
That was Pelosi. And now Syria has an even greater ally in Washington.
Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her op-eds have appeared in The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Israel National News and other publications.
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