Assad bezeichnet Israelis als Nazis
Geschrieben von Mr. Burns am 29. März 2001 18:18:02:
Als Antwort auf: Israel darf weiterbomben geschrieben von Mr. Burns am 29. März 2001 17:56:14:
Israelis are all Nazis, Assad tells summit
PRESIDENT ASSAD of Syria called Israelis “Nazis”
yesterday and offered to “forgive and forget” the
decision of Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader,
to negotiate with the late Yitzhak Rabin.Speaking at the start of the first Arab League
summit in a decade, Mr Assad overshadowed Mr Arafat’s
efforts to win support for the Palestinian uprising.
His speech, which often assumed the tone of a lecture
to the league’s 22 heads of state and their
representatives, was delivered as a suspected suicide
bomber blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing himself and
wounding a dozen others.Mr Assad said that the Arab world had been “too emotional”
and had failed to analyse properly the election of Ariel
Sharon to head a national unity government in Israel.
He said that successive Israeli elections had proved
that Israelis in general “gave us nothing and took
everything.“It is the Israeli public and not just the leaders
who are like the Nazis themselves,” he said in an
improvised speech that could have been delivered by
his father, Hafez, 20 years ago. The speech shocked
foreign diplomats, many of them sympathetic to the
Palestinian cause, who had gathered in Amman, the
Jordanian capital, for the summit.
“This does not do those who want to help the Palestinians
any good,” a senior Western diplomat said. “It’s the sort
of speech which proves to the Israelis that the Arab
world does not accept their existence and that the Arabs
really want to destroy Israel.”Mr Assad’s rhetoric took many people by surprise given
his efforts to portray his country as becoming more
democratic and moving away from its days as a Soviet
satellite.After medical training in London, Mr Assad has been
working to open Syria to foreign investment and get
the country wired into the Internet. Despite the need
to impress fellow Arab leaders, Mr Assad’s tough
message appeared to exceed what was necessary to
signal to the Sharon government that he is a man to
be reckoned with.Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations,
had hoped to persuade Arab leaders to see the problems
faced by both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict.He criticised Mr Sharon’s policy of besieging
Palestinian towns and of “excessive use of force”
in quelling riots. He said, however, that it should
be recognised that Israel feels threatened and that
it had a “legitimate right to live in safety within
its own borders”.After Mr Assad’s speech, Mr Arafat repeated his
allegations that the Israelis have used “illegal weapons”
against the Palestinians, but he also said that he
wanted to return to the agreements reached with the
Israelis in October last year, at Sharm el-Sheikh in
Egypt, which included a ceasefire.The Arab leaders, who are also discussing Iraq,
seem unlikely to reach an agreement about how to
persuade President Saddam Hussein to give up his
claim to Kuwait or how to seek the easing of
sanctions against his country.