http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/09/jonathan-kay-syria%E2%80%99s-hateful-chutzpah/

 Like the United Nations General Assembly itself, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) is a farce — a club where the world’s worst despots sing hymns to one another, while heaping endless abuse on Israel.

Yet even by the HRC’s standards, this week’s developments were bizarre: Syria, one of the world’s leading sponsors of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, is suddenly posturing as a global hate-speech policeman.

On Wednesday, Syrian diplomat Rania Al Rifaiy was delivering one of the usual colour-by-number rants against Israeli “brutality” — the sort of everyday anti-Zionist tirade that UN beat journalists don’t even bother reporting anymore — when she suddenly declared: “Hatred is widespread [in Israel], taught to even small children, who are taught to use weapons, and who are taught to sign missiles that will be fired at Arabs … Let me quote a song that a group of children on a school bus in Israel sing merrily as they go to school: ‘With my teeth, I will rip your flesh with my mouth I will suck your blood.’ ”

Needless to say, the claims are baseless, and one can only guess at what lurid blog or conspiracy web site Syria’s diplomatic corps plucked this nonsense from.


AFP

This way, shorty

Not that Syrian officials seem to require much convincing when it comes to spreading anti-Semitic myths. In 1986, no less an official than Syria’s Defense Minister, Mustafa Tlass, published a book called The Matzah of Zion, in which he recycled Medieval claims that Jews engage in ritual murder so they can inject gentile blood into their unleavened bread. Mr. Tlass, naturally, supported the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the famous anti-Semitic conspiracy tract that inspired Adolf Hitler as well as Syria’s Palestinian ally, Hamas (which cited the Protocols in its founding charter).

In Syria, anti-Semitic hatred goes all the way to the top. In 2001, when Pope John Paul II visited the country, President Bashar Assad greeted the man with the claim that Jews were seeking to “kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and … the Prophet Mohammed.” The following day, his minister for religious affairs declared: “We must be fully aware of what the enemies of God and malicious Zionism conspire to commit against Christianity and Islam.”

Mr. Assad presides over an impoverished, hateful regime that represses its own citizens and acts as junior errand boy for Iran and Hezbollah. That “diplomats” from this nation should be permitted to lecture anyone about “human rights” says a lot about the spirit of hypocrisy and surrealism that pervades not only the UN, but the entire international discussion about Israel.

National Post