Reflecting on the experience of meeting and interviewing Bashar al-Assad in Damascus in January 2015, Foreign Affairs’ managing editor Jonathan Tepperman wrote that he came away with earnest questions about the president’s sanity.
“A shrewd and crafty debater, he overwhelms interlocutors with torrents of language that combine common-sense rhetoric with wild untruths, often in a single sentence,” said Tepperman. “Assad’s constant pairing of the rational with the absurd was a neat rhetorical trick; it made the latter seem more credible through proximity to the former. And his utter, unblinking conviction added to the effect. Either Syria’s president is an extremely competent fabulist—in which case he’s merely a sociopath—or he actually believes his lies, in which case he’s something much more dangerous (like a delusional psychopath).”
Whatever the true state of Assad’s mental health may be, the leaked emails certainly contain a few items of eccentric and/or conspiratorial provenance. The majority were sent by Assad’s London-based father-in-law, Fawaz Akhras, who forwarded recommended readings on topics including the “controlled demolition” of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11, the “kangaroo court” that was Nuremberg, and how “Hitler was the founding father of the state of Israel.”
Below NOW highlights some of the standouts.
“CLICK ON THE AE911Truth.org”
On 26 August 2011, Fawaz Akhras sent an email linking to a video and a website, AE911Truth.org, with the comment: “A MUST SEE VIDEO. AGAIN A MUST SEE. WHY DID YOU NOT OPEN IT YET. CLICK ON THE AE911Truth.org”
The video has since been removed from YouTube, but the website—that of a group called “Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth”—remains. “We believe there is sufficient doubt about the official story and therefore the 9/11 investigation must be re-opened and must include a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives that might have been the actual cause of the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and Building 7,” says the group on a petition template.
“Hitler was the founding father of the state of Israel”
On 12 December 2011, Fawaz Akhras forwarded the following email to Bashar al-Assad, describing it as a “MUST READ”:
VERY FEW HAVE WRITTEN THAT TRUTHFULLY.... THIS IS AN INSIGHT OF WHAT JOURNALISM
OUGHT TO BE !!!
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011
John Swinton, the doyen of the New York press corps, upon his retirement , made the
following speech:
“There is no such thing , at this stage of the world’s history in America , as an
independent press. You know
it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and
if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid
weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others
of you are
paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be foolish as to
write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I
allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty four
hours, my
occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth,
to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his
country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly
is this
toasting of an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings
and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of
other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
I do understand that you have to eat like all of us and therefore must keep your
mouth shut. You are Jewish and so am I. (Sephardic) . For the sake
of truth, I will give you here another side to the Libyan story. Just imagine a
country where there is no electricity bill. Electricity is free to all its
citizens. There is no interest on loans, banks were state owned and loans given at
zero percent interest
by law. Having a home was considered a human right. All newlyweds received US$ 50
000 from the govt to buy their first apartment and to help them start a family.
Education and medical treatments were free. Before Ghadaffi, 25 % of the population
were literate.
Today this figure is 83 percent. Should Libyans want to take up farming, they would
receive land , a farmhouse, equipments, seeds and livestock to kick start their
operation, absolutely free of charge . If citizens could not find the education or
medical facilities
they needed, the govt would fund them to go abroad, free of charge, and would get
some US$2,300 per month for accommodation and car allowance. Cars were government
subsidized to the tune of 50%. Fuel prices were $0,14 per litter. The country had
no external
debt and its reserves amounted to some $170 billion, now frozen globally plus some
27 tons of gold, which the new regime found safely in the National Bank. Any
graduate unable to find a job would get the average salary for the profession, as
if he/she was
employed, until employment found. A portion of oil sales were credited once a year
to every citizen bank account. A mother who gave birth , immediately got some
$5000. Forty loaves of bread cost $0,15. 25% of citizens have a university degree.
An immense project
bringing water from aquifers in the south made it available all over the country,
free of charge.
That is what that “tyrant” Ghadaffi gave to his people. There are some 150 tribes in
Libya and a strong hand was necessary if the country was to remain
in one piece. Every citizen was in possession of a military weapon. Ghaddafi was
not frightened of his own people. The so called rebels who took over, so we are
told, would not have lasted a few days without Nato airpower, British and French
commandos and
thousands of mercenaries. Those are the winners. Now another Karzai has been
installed in Tripoli , and the country can be plundered at the victors’ whim and
fancy. It takes $1 to extract a barrel of Libyan oil and today’s price is over
$100. Total the French
company has already grabbed some 30% of the Libyan state oil company. BP is
starting exploration. And of course massive contracts for the reconstruction of
Libya will be handed over to US and European company. Of
the sovereign fund, only some 1,2 billion have been released out of the $170
billion. With the state of the European economy, I doubt very much if Libya will
see the rest any time soon. Now Libyans are free as you say, but as Janice Joplin
used to say…freedom
is just another word for nothing else to lose, as Libyan queue-ing for funds at
their bank’s door are finding out. Ghadaffi is gone and so are the perks. What will
be left is a terrible civil war. The price of democracy!
“it is the joyous jiggling dance Americans do – USA ! USA !- when their government
slaughters someone illegally . It is primitive, but it is positively
Libyan” . Wrong. It is positively American! Just saw a movie on the training of the
US Army before going to Iraq . Soldiers running and singing :”Kill the women! Kill
the children! “Then we are shown the results when civilians are gunned down in the
streets
by those braves . All on film. When they come back home, realising what they have
done, they just commit suicide! These are ordinary Sunday soldiers with families.
Of course you could not resist our own psychosis! Nuremberg and
The Hague are just kangaroo courts where the big criminals are judging the small
criminals. The most horrible crimes were committed in WWII by the Allies in Europe
and Asia , and nobody put them in front of
a tribunal. Justice Jackson and Lord Shauncross, US and British prosecutors at
Nuremberg stated as much. And the Hague is not different. After Vietnam and Iraq ,
no Allied troops were prosecuted, never mind Israeli crimes. As to the Allies being
so kind to
German children, please , what kind of nonsense is that? We roasted some 40 000
toddlers at Dresden alone, beside the rest. Ten millions Germans perished AFTER the
war, through deliberate Allies mass murder policies.
As to Bormann, he must have been 10 feet tall! Actually he was part Jewish and so
were 77 high members of the party and the Army. We even had a field
marshal , Ehrart Milch whose father was Jewish. Even SD Reinhard Heydrich original
name was Suss. Hitler was the founding father of the state of Israel . With his
Havaara transfer agreement, Jewish immigrants were paid off their properties in
Germany with
merchandises sold in Palestine . Hitler trained the Hagana in special camps in
Germany flying the present Israeli flag, before Israel was invented. Germans
supplied the weaponry as well. And Ishak Shamir even offered Hitler a battalion of
Jewish troops to
fight the British. Birds of the feather, flock together….As Teodor Herzl said in
1896…The policy of the new state (of Israel ) will be NATIONAL SOCIALISM. That
state is now the polecat of the world.
On August 14, 2004 at 9pm, Israeli TV station , Channel 4 , broke all the
conventions and exposed the ugliest secret of Israel Labour Zionist Founders:
the DELIBERATE MASS IRRADIATION OF NEARLY ALL THE SEPHARDI YOUTHS. 100 000
Sephardi children were given some 35000 times the normal dose of X-ray through
their head. Then upon request from the US Military, some 4500 Yemenite toddlers
were kidnapped from their
families and air-freighted to the US for radiation experiments. None survived to
tell the tale and their tiny bodies went up the chimney in some military hospitals.
And were chasing Mengele all over the world for a few experiments …Meanwhile he was
working for two years after the war for the British who wanted
the results from those hypothermia experiments, for two years . And as Israeli
dissident Gilead Atzmon said: If those Nazis were so bad, why did 80% of Jewish
inmates in camps in the East decided freely to go with the German Army, instead of
waiting for their
liberators? It does not make sense. As Atzmon further explains: Holocaustism is our
religion. We are not anymore the Chosen people. Every Jew is now a God! We have
reached the summit of the mountain and cannot go higher! When the balloon goes up
for us, I
hope that I will not be here to see it! We can fool the Goyim some of the time, but
we cannot fool all of them all the time. We can hide the truth with prison
sentences, but the truth eventually come through, and unfortunately for us we
cannot plug the dyke
any longer.
“CIA Agent Exposes How Al-Qaeda Dosen’t Exist”
On 22 January 2012, Fawaz Akhras forwarded Bashar al-Assad a link to a video interview by Russia Today of former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, titled, “CIA Agent Exposes How Al-Qaeda Dosen’t [sic] Exist.”
In the interview, Scheuer decries American interventionism in the Middle East, which he blames on “the leaders of the Jewish-American community in the United States who influence and corrupt our
Congress.”
“This guy is really has got balls”
On 28 November 2011, Fawaz Akhras forwarded Bashar al-Assad an email with links to two video clips of United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage berating the European Union during a parliament session, with the comment, “This guy is really [sic] has got balls to speak like this in the Euro conference Hall in Brussels.”
A series of scandals have implicated members of Farage’s right-wing, Eurosceptic party in racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia. Asked in 2014 which world leader he most admired, Farage nominated Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying: “The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant.”
Saddam, the poet
On 11 November 2011, Assad’s friend, Dr. Suzanne Kuzbari, a geneticist living in Paris, forwarded him an Arabic poem allegedly written by the late Saddam Hussein (though the opening two lines are in fact the work of the Abbasid theologian al-Shafi`i). “This poem […] stunned the people with the intensity of its rhetorical purity and eloquence,” reads a comment accompanying the text. Below is the poem, both in Arabic and in NOW’s English translation:
لا تأسفنَّ على غـدرِ الزمانِ لطالمـا....رقصت على جثثِ الأســودِ كلابا
لا تحسبن برقصها , تعلوا على أسيادها........تبقى الأسودُ أسوداً والكلابُ كِلابا
يـا قمـةَ الزعمـاءَ..إنـي شاعـرٌ....والشعـرُ حـرٌ مـا عليـهِ عتـابا
إنـي أنـا صـدّام..أطلـق لحيتـي....حيناً...ووجـهُ البـدرِ ليـس يعابا
فعلام تأخذنـي العلـوج بلحيتـي....أتخيفُـها الأضـراسُ والأنيـــابا
وأنا المهيـب ولـو أكـون مقيـداً....فالليث مـن خلف الشباك.. يهـابا
هلا ذكرتم كيـف كنـت معظمـاً....والنهـرُ تحـتَ فخـامتي ينسـابا
عشـرونَ طائـرةٍ ترافـقُ موكبي......والطيـر يحشـر حولـها أسـرابا
والقـادة العظمـاء حـولي كلهـم....يتزلفـونَ وبعضكـم حجّــابا
عمّـان تشهـدُ والرباطُ.. فراجعوا.....قمـمَ التحـدّي ما لهـنَّ جـوابا
وأنـا العراقـي الـذي في سجنـهِ....بعـد الزعيـم مذلـة...وعـذابا
ثـوبي الـذي طرزتـهُ لوداعكـم...نسجـت علـى منوالـهِ الأثـوابا
إنـي شربـتُ الكأس سمـاً ناقعـاً....لتـدارَ عنـدَ شفاهكـمُ أكـوابا
أنتـم أسـارى عاجلاً أو آجـلا.....مثـلي وقـدْ تتشابـه الأسبـابا
والفاتحـونَ الحمرَ بيـن جيوشُكم.....لقصوركم يوم الدخـول كـلابا
توبـوا إلى شـارون قبل رحيلكم....واستغفـروه فإنـهُ... تــوّابا
عفـواً إذا غـدت العروبـةَ نعجةً.....وحمـاةُ أهليـها الكـرام ذئـابا
Do not lament the treachery of time, for how often
Dogs have danced upon the corpses of lions
Think not, by their dancing, that they overcome their masters
For the lions remain lions and the dogs dogs
O pinnacle of chieftains, I am a poet
And poetry is free from rebuke
I am Saddam, I grow my beard
Once, and the full moon’s face finds no fault
So why do the heathens take me by my beard
Do the molars and canines frighten them?
I am awe-inspiring, even while shackled
For the lion behind the window inspires awe
Do you not recall how glorious I was
How the river flowed beneath my splendor
Twenty aircraft accompanied my convoy
And the birds gathered around them in flocks
And all the great leaders were around me
Fawning, and some of you were [only] doormen
Amman witnesses, and Rabat, so return
The pinnacles of confrontation have no response
And am the Iraqi who, in his prison
After [he was a] chieftain [is] subdued, and chastised
My robe which I embroidered to bid you farewell
Was imitated by [many other] robes
I drank the glass infused with poison
In order that your lips could taste many cups
You are prisoners sooner or later
Like me, and the reasons could be the same
The bloody conquerors are among your armies
For your palaces [will come] the day of the dogs’ entry
Turn to Sharon in repentance before your departure
And beg his forgiveness, for he is merciful
Sorry if Arabism has become a female sheep
And the protectors of her noble people [became] wolves
Incidentally, former British MP George Galloway, who at various times has praised both Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, made a remark upon his recent electoral defeat that is strikingly similar to the poem’s opening lines: “The hyena can bounce on the lion’s grave but it can never be a lion.”