Word: assad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much more politically organized force." The shift has been evident both in the hallways of power and on the streets. Last week Kahn attended the U.N.'s racism conference as an official member of the French government's delegation. Two months earlier, the state visit of Syrian President Bashar Assad - who in May made anti-Semitic comments in a speech in front of the Pope - provoked demonstrations in major cities throughout France...
...bordering the Golan Heights that was destroyed by Israeli forces in 1974 and has been maintained as a ghost town ever since. And while the pope prayed for peace and for the victims of the latest Israeli-Palestinian violence, Israelis expressed outrage at remarks by Syria's President Bashar Assad in welcoming the pontiff over the weekend, calling for solidarity against Israelis as "the betrayers of Jesus...
...Israeli officials urged the pontiff to distance himself from Assad's comments, but John Paul II not surprisingly steered clear of the controversy during his visit to the border zone Monday. After all, his mission in Syria is promoting rapprochement between Islam and the Catholic Church, just as he'd tried to promote reconciliation between Catholics and Jews during last year's visit to Israel. But in Syria he may have bumped into the reality that it's difficult to make friends with both groups while avoiding being drawn into the enmity that rages between them. Indeed...
...nobody's expecting any movement on that front any time soon. Whereas his predecessors were prepared to consider trading the Heights for a peace agreement and elaborate security guarantees, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon insists that holding onto the territory remains a strategic imperative for Israel - and he?ll take Assad?s "Christ-killer" rhetoric as further evidence of Syria's implacable hostility. And if he can't have the Heights back, Assad isn't much interested in peace, either...
...Israelis at all concerned about putting Syria's young President Assad into a corner, where he's either forced to retaliate or else is weakened in the eyes of his country's hard-liners, neither scenario being good for Israel...