An Israeli MK on Wednesday compared Syrian President Bashar Assad to the “infamous Auschwitz doctor, Josef Mengele,” reported Haaretz newspaper.
Assad was branded anti-Semitic and racist by Israeli President Moshe Katzav, and criticized by the United States and France, for telling the pope on Saturday that “Israelis today have the same mentality as the Jews who betrayed Jesus Christ.”
In a Knesset session devoted to Assad’s remarks, Benny Boim, from the right-wing Likud Party, said that “Bashar Assad has adopted the ideas proclaimed by that other doctor, the one from Auschwitz.”
The Syrian government summoned Tuesday the US and French ambassadors to Damascus to protest both countries' criticizing as "anti-Semitic" remarks by Assad.
Seeing the pope off at the end of a four-day visit to Syria, Assad seized the chance to respond to the criticism, saying: "There are many people in this world who are still afraid to even mention the historic facts and international resolutions, accusing us, the Semites, of being anti-Semitic."
The young Syrian leader, an ophthalmologist by education, was quoted by Reuters as saying that those people were "adopting double standards, using the logic of might and arrogance instead of using the logic of right and justice.”
Syrian officials were quoted in reports as saying the remarks were taken out of context and that Assad was referring to the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians and other Arab people.
Israel attacked a Syrian radar post in Lebanon in April, killing at least one serviceman.
Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, “became the surviving symbol of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution," according to websites concerned with the Holocaust.
“Josef Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers and their crematoria. He had a look that said 'I am the power,'" one survivor was quoted as saying.
“When it was reported that one block was infected with lice, Mengele solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it. At the time, Mengele was only 32 years old.” – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
