Senior Israeli Minister: 'Time Has Come' To Assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
May. 17, 2017

Senior Israeli minister Yoav Gallant called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to be assassinated on Tuesday in response to completely unverified claims that the Syrian government is using crematoriums to dispose of bodies after "mass killings".

From Bloomberg:
President Bashar al-Assad should be eliminated to stop the atrocities taking place in Syria, according to an Israeli minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Gallant, a retired major general who led the Israel Defense Forces’s southern command, which includes the Gaza Strip, pointed to U.S. allegations that the Assad regime built a crematorium at a prison outside Damascus to cover up mass murders. The Syrian government has denied the U.S. claim. When asked who Gallant thinks should do the killing, his spokeswoman declined to elaborate.
That means America's supposed to do it.
“The reality of the situation today in Syria, in which they are executing people, using chemical attacks against them, and the latest extreme measure -- burning their corpses, something which we haven’t seen in 70 years in this world -- we’re crossing a red line,” Gallant said Tuesday at a military conference in Israel. “In my opinion, it’s time to eliminate Assad.”

After cutting off what he described as “the snake’s tail,” then “we’ll be able to get to its head, which sits in Tehran,” Gallant said.

The comments -- among the strongest by any member of the Israeli government -- highlight growing pressure from U.S. allies in the Middle East to confront Assad and his main regional backer, Iran, as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to visit the region next week. Israel for now has stayed clear of large-scale intervention in Syria, preferring to target weapons passing through the country en route to the Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. It also has struck back at Assad’s army in southern Syria when shells land in the Israeli-controlled territories of the Golan Heights.
The government of Syria has said the latest crematorium claims are "completely unfounded," as the AFP reports:
"These allegations are totally unfounded, they are nothing but the product of the imagination of this administration and its agents," state news agency SANA quoted the foreign ministry as saying.

"Successive US administrations have repeatedly fabricated lies and allegations to justify their aggressive and interventionist policies in other sovereign countries," the ministry said.

"Yesterday the US administration pulled out a new Hollywood screenplay disconnected from reality, accusing the Syrian government of having, according to the administration, built a crematorium at the Saydnaya prison."
As usual, while our media claims to be crusaders for truth and obsessed with getting to the bottom of every last statement by Donald Trump and his associates, they couldn't care less about "fact checking" these flimsy excuses for war in the Middle East. Be it this latest ridiculous crematorium story clearly designed to bring to mind the Holocaust, or the alleged gas attack, which was also compared to the Holocaust and was used as a pretext for the US Tomahawk missile attack on a Syrian air base in March.

Many say Israel's real interest in the Golan Heights can be found by examining the New Jersey oil company Genie Energy, which has among others, Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild on its board.



As New Eastern Outlook reported earlier this year:
The Israeli subsidiary of a Newark, New Jersey oil company, Genie Energy, has been given permission to drill for oil on the Golan Heights.

As I noted in a piece published on NEO in 2015, Genie Energy is no “penny stock” run-of-the-mill oil company. Its board of Advisors includes Dick Cheney. It includes former CIA head and chairman of the above-mentioned Foundation for Defense of Democracies, James Woolsey. It includes Jacob Lord Rothschild of the London banking dynasty and a former business partner of convicted Russian oil oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Before his arrest Khodorkovsky secretly transferred his shares in Yukos Oil to Rothschild.

Further this little-known Newark, New Jersey oil company board includes former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, pro-Israel media mogul and owner of Trump’s favorite Fox News TV, Rupert Murdoch. Also on the board are former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt. Steinhardt, a philanthropic friend of Israel and of Marc Rich, is also a board member of Woolsey’s neo-con Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which advises Trump among other things that it would be good for Washington to recognize Israel as legitimate owner of the Golan Heights lands taken by Dayan in the 1967 War.

...Genie Energy in 2013 was granted exclusive oil and gas exploration rights to a 153-square mile radius in the southern part of the Golan Heights by the Netanyahu government.

On October 8, 2015 only days after the surprise Russian announcement it had accepted the request of the elected Bashar al-Assad government to militarily intervene against ISIS, Al Qaeda and other terrorists in Syria, Genie Energy made a major announcement. Yuval Bartov, chief geologist from Genie Energy’s Israeli subsidiary, Afek Oil & Gas, told Israel’s Channel 2 TV that his company had found a major oil reservoir on the Golan Heights: “We’ve found an oil stratum 350 meters thick in the southern Golan Heights. On average worldwide, strata are 20 to 30 meters thick, and this is 10 times as large as that, so we are talking about significant quantities.”

On January 10, 2017, Genie Energy Ltd. announced it was creating a new company, Atid Drilling Ltd., an on-shore drilling services venture based in Israel to drill for oil in the Golan Heights among other places. They will expand the drilling by Genie Energy’s subsidiary Afek Oil & Gas which since the October, 2015 announcement has completed five exploratory wells in Golan Heights.

The creation of Atid Drilling by Genie confirms they are convinced based on the preliminary drilling results that there is something “big” in Golan. A month later, in mid-February soon after Trump is sworn in as President, Netanyahu flies to Washington to discuss US recognition of Israel’s annexation of Golan Heights.
In April, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon told Israel's Channel 10 news ISIS had "apologized" for attacking Israeli Defense Forces operating in the Syrian Golan Heights.

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