The warmongering POS in the White House and warmonger Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), who’s never met a war he doesn’t like, are, once again, agitating for a war against Syria.
Both sides in the ongoing Syrian civil war — the Assad regime and the “rebel” insurgents — are reprehensible, but not equally reprehensible. Assad is not a good man, but his government has not persecuted and abused Syrian Christians.
Not so with the Syrian “rebels,” the ranks of whom increasingly are radical Islamist jihadists. The “rebels” have also committed horrible atrocities against Christians. See “Prayer needed: Muslim jihadists attack, loot, kill Christians in Syria.”
Now comes news that McCain bears an animus against Syrian Christians. At a recent meeting with a group of Syrian Christian clergymen visiting Congress, McCain was extremely rude. He screamed at the visitors and angrily stomped out of the committee room.
One has to ask what Syrian Christians, who only want to live and worship in peace, have done to warrant the senator’s angry outburst.
Shame on you, John McCain! You’ve brought disgrace on your office, Arizona, the United States Senate, and America.
See also “Pigs in the Parlor: Jihadists influencing the Republican Elite,” Feb. 13, 2014.
~Eowyn
From Judicial Watch, Feb. 5, 2014:
Hell-bent on arming opposition forces in Syria—despite strong evidence that they’re run by Islamic terrorists—John McCain displayed behavior unbecoming of a United States Senator during a recent meeting with Syrian Christian leaders touring Capitol Hill.
The delegation of Syrian clergy came to Washington to raise awareness among lawmakers of the growing crisis among the region’s minority Christian community. Christians make up about 10% of the Syrian population and they are being targeted and ruthlessly murdered by radical elements of the rebel forces, according to the visiting church officials. They say the media and human rights groups in the west have been largely silent on the ordeal of the Christians in Syria.
A number of churches have been destroyed or burned, children were killed when rebels fired mortar rockets at an Armenian Christian school in Damascus and countless others have been abducted by Islamic fighters, the Syrian delegation reveals in a statement published by the research group, Westminster Institute, that brought them to Washington. Eleven nuns have also been abducted and are still in captivity and two bishops are still missing after getting kidnapped during a humanitarian mission.
But Senator McCain, an Arizona Republican, evidently doesn’t want to hear negative stories about the rebels he’s working to arm. So he stormed out of a closed-door meeting with the Syrian clergy officials last week. Held in the Senate Arms Services Committee meeting room, the reunion also included senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Graham is a Republican and the rest are Democrats.
McCain marched into the committee room yelling, according to a high-level source that attended the meeting, and quickly stormed out. “He was incredibly rude,” the source told Judicial Watch “because he didn’t think the Syrian church leaders should even be allowed in the room.” Following the shameful tantrum McCain reentered the room and sat briefly but refused to make eye contact with the participants, instead ignoring them by looking down at what appeared to be random papers.
The outburst was so embarrassing that Senator Graham, also an advocate of U.S. military intervention in Syria, apologized for McCain’s disturbing outburst. “Graham actually apologized to the group for McCain’s behavior,” according to the source, who sat through the entire meeting. “It was truly unbelievable.”
Not really, for those familiar with McCain’s history on this matter. The veteran lawmaker is enamored with a controversial young “Syria expert,” Elizabeth O’Bagy, who has managed to convince him as well as the president and secretary of state that Syrian rebels are mostly moderate and not terrorists. While persuading the U.S. of this, O’Bagy concealed that she was a political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group that advocates for Syria’s rebels from Washington D.C.
__________________________
Note from Eowyn: A registered Democrat, 26-year-old O’Bagy is a former senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who was terminated for resume padding. O’Bagy also had an unrevealed affiliation with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based group advocating the armed overthrow of the government of Syria. In her paid work with that group, done simultaneously with her job at the officially nonpartisan Institute for the Study of War, she had lobbied American political leaders to send heavy weaponry to Syrian insurgent groups. Two weeks after her dismissal from the Institute for the Study of War, O’Bagy was hired as a legislative assistant by Senator John McCain. (Source)
__________________________
Before getting exposed by conservative media outlets, O’Bagy claimed to be an objective analyst at a Washington D.C. think-tank that studies military affairs when in fact she had a “reputation as the leading expert on the armed opposition in the Syrian revolution,” according to SETF. In September O’Bagy was abruptly fired from the think-tank for padding her resume and McCain graciously hired her. “Elizabeth is a talented researcher, and I have been very impressed by her knowledge and analysis in multiple briefings over the last year,” McCain said in a statement to the political news publication that broke the story in late September.
Besides the fact that a Syrian Islamist group is essentially steering U.S. policy, a number of domestic and international media outlets have confirmed that terrorists—mainly Al Qaeda—are running opposition forces in Syria. For instance the New York Times published a piece that reveals Islamist rebels—including the most extreme groups in the notorious Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-aligned force—are running the show in Syria. “The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion,” the story says. “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”
Incredibly, last month an international news agency reported that Congress secretly approved U.S. weapons flow to what officials describe as “moderate” Syrian rebel factions. The White House refused to comment on the back-door operation, but the story cites U.S. and European officials who say the weapons deliveries have been funded by the U.S. Congress, in votes behind closed doors, through the end of government fiscal year 2014.
