President Assad’s extraordinary speech at the Arab League and OIC Summit, Riyadh 11 Nov 2024
” …As for our summit, we have met and expressed our condemnation for a year, and for a year the crime continues. So shall we meet to reproduce the past and its events or to change the course of the future and its prospects?
Last year, we called for the cessation of hostilities and the protection of the Palestinians, and the outcome was tens of thousands of martyrs and millions of displaced people in Palestine and Lebanon.
In 2002, the Arabs proposed an initiative for peace, but the response was more massacres against the Palestinians. In 1991, we decided in an Arabic way to play the American goodwill game, by participating in the peace process in Madrid. Our peace was a safeguard for their wars and a legislation for their settlement.
This does not indicate a mistake in the directions but rather a shortcoming in the preparation of the tools. Our tools are language and their tools are murder.
We say, and they do.
We offer peace, and we receive bloodshed.
…
The goals may seem elementary to us when it comes to the future rights of the Palestinian people.
But what is the value of these rights in general when the Palestinians do not have their fundamental right, which is the right to life? What is the value of any right given anywhere in the world in any field, for the dead?
…
We are not dealing with a state in the legal sense but rather with an outlaw colonial entity. We are not dealing with people in the civilized sense but with herds of settlers, that are closer to barbarism than humanity.
It is not correct to say that the problem is the current, colonial, extremist government that has lost its mind, and a people that has been affected by what happened on the 7th of October last year.
They all have the same ideological mind, a mind that is sick with bloodshed, a mind that is sick with delusion of superiority, a mind afflicted with schizophrenia between hating Nazism abstractly and loving it as an organic part of itself in practice.
These are the targets of our meeting today and they are the problem, the problem determines the means and the means is the basis for success. Here lies the essence of our meeting today, which I hope will be successful, and that we we will be able to make the right decisions.
So that we will not be like those who speak to the thief in the language of law, to the criminal in the language of morals, and to the murderer in the language of humanity.
And so that the good intentions will never again be a starting point and motivation for more deaths for the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, who have spent decades paying the price of good intentions and absent mechanisms.
Peace be upon you.”
WtR