Jarjour’s pro-Hezbollah position does not seem to have faded with the passage of time. As recently as September 2011, he took part in another delegation, this one to Lebanon to meet with al-Sayyid Ibrahim al-Amin, the head of Hezbollah’s political office. That group, as reported by NOW’s Arabic site at the time, expressed “its pleasure in its meeting with the leadership of Hezbollah, which represents a line of victory for the will of the people through the achievements of the resistance in Lebanon. [It also] praised the positive role played by the party in Islamic-Christian relations in Lebanon and in the Arab and Muslim world.” In 2012, the United States Treasury and State Departments both accused Hezbollah of playing a central role in Assad’s crackdown and aiding agents of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria. Nasrallah, the Treasury found, was overseeing Hezbollah’s “increasingly ruthless efforts to fight against the opposition.” Nasrallah was personally sanctioned for his role in the war by an executive order signed by President Obama in August 2011.
Another speaker, Bishop Dionysius Jean Kawak, is the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church from the old city of Damascus who has previously served at both St. Efraim’s Church in Washington, D.C. and at a parish in Indiana. Currently, Kawak is the president of the Patriarchal Development Committee and director of Syrian youth program as the Syrian Orthodox Archdiocese in Damascus. His presented comments during the panel were generally more anodyne than Jarjour’s; however, after the event, he explained to two anti-Assad dissidents in the audience who the real culprit was for the humanitarian catastrophe in the Levant. “Believe me, believe me, believe me,” the bishop said, “the game from the beginning was drawn like this. The region is going to be partitioned. A sectarian partition to secure the legitimacy of Israel. Trust me.”
This view certainly jibes with what Kawak has said elsewhere, including on the “Here is Damascus” show on Lebanese Top News TV on December 13, 2013:. “Another problem which we have in the Middle East is our inability to accept each other,” he said, “especially after the establishment of Israel which was established according to a religious logic that, in my opinion, is contrary to all human rights in the world.”
Finally, Bishop Armash Nalbandian, the Primate of the Armenian Church of Damascus, who only spoke during the question-and-answer period of the discussion, has himself made his position on Israel clear. On January 6, 2009, Nalbandian delivered a Christmas sermon, in the midst of Operation Cast Lead, that was cited in the Syrian Arabic News Agency, the mouthpiece organ of the Assad regime: “We stand with our people in Gaza in their suffering and their steadfastness in the face of the Israeli occupation, although the whole world is silent for its crimes, because Zionism revealed its true face, has returned to the gangs of Irgun and Haganah.”
In recent years, the Heritage Foundation has come under fire not just from liberals and Democrats, but also from Republicans who see the think tank as having strayed too far into the orbit of the Tea Party movement and away from intellectual conservatism. Accusations have been leveled against it that its activist wing, Heritage Action, headed by former Rudolph Giuliani presidential campaign staffer Michael Needham, is more interested in holding members of the GOP to an austere ideological litmus test than in shaping Republican Party policy. Indeed, a founding trustee of the Foundation, Mickey Edwards, who is also a former Republican congressman, told the New Republic magazine in November 2013: “I don't think any thoughtful person is going to take the Heritage Foundation very seriously, because they’ll say, How is this any different from the Tea Party?”
Nevertheless, much of the above will no doubt sit uneasily with many of the think tank's board or research staff, given what the latter have lately produced on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. In fact, on the same day as the “Marked for Destruction” event, Charlotte Florance wrote on Heritage’s Foundry blog: “Assad’s so-called war on terrorism is a double-edged sword. Negotiators in Geneva should not fall for the trap. If Assad wants to fight terrorism, he should look in the mirror and end his support for terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.”
“The U.S. should stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel in confronting Iran’s growing nuclear menace,” concluded James Phillips, the Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs, and James Jay Carafano, the Vice President of the Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, in February 2012. “If Jerusalem decides to exercise its right of self-defense,” they wrote regarding a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program, “then the U.S. and its allies should support that decision, not condemn it.” Furthermore, Phillips and Carafano found, the “Obama Administration should also offer to further deploy land- or sea-based missile defense systems in the greater Persian Gulf area with the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council – the alliance formed in 1981 by Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to provide collective defense against Iran and other threats.”
Yet America’s alliance with Saudi Arabia and Qatar was precisely the problem, according to several speakers at the event, who blamed these countries – and Turkey – for facilitating or sponsoring jihadism. “We accept to be marked for destruction if it comes from Paul’s mouth,” said Reverend Adib Awad, the General Secretary of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon. “But we do not accept to be marked for destruction by terrorists coming from 83 countries, sent, funded, and armed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. We do not accept that.”
Awad used much of his opening remarks to glorify the United States and the schools in Syria in which he was educated. “I learned in the American schools the basis of my life. I learned what we used to call American values at that time; later I discovered they are Christian values simply because our history books were books of the American history.”
Awad is from Qardaha, Latakia, the ancestral home of the Assad family. According to Ayman Abdel Nour, a Syrian Christian who edits the pro-revolutionary All4Syria website and whose grandfather was a prominent Protestant clergyman in Syria, Awad used to be famous for giving sermons on state television during Christian holidays praising both Jesus Christ and Hafez al-Assad. “He is connected to the Assad family and the security services,” Abdel Nour told me. “Everybody knows that. It’s not a secret.”
Closing the proceedings at Heritage was Patrick Sookhdeo, an ordained pastor and the international director of the Barnabas Fund. He said that “the information that comes [from the media on Syria] is only one side.” He also urged the Obama administration to be “even-handed” in its response to the conflict and to “recognize that under the UN principle of the responsibility to protect that the international community, coupled with individual countries, have a duty and a responsibility to protect beleaguered minorities.” Like the previous clerics, Sookhdeo made no mention of the war crimes committed by the regime, Iran, or Hezbollah in Syria. Instead, he too blamed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey for helping al-Qaeda, and went so far as to declare that “Syria and the Christians of Syria have been shaped by American values, and Heritage stands for American values, so stand with us at this time.”
Ahed al-Hendi, co-founder of Syrian Christians for Democracy, an anti-Assad Syrian-American organization, attended the discussion. “They tried to play the role of neutral observers in Syria, but the blame of Assad was absent,” he said, referring to the panelists. “They did not mention Assad in any way. They did not say that he empowered the Islamists in Syria when he cracked down on secularists and put a lot of moderate people behind bars.”
“They were fearful to blame Assad in any way, but they were not afraid to blame al-Qaeda or the Islamists. That shows you who they fear most.”
