Ambassador Rafik Joujati of Syria assured officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Center at Yeshiva University of Los Angeles that “I am looking closely” into the report that a pregnant Jewish mother and her two children were brutally murdered in Aleppo on December 28. He wrote to the Center officials, in response to a telegram they had sent him, that “I did not have details and shall inform you” when he ascertains the facts.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean, and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, in their telegram to Joujati, dated January 4, wrote that “At the very hour that (U.S.Navy pilot) Lt. Robert Goodman reached the United States (after being released by the Syrian government last Tuesday) the Simon Wiesenthal Center was shocked and outraged to receive information of the brutal murders” of Lilian Abodi, 25, her six-year-old son and three-and-a-half year old daughter who “were shot and hacked to death in their homes in the Jewish quarter.
The telegram to the Ambassador added that “the American public and all decent people everywhere will be watching to see if the same Syrian authorities who spoke so glowingly of their country’s ‘humanitarian and compassionate’ gesture in the Goodman case will, not turn their backs on the perpetrators of the repugnant crime, and if Syria will take measures to reassure the physical safety of its Jewish minority.
Joujati, in his reply, dated January 6, stated: “While I am on record of appreciating your concern I wish you did not choose to speak sarcastically about the release of Goodman who, I understand, is of your own U.S. nationality. Also your humanitarianism and fairmindness would be tested when your position is made known about (the December 6) massacre by the U.S./Israeli cluster bombs of the children of Baalbek. Let us work for peace and justice of all without discrimination. “
The envoy’s reference to the “cluster bombs” was the first time any source had asserted that Israel, in its raid on terrorist centers in Baalbek in central Lebanon, used cluster bombs. None of the media reports on the raid mode any reference to such weapons.
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