c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the Senior Interreligious Adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Whenever a world leader _ even a dictator _ dies, commentators invariably employ such words as “stability,” “steadfastness” and “patriotic” to describe the deceased.

This happened when Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, died recently in Damascus. Although Assad ruled Syria since 1970 with the proverbial “iron hand,” American television viewers were treated to a series of “Middle East experts” who with straight faces solemnly recounted the Syrian leader’s outstanding achievements. Several retired Western diplomats who personally dealt with Assad augmented the experts. They, too, rehearsed the Syrian’s positive traits.

All of this is perfectly understandable because of Syria’s importance in any future Middle East peace settlement.

Although autocratic regimes can always produce “spontaneous” street demonstrations, it’s clear many Syrians genuinely mourn Assad’s passing. But before the mists of hoary legend cover him, it is important to remember Assad as he really was and how he affected not only the Middle East, but also the entire world.

Assad was a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Islam some believe is apostate. It is a minority within Syria _ about 12 percent of the population of 17 million. As a result, Assad was acutely aware the majority Sunni Muslims could topple his regime. Like every dictator, Assad held power through a broad secret police apparatus and his most trusted inner circle was limited to family members and other Alawites.

In 1982, Assad brutally crushed an uprising by murdering at least 10,000 Sunni Muslims in the town of Hama. Assad not only killed his perceived enemies, including women and children, but he also physically destroyed Hama, and it still remains in ruins.

Assad was a master chess player, and he used that skill in carrying out domestic and foreign policies. He saw the tiny Syrian Jewish community as a pawn to be cynically used, and for many years Assad harassed Syrian Jews, a community living in the country since biblical times.

Because of Syria’s post-World War II instability, however, most Jews had emigrated before Assad came to power. But some remained and the Syrian president made their lives miserable.

For years Assad’s regime portrayed Syrian Jews as Israeli or American spies. Single Jewish women of marriageable age were not permitted to leave Syria to find husbands, and some family reunifications were capriciously blocked. Syrian Jews became a hostage to Assad’s political agenda.

I clearly remember the deep concern the American Jewish Committee and other human rights organizations expressed about the plight of Syrian Jews during the 1970s and 1980s. Especially upsetting was when, as sometimes happened, well-intentioned Western journalists visited Syria and were taken in by Assad’s elaborate propaganda that hid the desperate situation of Syrian Jews.

It was not until 1994, and after international pressure from many quarters, including the Vatican, that Syrian Jews were allowed to emigrate.

Assad’s chess strategy included his military occupation of neighboring Lebanon, whose national independence has never been recognized by Syria. When I was in Beirut in 1974, some Christian leaders showed me copies of English language Syrian newspapers carrying the dateline, “Beirut, Syria.” Assad also supported a host of Arab terrorist groups that were violently anti-American and anti-Israel. Indeed, the U.S. State Department placed Assad’s Syria on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism.

For decades U.S. secretaries of states made pilgrimages to Damascus to cajole, urge and perhaps even beg, Assad to enter the Middle East process. The American entreaties were usually unsuccessful, and who can forget the carefully posed photos of a supplicant secretary of state sitting with a smug Assad in the Syrian president’s palace.

Most of those sessions consisted of Assad denouncing alleged Israeli “intransigence” or, worse, the legitimacy of the Jewish state. However, after losing two costly wars to the hated “Zionism entity,” Assad was careful to comply with the cease-fire on the Golan Heights that Syria had meticulously negotiated with Israel.

My lasting image of Assad’s policies took place earlier this year when he dispatched his foreign minister to the United States to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Assad authorized his minister to negotiate with Barak, but the Syrian official was forbidden to shake the Israeli leader’s hand.

Hopefully, Assad’s successor will end such charades and fully join the Middle East peace process; something that Assad was incapable of doing.

DEA END RUDIN