Chief rabbi calls for action against Syrian ‘genocide’

Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef said on Sunday that a genocide was being perpetrated in Syria and insisted that there is a moral responsibility to stop the bloodshed of civilians in the ongoing civil war there.

His comments came after a chemical attack in the rebel-held city of Douma was apparently carried out by the Syrian regime, leaving dozens of people dead and hundreds fighting for their lives due to the poisonous gas.

“I have said in the past and I say again, there is a cruel genocide happening in Syria against women and children with weapons of mass destruction,” Yosef said Sunday morning. “There is a moral obligation not to be quiet and to try and halt the slaughter.”

“As Jews who have experienced genocide, as Jews whose Torah is a light to the nations, our moral obligation is to try and stop the slaughter,” he said. “This is an obligation no less than the moral obligation that was in destroying the Syrian [nuclear] reactor.”

Yosef has spoken out on several occasions in the past on the indiscriminate attacks perpetrated by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime against civilians in the Syrian civil war.

During the battle for Aleppo, Yosef said events in that country were akin to “a small Holocaust,” and although the Syrians were not friends of Israel, Jews should speak out against the genocide, and it should not be ignored.