August 1939 Alert: “Yemenite President Ali Abdallah Saleh on Al-Jazeera TV: I Hope All Countries Bordering Israel Will Join the War; Arab Countries Should Allow Transfer of Weapons & People to Lebanon & Palestine,” from MEMRITV, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
The following are excerpts from an interview with Yemenite President Ali Abdallah Saleh, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on August 1, 2006.
TO VIEW THIS CLIP, VISIT: http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1217.Interviewer: “Do you expect the war to expand?”
Ali Abdallah Saleh: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “To include Syria?”
Ali Abdallah Saleh: “I would certainly hope that it expands. I would hope so, but the Israelis would not dare. They are frustrated in South Lebanon, so how could they expand the war? All Israeli cities would be within the range of the Syrian missiles. Syria is armed, and is ready for anything. It would be foolish, even more than foolish… I say in all honesty that the Israeli government is defeated. The Israeli army is also defeated by any standard. The Israeli government will fall. It will fall soon because it misjudged things. Israeli strategy is based on brief wars, on swift strikes. By now it has been 19 days, and the equation has changed. If Israel were to act foolishly and wage war against Syria, I expect Israel would find itself in an extremely difficult situation. Perhaps they would even leave the region, because their society is a mixture [of identities], full of contradictions.”
[…]
Ali Abdallah Saleh: “I hope that all the countries bordering with Israel, not just Syria, would enter the war. I meant the countries bordering with Israel. We will not enter the war officially, but we will open the borders to the fighters. We will allow the transfer of money and equipment, to support the Lebanese resistance and the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.”
[…]
“This war has become a duty incumbent upon us. Every Muslim has the individual duty to fight on this front.”
[…]
Interviewer: “The secretary-general of Hizbullah said that this is a battle of the nation. Do you agree with him?”
Ali Abdallah Saleh: “Yes, I believe this is a battle for the Islamic nation, not the Arab nation.”