How a US and Qatari regime change deception produced ‘Caesar’ sanctions driving Syria towards famine
Like the mysterious figure it is named for, the Caesar sanctions bill is the product of an elaborate deception by shadowy US- and Gulf-backed operatives. Instead of protecting Syrian civilians, the unilateral measures are driving them towards hunger and death.
by Max Blumenthal
Part 6 - Enlisting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the push for war
Back in July 2014, a self-styled human rights lawyer named Stephen Rapp sat on stage at the Saudi-funded Rafiq Hariri Center of DC’s Atlantic Council think tank and demanded regime change in Syria: “Its legitimacy, its ability to serve the people of Syria is gone, if ever it where there,” he said of Assad’s government.
Throughout the event, entitled “Making the Case Against Assad,“ Rapp touted the work the aforementioned US-funded Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) was doing to gather documents implicating the Syrian government, and the State Department’s role in supporting them.
At the time, Rapp was the Barack Obama administration’s ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice. He later moved on to serve as the chair of CIJA and visiting fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, where according to his bio, he pursued “justice and accountability on Syria.”
Rapp had worked with the Qatar-sponsored authors of the initial Caesar inquiry in the past when he, David Crane, and Desmond De Silva each served as chief prosecutor at the special court for Sierra Leone.
In his capacity at the Holocaust Museum, Rapp focused on “bringing forth the first case against the Assad regime and working on potential cases related to the ‘Caesar file’ in Germany.”
Under Rapp’s watch, the Holocaust Museum was transformed into an overt tool of US foreign policy in the Middle East. The institution’s interventionist bent was supplemented by the presence of neoconservative ideologues like Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams, former DHS Chief Michael Chertoff, and Stuart A. Levey – a pioneer of US sanctions policy – on the museum’s ironically named “Committee on Conscience.”
In 2014, Mouaz Moustafa, the Syrian-American regime change lobbyist who worked as “Caesar’s” handler, joined Stephen Rapp in helping the Holocaust Memorial Museum establish an exhibition likening the Syrian war to the Jewish genocide of World War Two Europe. The exhibit contained a special section on the Caesar file, presenting it as evidence of industrial mass murder without a scintilla of critical context or evidence.
According to Rapp, the file provided a “better” basis for prosecutions of Syrian officials than the Allies mustered at Nuremberg, where key Nazi German officials were convicted for crimes against humanity. Rapp has even claimed that, based on the Caesar files, “Conservatively, we’re looking at 50,000 Syrian civilians tortured and murdered by their own government.”
When the Holocaust museum in DC established its exhibition in late 2014, it was only able to display 10 carefully selected photos from the Caesar file. Once other investigators were able to view the full file, however, the one-sided narrative of its promoters began to crumble.
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