Om opprøret til "the muslim brothers" i Hama i 1982, som blei slått ned av den syriske regjeringen.
'I know you disapprove of what happend in Hama, Robert, the killings
and the executions,' he said. 'But you must realise that if our
president had not crushed that uprising, Syria would have been like
Algeria today. We tried to talk to the Brothers at first, to negotiate
with them. We didn't want this bloodbath. We asked them: "What do you
want?" They said: "The head of the president". And, of course, that
was the end. We were not going to have an Islamic fundamentalist
state in Syria.You in the west should be greatful to us. We crushed
Islamistic fanatism here. We are the only country in the Middle East
to have totally supressed fundamentalism'.