Yousef Munayyer: Attacks in Brussels & Paris Underscore Need to Address Crisis in Syria | Democracy Now!

23.3.16

Yousef Munayyer: Attacks in Brussels & Paris Underscore Need to Address Crisis in Syria | Democracy Now!: Tuesday’s attacks in Belgium came just four days after authorities in Brussels arrested Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the November Paris attacks that killed 130 people. Abdeslam had fled to Brussels after the Paris attacks. After his arrest in a raid on Friday, the Belgian interior minister had warned the country was on the highest level of alert for a possible revenge attack. "I think the attacks today really underscore the urgent crisis and catastrophe that is taking place in Syria and the need for the international community to redouble its efforts to address in a serious way the civil war that is going on there that has really given rise, through the failure of the Syrian state, the vacuum of power that exists between Syria and Iraq, to this monster that we have come to know as ISIS, which has metastasized around the globe," says Yousef Munayyer, executive director of U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. We speak with Munayyer and Robert Freedman, visiting professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the former president of Baltimore Hebrew University.