“The European media have not ceased to suppress the daily news of those who are suffering in Syria and they have even justified what is happening in our country by using information without taking the trouble to verify it,” a Syrian Christian leader of the Melkite Catholic Church recently told reporters. Jean-Clément Jeanbart, who has been archbishop of Aleppo since 1995, was speaking at an event in France organized by the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. A French report on the meeting was translated by the traditionalist Catholic website Rorate Coeli.

Fighting in Syria has intensified in the last few days, CNN reported, with the U.N. reporting that the most recent fighting has displaced 40,000 people. Aleppo is in the northeastern part of the country, near the border with Turkey. There are 42 Melkite churches and communities in the United States, organized in the Eparchy [diocese] of Newton.

The Melkite Catholic Church is one of the Eastern Catholic Churches, parts of the Catholic Church that have their own government under the pope, worship, and church law. They are found mostly in the Middle East and eastern Europe. Among the best known in the West are the Maronite Church in Lebanon and the Ukrainean Catholic Church.

Syrian Christians had to side with the government, Jeanbart told the reporters. The press condemns the regime because it didn’t try to be objective in its reporting, he said, pointing to the press’s reliance on the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a group controlled by the opposition.

He had tried to tell the French government about the situation in Syria but was told to be “less critical,” he said. He rebuked French foreign minister Laurent Fabius for playing God by saying that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad should not be living. This helped explain the French reaction to his reports, he said.

President Assad

Jeanbart defended Syrian president Assad. “Bashar al-Assad has many defects, but you have to realize he has many good points as well,” he said.

Schools are free, hospitals too, mosques and churches pay no taxes, what government in the region does things like that, be honest? Remember too that if we prefer today to support the government, it’s because we fear the installation of a sunni theocracy that would deprive us of the right to live on our own lands.

Speaking to the National Catholic Reporter last April during a short visit to the United States, the archbishop said that “Assad and the regime should be part of the solution. They would be pushing in the direction of a non-confessional or nonreligious and pluralistic regime. … If Assad steps down, there would be no voice for a pluralistic regime.”

Jeanbart has consistently spoken against the Western powers’ support for the opposition. “It is terrible for us to see all the marvelous things we had destroyed for pretend democracy and freedom,” he told English politicians in an address at the House of Lords  in England last October. “Our country was fighting for 50-60 years to become a secularist regime, a pluralistic country, to give citizens their rights of religion and freedom of choice … and you are destroying this work and pushing on us fundamental jihadis who want to kill everyone who is not similar to them.” A Foreign Office official, speaking after Jeanbart, flatly rejected the archbishop’s claims.

Asked by the Reporter what gives him hope “in the midst of unspeakable carnage, violence and chaos,” Archbishop Jeanbart answered, “Certainly there will be people with human feelings and values who will say, “It is enough. Stop.” And of course, I have hope in the blessing of the Lord and his powerful intervention to change minds and hearts and to get people to reconciliation.”