Yemen, Lebanon voted against Syria's suspension from Arab League

The much heralded vote over the weekend calling to suspend Syria's membership in the Arab League was not unanimous.

Iraq abstained:

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on Monday defended his country's abstention from a vote on suspending Syria from the Arab League, emphasising that events in Syria have a direct impact on Iraq.

"Iraq's stance was not easy," Zebari told a news conference on Monday.

"Syria is a brother country. It is an important country in the area, and we have special relations with it, as it hosted hundred of thousands of Iraqis in difficult circumstances," he said, referring to Iraqi refugees who fled to Syria to escape violence at home.

Yemen voted against.

And Lebanon voted against:

Where does one begin? In a year of so many lows, Lebanon, by choosing not to sanction Syria at Saturday’s Arab League meeting in Cairo, has probably reached its nadir. For in doing so, it has torn up its much-vaunted democratic credentials and sided with the forces of repression and systematic murder. Subsequent explanations from both the Lebanese president and prime minister did little to justify the way Lebanon, along with troubled Yemen and Syria itself, voted.

Prime Minister Najib Mikati explained that the decision to side with a regime that has killed more than 3,500 protesters, and which has constantly broken all promises to embark upon a program of reform, was based upon “historic and geographic considerations and facts that take into account the Lebanese peculiarity, which we know that [our] Arab brothers understand.”

Lebanon’s “Arab brothers” understand only one thing: Beirut and Damascus are joined at the hip, and the March 8 forces that overthrew the democratically elected government of Saad Hariri in January of this year did so with the overarching aim to restore Lebanon to Syria’s orbit after a six-year hiatus. It is for this and this reason only that Lebanon sided with one of the region’s darkest forces.

Iran is trying to spin the vote as if it was closer than it was, by claiming that Jordanian leaders were divided:

Jordan's vote for the suspension of Syria from the Arab League earlier this week has reportedly caused a rift among the Jordanian government officials.


According to Arab media reports, senior members of the Jordan's foreign ministry have slammed the order made by the League which calls on member states to withdraw their ambassadors from Damascus.

A spokesman for the Jordanian foreign ministry has allegedly called the decision not binding and that any Arab country can choose not to follow such orders.

This seems to be fiction as far as I can tell, but one of the comments in this PressTV article is too good to ignore:

All these Zionist gutless puppets who call them selves Arabs have their day coming, their western stance and silence on Israel will bring their destruction by their own people , if you research that fake king abdullah you will find that his mother is a British Jew who was an actress

Wow, a halachically Jewish king in Jordan? Why haven't we heard this before?

(Abdullah's mother Princess Muna did convert to Islam when she married King Hussein - it is one of those racist Jordanian laws we never hear anyone complain about - but she was not Jewish in any way. Her family tree can be seen here.)