Al Arabiya, 31 May 2012 –  Syria’s Consul General Hazem Chehabi in California has resigned from his post in protest of last weekend’s al-Houla massacre that left at least 100 people killed, a U.S. radio station reported him as saying on Wednesday.

“You get to a point where your silence or your inaction becomes ethically and morally unacceptable,” Chehabi told National Public Radio (NPR) in an interview.

“Although I think I may have been there a while ago, the recent barbaric massacre that took place in the town of Houla, for me it was a tipping point and was a point beyond which one could not justify remaining silent and/or remaining in a position that may be perceived, correctly or incorrectly, as having ties to the Syrian government.”
Chehabi, who told NPR that the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is “responsible for the action of his own government,” is chairman of the University of California at Irvine board of trustees and has been the subject of student protests urging his removal.

“Either you’re committing those atrocities, and therefore you’re guilty, or you’re not preventing them from happening, and the buck has to stop somewhere. And to me the buck stops all the way at the top.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. and several governments worldwide have expelled Syrian diplomats in a coordinated protest against what had happened in the central town of Houla near Homs. On Wednesday, Turkey and Japan joined the list of countries that expelled the Syrian envoys.

Chehabi, however, is a U.S. citizen and as honorary counsel is not subject to Washington’s expulsion order, a spokesman for the Syrian American Council (SAC) told The Lost Angeles Times newspaper on Wednesday.

“We welcome Chehabi’s resignation and urge him to use his ties with Syrian officials to convince them to defect from the Assad regime in order to help speed its fall and save lives,” Amar Kahf, council activist, told the newspaper.

SAC, meanwhile, wrote on its official website that Chehabi is the “first official to defect from Assad regime.”

Charles Ries, director of Rand Corp.’s Center for Middle East Public Policy, told The Lost Angeles Times that “diplomatic expulsions could force Syrian officials, military officers and foreign envoys to reconsider their relationship with the Assad regime and set off embarrassing defections that the Syrian president has so far been spared.”

As violence continues against civilians in Syria, Russia and China on Wednesday signaled their opposition to any military intervention in the crisis-torn country.

Russia said that the U.N. Security Council should not consider new measures to resolve the crisis in Syria at this point and signaled it would block any effort to authorize military intervention as China reiterated its opposition to either military intervention or regime change in Syria.