It was a totally unnecessary detail. In my opinion it was dog whistling. Replace Syrian with "African" or "Jewish" and it shouldn't be any more or less outrageous of a detail to add. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24162563
just a correction Syrian is not a race Lebanese and Syrians or Jordanians are all arabs but you find different belief groups there, christians muslims (Shia and sunni and...) and more but most of them are Arabs if not all
They're all Arabs only in the sense that they speak Arabic. Syrians and Lebanese people are Levantine (with varying degrees of mixture with Arabs depending on subregion and religion - but the vast majority have primarily Levantine DNA). Nonetheless, modern DNA analysis can guess who is Lebanese and who is Syrian more often than not. The same goes for distinguishing a Nord from a Swede.