Struggling to frame a response to last week’s announcement by EC President Ursula von der Leyen, that the EU is to prepare for war with you know who, I now have to put those efforts on hold and add to my previous post on the ongoing sectarian terror the West and its clueless apologists have inflicted on Syria.
Since I want to return asap to Europe’s plight, I’ll stick to flagging up three alt media responses to the said sectarian terror. While corporate media have not entirely ignored it, their response is predictably muted. Those same media fell over themselves in the propaganda stampede to oust the government of Bashar al-Assad.
Of which Daniel Kavalik, quoted in that previous post, said:
The Assad government was not perfect, nor would any government be perfect under similar circumstances, but the chief orchestrator of the current mass-murdering disaster is Washington.
It’s hard for any of us to play the “how could we have known?” card, given how regime change in Iraq and Libya – similarly preceded by infantile but effective media demonisation – panned out. As I put it in a post five months ago:
After Saddam came Gaddafi, as Libya was liberated from the tyranny of being Africa’s richest nation, with free healthcare for all and literacy rates higher than the West’s, to become a failed state ruled by warlords. Slaves were sold openly on the quayside in Tripoli, the chief export was Salafist terror, and for good measure Libya was now a hub for sub-Saharans desperate to reach Italy or Greece …
Now it was Syria’s turn. With ‘Arab Spring’ in full bloom, and the average Westerner clueless, it was child’s play to paint jihadists armed by the West and Riyadh, while Israeli medics tended their wounded, as freedom fighters. Few were listening [to] US General Wesley Clark’s revelations …
In the Pentagon in November 2001, a senior military staff officer had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was to be part of a five-year plan against seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.
By now [2015/16] even I, slow of uptake, had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington.
My baser nature wants to scream “told-you-so” at the cheer-leaders for Assad’s downfall, but a smidgeon of benefit might, as in Gaza, come out of this if eyes are opened to corporate media complicity (credulous leftists George Monbiot and Owen Jones not excepted) and to a far-Left happy to suspend critical faculties and declare – as though some third option lay just round the corner – “a plague on imperialism and Assad both!”
Media systemically incapable of speaking truth to power when it most counts are not ignoring the slaughter of Alawites and Christians entirely. Just playing it down and wringing their hands in the manner of the horrified but blameless. For reportage less compromised I look as usual to alternative sources.
Defend Democracy Press – More than 700 massacred in Syria
7,000 Christians and Alawites have been “slaughtered” in Syria according to Greek Member of the European Parliament, Nikolas Farantouris, a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Security & Defense, who visited Damascus on 8-9 March.
SYRIZA MEP Nikolas Farantouris has returned from the Syrian capital, where he met with religious leaders, including Greek Orthodox Patriarch John X of Antioch and the Near East, and officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the new regime in Damascus.
His visit over the weekend coincided as the forces of the Turkish-backed Islamist regime horrifically massacred Alawites and Christians, including Greek Orthodox, with the death poll being placed at over 7,000.
“Reliable data indicate 7,000 Christians and Alawites slaughtered and unprecedented atrocities against civilians. Christian and other communities with a millennial presence in this region are at risk of extinction,” Farantouris said in a statement following his visit …
Full article here
Aaron Maté – Syria’s sectarian massacres [after] foreign-led dirty war
By arming the sectarian insurgency that now rules Syria, the US and its allies bear responsibility for the current slaughter of Alawite civilians and other minority groups.
Since Friday, fighters loyal to Syria’s new Al Qaeda offshoot government have massacred hundreds of people in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, the heartland of Syria’s Alawite population. Contacts in Syria have shared stories, corroborated by gruesome videos circulating on social media, of outright pogroms: entire families murdered in their homes; residents rounded up and executed in the streets; shops looted and burned to the ground; and thousands hiding in mountains and farmland from the marauding killers, many of them foreign fighters. According to the Washington Post, “witnesses said the gunmen who wrought carnage were indistinguishable from government forces.” This has resulted in massive displacement, with thousands of civilians seeking refuge anywhere they can, including a Russian military base, churches, and neighboring Lebanon.
The slaughter followed a deadly ambush against government troops near the coastal city of Jableh, which then sparked similar attacks in Syria’s northwest. Yet rather than target their armed foes, Sunni militants under the control of Syria’s new government unleashed a wave of sectarian violence against civilians belonging to minority groups, namely Alawites and Christians. The violence directed at ordinary Syrians stands in stark contrast to the new government’s response to invading Israeli forces, who have conquered large swaths of Syrian territory since Assad’s ouster in December. On that front, the new government has not fired a single shot …
Full article here
Vanessa Beeley – An Al Qaeda genocide in Syria and the West is silent
As the massacres of ethnic minorities continues in Syria, the so-called international community is not only silent but endorsing the Al Qaeda slaughter of men, women and children described as “regime remnants”. We all have a responsibility to do everything in our power to hold our regimes and media criminals accountable, they all have blood on their hands for legitimising the Jolani Takfiri project that is now shedding Syrian blood across the land.
Full podcast here (close to an hour I’m afraid)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to Queen Ursula’s sabre rattling.
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