THE ROAD MAP TO DEATH OF 'ARAB SPRING', BBC world news editor: Houla massacre coverage based on opposition propaganda, Exclusive: Arab states arm rebels as UN talks of Syrian civil war
Enrique Ferro
"These relate to the fragmentation of Arab countries: From Somalia, reduced to a leftover of the worldwide war; to Sudan, dismembered and preoccupied with feeding its people; and also Iraq, mired in the agony of protracted war; disintegrating Libya; Tunisia, sunk in its own brand of Islamic rule, and the other disoriented Maghreb countries; Egypt, as it slowly swaps sides; Syria, engrossed in a major national crisis and facing a fierce colonial onslaught; Yemen, where terrifying splits loom; Jordan, primed to explode from poverty and identity issues; and Lebanon, which is poised for a fresh civil war."
"Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have acquired their own agendas too. And they are poised to engage fully in the ongoing war in Syria."
"They are also stepping up the media war: not only by denying their adversaries any platform and acquiring control of as many Arab media outlets as possible, but also extending their influence to media in the wider region and beyond – given the availability of pundits willing to be hired as cheerleaders."
"They have worked hard to take Palestine off the agenda and turn Iran into the adversary and enemy, with the aid of forces whose ideological and religious outlooks make them see Iran as a genuine menace to many, and the principal threat to the current rulers of the states of the Arabian Peninsula."
http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/gulf-states-and-turkey-going-all-out-against-syria
SEE AS WELL:
BBC world news editor: Houla massacre coverage based on opposition propaganda,
15 June 2012
As quietly as possible, BBC world news editor Jon Williams has admitted that the coverage of last month’s Houla massacre in Syria by the world’s media and his own employers was a compendium of lies.
Datelined 16:23, June 7, Williams chose a personal blog to make a series of fairly frank statements explaining that there was no evidence whatsoever to identify either the Syrian Army or Alawite militias as the perpetrators of the May 25 massacre of 100 people.
By implication, Williams also suggests strongly that such allegations are the product of the propaganda department of the Sunni insurgents seeking to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
After preparatory statements of self-justification noting the “complexity of the situation on the ground in Syria, and the need to try to separate fact from fiction,” and Syria’s long “history of rumours passing for fact,” Williams writes:
“In the aftermath of the massacre at Houla last month, initial reports said some of the 49 children and 34 women killed had their throats cut. In Damascus, Western officials told me the subsequent investigation revealed none of those found dead had been killed in such a brutal manner. Moreover, while Syrian forces had shelled the area shortly before the massacre, the details of exactly who carried out the attacks, how and why were still unclear.”
For this reason, he concludes somewhat belatedly, “In such circumstances, it’s more important than ever that we report what we don’t know, not merely what we do.”
“In Houla, and now in Qubair, the finger has been pointed at the Shabiha, pro-government militia. But tragic death toll aside, the facts are few: it’s not clear who ordered the killings—or why.”
No trace of such a restrained approach can be found at the time on the BBC, or most anywhere else.
Instead the BBC offered itself as a sounding board for the statements of feigned outrage emanating from London, Washington and the United Nations headquarters—all blaming the atrocity on either the Syrian Army or Shabiha militias acting under their protection.
Typical was the May 28 report, “Syria Houla massacre: Survivors recount horror”, in which unidentified “Survivors of the massacre ... have told the BBC of their shock and fear as regime forces entered their homes and killed their families.” Nowhere was the question even posed that in such a conflict these alleged witnesses could be politically aligned with the opposition and acting under its instruction.
Only now does Williams state:
“Given the difficulties of reporting inside Syria, video filed by the opposition on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube may provide some insight into the story on the ground. But stories are never black and white—often shades of grey. Those opposed to President Assad have an agenda. One senior Western official went as far as to describe their YouTube communications strategy as ‘brilliant’. But he also likened it to so-called ‘psy-ops’, brainwashing techniques used by the US and other military to convince people of things that may not necessarily be true.”
Williams is in a position to know of what he speaks.
On May 27, the BBC ran a report on Houla under a photo purporting to show “the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial.”
In reality this was an example of opposition propaganda that was anything but “brilliant”. The photograph of dozens of shrouded corpses was actually taken by Marco di Lauro in Iraq on March 27, 2003 and was of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.
Di Lauro commented, “What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever… Someone is using someone else’s picture for propaganda on purpose.”
The BBC again acted as a vehicle for such propaganda, despite knowing that the photo had been supplied by an “activist” and that it could not be independently verified.
Williams concludes with the advice to his colleagues: “A healthy scepticism is one of the essential qualities of any journalist—never more so than in reporting conflict. The stakes are high—all may not always be as it seems.”
Given its track record, the appeal to exercise a healthy skepticism should more correctly be directed towards the BBC’s readers and viewers—and towards the entire official media apparatus.
It may well be the case that Williams’ mea culpa is motivated by a personal concern at the role he and his colleagues are being asked to play as mouthpieces for the campaign for regime change in Syria. But with his comments buried away on his blog, elsewhere on the BBC everything proceeds according to script.
The BBC’s coverage of the alleged June 6 massacre in the village of Qubair once again features uncritical coverage of allegations by the opposition that it was the work of Shabiha militias that were being protected by Syrian troops. BBC correspondent Paul Danahar, accompanying UN monitors, writes of buildings gutted and burnt and states that it is “unclear” what happened to the bodies of dozens of reported victims. He writes of a house “gutted by fire,” the “smell of burnt flesh,” blood and pieces of flesh. He writes that “butchering the people did not satisfy the blood lust of the attackers. They shot the livestock too.”
This is accompanied by a picture of a dead donkey, but aside from this there is absolutely nothing of substance to indicate what happened in the village.
And at one point, Danahar tweets: “A man called Ahmed has come up from the village who says he witnessed the killings. He has says dozens were killed… He has a badly bruised face but his story is conflicted & the UN say they are not sure he’s honest as they think he followed the convoy” (emphasis added).
This does not stop Danahar from concluding, from tracks supposedly made by military vehicles, that “attempts to cover up the details of the atrocity are calculated & clear.”
So much for healthy scepticism!
It must also be pointed out that the BBC has not written a word regarding the June 7 report by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the Free Syrian Army carried out the Houla massacre, according to interviews with local residents by opposition forces opposed to the Western-backed militia.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jun2012/bbcs-j15.shtml
Exclusive: Arab states arm rebels as UN talks of Syrian civil war
Saudi Arabia and Qatar 'supplying weapons' to anti-Assad forces, while fears mount for civilians
Justin Vela Istanbul Wednesday 13 June 2012
Syrian rebels are being armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, The Independent has learnt, in a development that threatens to inflame a regional power struggle provoked by the 15-month-old uprising against the Assad regime.
Rebel fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have received weapons from the two Gulf countries, which were transported into Syria via Turkey with the implicit support of the country's intelligence agency, MIT, according to a Western diplomat in Ankara. Opposition fighters in Syria have hitherto been handicapped by a reliance on an old and inadequate arsenal, while the regime in Damascus has been able to rely on a supply of arms from Russia and Iran. Moscow is arming Syria with attack helicopters, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, claimed yesterday. "We are concerned by the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria, which will escalate the conflict quite dramatically," she told a conference in Washington.
Since the start of the uprising, anti-regime activists have only smuggled small quantities of weapons, purchased on the black market, from Hatay in southern Turkey into Syria's Idlib province.
However, three weeks ago, members of the loose assortment of rebel groups that comprises the FSA said they had received multiple shipments of arms including Kalashnikov assault rifles, BKC machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank weaponry from Gulf countries and that Turkey was assisting in the delivery of the weapons.
"The Turkish government helped us to be armed," said one member of the FSA living in the Turkey-Syria border area. He claimed that the weapons had arrived at a Turkish port via ship and were then driven to the border without interference from Turkish authorities.
Saudi officials have in the past made clear their feeling that the rebels should be armed, with Saudi King Abdullah saying dialogue was "futile".
An Ankara-based Western diplomat, who spoke on a condition of anonymity, confirmed that the delivery of "light weapons" to the rebels was a "recent development", one that involved unmarked trucks transporting the weapons to the border for rebel groups. "There are arms coming in with the knowledge of the Turks," he said. The Syrian National Council (SNC), the main umbrella organisation of groups opposed to the regime, vetted the consignment.
The SNC is seen as having lost nearly all of its legitimacy with Syrian activists inside the country after failing to unite the fractured opposition. Yet, it appears that Turkey insisted the SNC vouch for the specific FSA groups that would receive the weapons before allowing the arms to cross the border.
"Officially, they are not going to admit it," the diplomat said. However, the SNC are "their guys", he said, referring to MIT. The vetting process was aimed at preventing the weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. Yet, the diplomat voiced concerns that, in practice, the weapons have only been delivered to rebels sympathetic to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, the dominant group within the SNC. "Only Muslim Brother groups are getting weapons," he said. Activists along the border not affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood said they had not heard of the weapons being delivered until just a few days ago
However, the true strength of the Muslim Brotherhood inside Syria is still debated. The diplomat added that the SNC was "finished" due to pervasive in-fighting and that the rebels – who have become the dominant force in the revolution – "might grow a beard" to attract the attention of wealthy religious benefactors for a conflict he characterised as a "civil war".
Saudi and Qatari officials did not return requests for comment. At a "friends of Syria" conference in Tunisia in February, the Saudi delegation walked away from proceedings, warning that firmer action was needed. Before leaving, the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, described the arming of the Syrian rebels as "an excellent idea".
A Turkish official said: "Turkey is not providing arms to anybody, nor sending armed elements to any neighbouring country, including Syria." He also reiterated that Western countries were still only providing "non-lethal" aid.
While it has hosted members of the FSA in refugee camps in Hatay, Turkey has been hesitant to directly involve itself in the conflict. However, following several cross-border shootings and reports that the regime is supporting Kurdish militants who have engaged in a 30-year conflict with Turkey, the country is changing course, said Andrew Tabler, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
"Assad did not implement the Annan plan at all, that's the biggest thing," he said. "Turkey can see exactly the hurricane that is gathering."
Mr Tabler said videos uploaded to the internet showed more regime tanks were being destroyed, but cautioned that the weapons would not decisively turn the tide of the conflict. "These weapons are helping harass the regime forces, but these alone are not enough to bring down the regime," he said.
A rebel officer said their forces now control much of Bab al-Hawa, a Syrian town with a border gate to Turkey, and that having received the weapons and communications equipment, were preparing for an offensive in the coming days.
Another look at Tripoli's Abu Salim trauma hospital. The world was riveted by the carnage there for one day (August 26), then apparently woke up from the bad...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hjJYQ4BW4k&feature=channel&list=UL
The “little spin” on helicopters and the big lie on the “Arab spring”
Jun 15, 2012 15:05 Moscow Time |
Photo: EPA |
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The events in the Middle East are gradually forming a pattern that less and less suits the vision of the “Arab spring” propagated by American media and the media of the EU countries. Attacks against police, the headquarters of trade unions and political parties in Tunisia; the parliamentary crisis in Egypt, where the Islamist-dominated national assembly has been declared dissolved by the Constitutional Court; continuing ugly violence in Libya and now Syria – all of these events don’t fit the “democratization” pattern suggested by the mainstream Western media since the start of the Arab spring in early 2011.
The problem is, however, that the Western leaders refuse to recognize their own mistakes, continuing to present the developments in the region as “momentous change” for the better and urging Russia “to find its place on the right side of history,” i.e. on the side of Arab “revolutionaries.” There was a supreme irony in the fact that the arts’ exhibition that provoked the recent Islamist riots in Tunisia was named by its pro-Western organizers “The Spring of Arts” in a clear evocation of the “Arab spring.” There was also supreme irony in the fact that, having destroyed the exhibition, Tunisian Islamists are now planning to further constrain artistic freedom by a special law on protection of sanctity, thus putting ABSENCE of freedom in a legal framework, so much cherished in the West. Again ironically, the police trying to quell the anti-artistic riots used the law adopted in the times of the former “dictator” Ben Ali, now denounced in the West in the same way as Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Ghaddafi. Meanwhile, the primary enemies of tolerant attitude to arts were “the people on the right side of history,” i.e. the “revolutionary” minister of culture and Ennahda, the Islamist party that dominates Tunisian parliament since the first post-Ben Ali elections, applauded by the West. Both the minister and the parliament denounced the artists, putting the main responsibility for violence on them.
“We often hear from our Western partners that we should put ourselves on the right side of history, but when hearing that one often gets an impression that this kind of advice comes from the people who have fallen out of history, who simply forget what they were saying a few months ago,” Russian deputy minister of foreign affairs Mikhail Bogdanov said in an interview to RIA Novosti news agency. “Today these Western partners of ours are on one side of history, tomorrow – on another one. They change affiliations on a daily basis. I think that our Arab friends and partners are getting more and more conscious of the fact that we simply don’t betray our old partners with whom we had been building relations for years.”
It is enough to remember the U-turn in the American policy of supporting Egypt’s Mubarak to illustrate the Russian deputy minister’s point. After decades of open support for Egypt’s strongman, the American state department suddenly became its staunchest critic, currently showing absolutely no compassion for the ailing Mubarak, sentenced to life in prison and currently slowly dying in custody. All of this – against the background of troubling political developments in Egypt, which prove that real democratization is a much more complicated process than the simplified American vision of it, usually reduced to a Hollywood style conflict of “everything bad” (a dictator) against “everything good” (freethinking people).
Again ironically, the latest spat between the U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov over the presumed Russian military supplies to the Syrian regime fits the same pattern. As it transpired, Mrs. Clinton preferred simplification (some would say a blatant lie) when talking about supplies of Russian helicopter gunships to the Syrian regime. In fact, the United States had to correct its diplomat number one, acknowledging that these were not supplies, but repairs and adding a lot more interesting details to Mrs. Clinton’s imprudent statement.
“She put a little spin on it to put the Russians in a difficult position,” the New York Times quotes “a senior Defense Department official” as saying. A “spin” in plain language is a half-truth, which in modern media has a tendency to become a lie, since, once put in context, it distorts the bigger picture. In the case of the current US policy on the Middle East, the “little spin” about helicopters was just a little detail of a bigger lie – that of “democratic US supporting the democratic Arab spring.”
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_06_15/78223033/
This is the sectarian war by fanatics bound to exterminate the "heretics" and that the West supports. SHAME!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/06/blast-damages-major-shiite-shrine-in-syria.html