President Trump’s announcement this week to end the CIA’s covert arming of militants in Syria is an admission of defeat. The US has lost its six-year war for regime change in the Arab country. It’s time to wrap it up. It’s not over yet, of course. It remains to be seen if Trump’s decision can in fact be implemented. Can the CIA be reined […]
In the current environment, to express even a mildly dissenting opinion, point out basic but unwelcome facts such as the presence of significant public support for the government in Syria, or highlight the frequently brutal acts of rebel groups, has seen many people ridiculed and attacked on social media. These attacks are rarely, if ever, reasoned critiques of opposing views; instead they frequently descend into personal, often hysterical, insults and baseless, vitriolic allegations.
When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called themselves socialists. I liked them. One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter. “Arabs”, they said, “nomads”. The words were almost spat out. […]
“The US is setting up its military bases in the territories that were liberated from Daesh by our fighters during the fight against terrorism,” ~ Senior Representative of the US armed, proxy, SDF forces. With very little fanfare from the western media, the US is quietly creating a hostile military footprint inside Syria. By establishing a chain of airbases, military outposts and missile bases inside Syria, the US […]
This fetishization of the ‘British Soldier’, emblem of the armed forces as a whole, has become pathological in its intensity in parallel with our foreign military interventions being prosecuted in an era of unprecedented political mendacity. The more profound the corruption, the greater the need for propaganda and, importantly, the cruder it needs to be as the most skilled propagandist of them all, Joseph Goebels, well understood when he declaimed that propaganda ‘must always be essentially simple and repetitious’ and must ‘appeal to the emotions and instinct, never the intellect.’ ‘Hero’, ‘Help For Heroes’, ‘our heroes overseas’, ‘our courageous men and women protecting our freedoms’, ‘protecting us’, ‘doing it for us’… ‘for us’, ‘for us’, for us’.
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has now made a public statement rejecting calls from Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) and the wider Palestinian solidarity movement to cancel the band’s Tel Aviv concert. Disappointingly, it’s a piece riddled with liberal evasions, barbed charges, and unfounded assumptions about those making the case for a boycott. Here’s Yorke’s full comments on the issue, as reported at Rolling Stone: I’ll […]
Dr Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to Syrian President, Bashar Al Assad Do you remember the main objective that was announced by ISIS in Syria and Iraq? Was it not the creation of an ISIS state in the region between Syria and Iraq? Wasn’t this the main purpose of its presence in Anbar, Mosul, Raqqa and Deir, along the Iraqi-Syrian […]
The United States’ ability to maintain its influence over the rest of the world has been slowly diminishing. Since the petrodollar was established in 1971, U.S. currency has monopolized international trade through oil deals with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and continuous military interventions. There is, however, growing opposition to the American standard, and it gained more support recently when several […]
The mainstream media is so hostile to challenges to its groupthinks that famed journalist Seymour Hersh had to take his take-down of President Trump’s April 6 attack on Syria to Germany, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Paradoxically, over the past decade, as social media has created a more democratic platform for information dissemination, the corporate media has grown ever more fearful of a truly independent figure like Hersh. The potential reach of his stories could now be enormously magnified by social media. As a result, he has been increasingly marginalised and his work denigrated. By denying him the credibility of a “respectable” mainstream platform, he can be dismissed for the first time in his career as a crank and charlatan. A purveyor of fake news.
President Donald Trump ignored important intelligence reports when he decided to attack Syria after he saw pictures of dying children. Seymour M. Hersh investigated the case of the alleged Sarin gas attack.
The U.S. mainstream media’s near universal demonization of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin – along with similar hatred directed toward Iran and Hezbollah – has put the world on a path toward World War III.
