My latest trip to Syria was spent in Aleppo and Damascus. During my time in East Aleppo I was struck by the hive of activity, pockets of industry, rebuilding the stricken neighborhoods, stone by stone. Despite lack of electricity and water, in each street and alleyway, the sound of welders and the beat of hammers, rang out. The sparks from […]
The Syria Times e-newspaper is indeed honored to republish H.E. President Bashar Al-Assad‘s landmark address to the Syrian journalists at Journalists Union 4th Conference :Al-Umawyeen Conference Palace, Damascus: August 15, 2006 . Ladies and gentlemen members of the fourth general conference of the Journalists Union, Ladies and gentlemen, It gives me pleasure to meet you at the opening of the proceedings […]
In the eyes of profiteers, there’s money to be made from debt, especially from the poor. Privatisation of the court bailiff system is like privatising parking enforcement – and look where that led – scandal after scandal. The civilianisation of law enforcement has always proved to be much worse than when managed by government with civilian scrutiny. This, like so many other privatisation projects this will end in failure with the over-stretched citizenry shouldering the burden of government incompetence and the poor exploited even further.
There is a debate taking place within our movement on whether EU migrants to the UK are responsible for a cut in wages and terms and conditions in our country. There have been numerous academic studies that have found scant evidence for this assumption. Yet the false perception persists, promoted to a large extent by our right-wing media and UKIP’s […]
Over the past two years, enlightening information has been revealed that thoroughly and unequivocally debunks the “humanitarianism” of the White Helmets in Syria, sometimes referred to as the Syrian Civil Defense. Since they were founded in 2013, much of Western media has sought to elevate the White Helmets as the “bravest” and most heroic of Syrians. They have been the […]
The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media. This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and […]
These past six months I have been getting to know the inter-media. They’re not formally part of mainstream, and they’re not very social, so I call them inter-media. They are like the maintenance team for the mainstream. To explain this, I’ll first say how I came to meet them. The context of these encounters is writing posts on Syria. Doing so, I rely entirely […]
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’.
Corbyn only got chosen as it was his turn. The left in the Labour Party were a rump consisting of about dozen or so MPs, and everyone else had had a go. He never wanted to be PM. He never chased office. He has the lowest expenses returns of any MP. He’s been consistent in his views throughout his life, voting according to his principles.
