For the record, the below is a partial record of correspondence between Susan Dirgham, National Coordinator of 'Australians for Reconciliation in Syria', and Q&A, the Australian television program. Like most Australian media outlets, the ABC almost invariably presents Syria in a squewed, ahistoric manner that supports the continued and disastrous interference by the US, NATO and its allies in the region, maintaining war.

Questions to Q&A Panel; Monday 16 May 2016

How does it help Australia to ignore the voices of millions of 'ordinary' Syrians (Sunni, Shia, Catholic, Orthodox, atheist etc)  who share our truest values, and instead promote the claims of those who support a violent form of radical Islam?

How does it help our security and social harmony to be a member of the unholy alliance that has formed between radical Islamist groups in Syria and US neo-cons and their friends?   Such an alliance could lead to the deaths of millions of innocent people and the destruction of countries.

The basic question is, 

What will become of us as a nation if we hide from the truth and play dirty? 

Newly-discovered images of alleged BBC "napalm victim": In June 2014 a Netherlands resident contacted me, expressing anxiety about being recognised in a frame from 'Saving Syria's Children' which I had posted on Facebook. Although the woman was not among the group of alleged napalm/thermite victims in the frame in question, I subsequently recognised her in a You Tube video shot at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013, apparently in the guise of a victim of the same alleged events portrayed in Ian Pannell and Darren Conway's BBC reports. This is the latest report in Robert Stuart's extraordinary investigation into BBC war propaganda.

1. In June 2014 a Netherlands resident contacted me, expressing anxiety about being recognised in a frame from 'Saving Syria's Children' which I had posted on Facebook. Although the woman was not among the group of alleged napalm/thermite victims in the frame in question, I subsequently recognised her in a You Tube video shot at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013, apparently in the guise of a victim of the same alleged events portrayed in Ian Pannell and Darren Conway's BBC reports. I have written about this here and here.

A number of images currently viewable on the Facebook account of one of the woman's relatives would appear to make it plainer still that the person who contacted me is indeed the same person who appears in the You Tube footage of the aftermath of the alleged Aleppo incendiary bomb attack. Details here.

2) My attempts to secure documents relating to Saving Syria's Children from the BBC through a Freedom of Information request appear, somewhat inevitably, to have run aground.

Following a decision notice from the Information Commissioner's Office upholding the BBC 's rejection of my request, I had argued in an appeal to the First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber) that the evidence set out in my blog:

...clearly demonstrates that the BBC has committed the greatest betrayal of audience trust imaginable by a news broadcaster – the fabrication of an atrocity for the purposes of war propaganda. Such an egregious transgression is quite possibly unique in the history of broadcasting.

I further argued that Saving Syria’s Children and related BBC News reports had breached Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law”.

In response the Tribunal has issued a Case Management Note (3 May) observing that:

"Mr Stuart’s rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights may be capable of being litigated and remedy given to him if a Court finds there was a breach of those rights. The question of whether reports are genuine or fabricated may also be capable of being independently investigated."

However the Tribunal "is unable to grant Mr Stuart a remedy for what he says is a contravention of his rights under that Covenant" and directs that I must provide it with reasons why the information I have requested from the BBC was or is “not held for the purposes of journalism, art or literature”.

The deadline for submitting a response is 24 May.

3) A high quality copy of Saving Syria's Children is currently available on Vimeo. The section which forms the focus of my blog commences at 30:38. As BBC Worldwide has long since blocked all You Tube postings of the documentary, please consider downloading the Vimeo copy while it is available. This version is the highest quality I have seen to date and has already yielded a number of interesting new details, such as an apparent glimpse of the Dutch woman pictured above (see update here).

4) Further to my submission of shocking images of a staff member of UK registered charity Hand in Hand for Syria's "flagship medical facility", Atareb Hospital, Aleppo, posing with an array of weapons and munitions, an officer of the Charity Commission's Investigations Monitoring and Enforcement department has responded (12 April):

"I am currently considering the information that you have provided in order to determine what regulatory action, if any, is required. I confirm that I will provide a more detailed response once I have completed my assessment."

5) A reminder of the two sets of graphics highlighting some very startling inconsistencies in accounts of the alleged events of 26 August 2013 by BBC International Correspondent Ian Pannell and BBC 'Trust Me I'm A Doctor' presenter Dr Saleyha Ahsan and my recent presentation on Saving Syria's Children for From Stop War.

Robert Stuart
https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com

Migration is part of our collective history, but Europe’s political leaders are still failing completely to address widespread public concern over the flood of migrants now storming Europe’s borders. The consequences of these pressures will have profound impacts.

Unable to reach rational solutions beyond discussing how many each member state should be obliged to take, bribing African countries to take back their own citizens who don’t qualify as refugees and now paying Turkey to take back illegals bound for Greece, while taking a similar quota of Syrians from Turkey, are inadequate responses. Our leaders are moving into systemic chaos, where the Human Rights Act, has spawned a people-trafficking industry that is endangering our security and running rings around governments at taxpayers’ expense. It is not fit for purpose and needs reform. Without leaving the EU, the UK could suspend and redraw the act with our European partners, who all have much to gain from a more sensible approach.

In Britain, the Government, under Labour, first lost control of immigration and then tried to spin the idea that a large influx of people is vital to our interests. Despite attempts at reforms, the system is still failing. Legal migration in to the UK has hit record levels - up 40 per cent on 2014, according to the Office for National Statistics. Nearly 100,000 illegals were detected trying to enter the UK in 2015, while the EU is receiving thousands of illegal migrants a day – triple the rate last year.

The situation has been escalating for years, but after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand moral gesture to take in 800,000 ‘refugees’ a year in response to the photo of a drowned boy on a Turkish beach and then demand other EU states take their share, it has ignited the hopes of millions more to settle in Europe. Now barbed wire borders are being erected in the heart of Europe, destroying the ideal of free movement.

Described as refugees or just ‘migrants’, as though there has merely been some bureaucratic error in their status, the asylum lobby and much of the media are cheerleading the appeal for public sympathy as a tragic human interest story. But this terrorist infiltrated people-smuggling led invasion, facilitated by EU governments, presents a huge challenge from failing states with exploding populations and self-inflicted turf wars.

Generous policies in Sweden and Germany are enabling thousands of non-EU migrants and illegals to settle legally there and then move to other member states as internal EU migrants. Over 1.2 million have claimed asylum in 2015. Our politicians consistently ignore this back door impact.

Sweden has been receiving up to 2000 unaccompanied minors a week in late 2015, nearly a third of its migrant influx, who can then have their families flown in to join them. Most were males giving their age as 16 or 17 but receiving groups say many appear much older. According to Statistics Sweden, 50 per cent of refugees are not in work seven years after arriving in the country. Even after 15 years, 40 per cent are still on welfare without a job – a major drain on the country’s welfare system.

Refugee lobbyists say it is the moral duty of Western countries to absorb these migrants. Do the media and politicians seriously think that Europe can take in the populations of sub-Saharan Africa and beyond? When will the line be drawn? All UK parties are well aware of the mounting pressures on housing, schools and health services, but don’t like to talk about it. Or the 25-50 per cent of young people in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece who don’t have a job. So too, they should be aware of the Parliamentary report in 2008 that the large rise in legal immigration to the UK had virtually no net economic gain for the country. Nor do we need high immigration to counter a temporary rise in ageing populations. Ever more migrants also get old and then need support.

The Government talks about skilled immigrants Britain needs, but skilled immigrants account for only 20% of total non-EU immigrants in Britain and many actually do unskilled work when they get here.

Proposals to cap numbers will barely touch the scale of the true problem - a permanent population swelling so quickly by other immigration pathways, including a generous interpretation of family reunion from outside the EU that is adding to the pressures on our environment and food security.

Australia is often cited by UK politicians as a model immigration system, but its population just hit 24 million– 17 years earlier than expected. With net overseas migration contributing 53 per cent to total population growth, the population is now set to double every 50 years. This in an arid continent with only six per cent of the land able to grow crops.

Europe’s growing immigration crisis
In 1950, the countries that later constituted the EU-27 had a population of 370 million. By 2010 it topped 500 million - equivalent to absorbing the inhabitants of another present-day France and Britain combined. By January 2015 Eurostat figures show the population was 508.2 million - up 1.3 million from the previous year, with the majority of 1.1m a result of net legal immigration into the EU.

Add to this the rapidly growing number of illegals – with over 1.2 million detected in 2015 and many more entering undetected, according to the EU borders agency, Frontex.

Today, only Syria currently has an acute refugee crisis, but to avert mounting chaos and retain the fabric of the EU, we have to stop the lure of a gateway to permanent citizenship to millions. People in Europe might be more reassured if irregular migrants eligible for asylum were offered temporary support and then returned to their countries when the crisis resolved. Many of those who claimed asylum from countries like Somalia and Iraq go back for extended holidays, but the claims for asylum continue. Iraqi Airways now operates four flights a week from the UK to facilitate demand for vacations back home. Yet Iraqis are in the top ten asylum applications to the UK in 2015,

Also in the list are Nigeria – touted as Africa’s fasted growing economy and other democratic countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even Albania – now 25 years since it became a European democracy. Eritrea is top of the list, supposedly linked to harsh national service. What is going on? International pressure should sort this out, not expect resettlement.

Part of the problem is that EU countries don’t have repatriation agreements with many countries involved, but this could be remedied quite simply, as just about all the sender countries in Africa and many in Asia are recipients of generous Western aid. We need to use this leverage. Several countries, like Senegal, condone exporting people in the hope they will reach Europe, find work and send back remittances.

Global leaders need to be focused on real solutions and more effective regional aid in all these fragile states as well as engaging more constructively with Russia, Iran and countries in the region to bring about positive outcomes. You can help far more people cost effectively in nearby protected areas than import millions into high-cost West European countries. Sweden is now having to spend its foreign aid budget on trying to deal with new migrant arrivals.

The current level of UK immigration and increasing birth rates will require building the equivalent of a new Manchester every year. It is little wonder we have a housing crisis. How can we possibly accommodate this and claim it is sustainable?

In 1998, the Office for National Statistics predicted that the UK population would rise to 65m by 2051. We’re already there! Now they say it could reach 80 million by 2040, mostly as a result of immigration.

David Cameron promises a review of welfare benefits for EU migrants but equally, we need to look at the pull factors for illegals – many openly piling up in Calais attempting to cross to the UK. The EU Commission says it is the responsibility of each Member State to set the rules for welfare support.

We need urgent action to address these issues and clear shared rules that would be strict enough to discourage ineligible people from attempting dangerous journeys. The growing cost to communities of accommodating large-scale inflows of people, in a now crowded world, raises many challenging questions. This is not a left or right issue or racist. It is about global social and environmental sustainability.

Doctors without Borders is well regarded and influential. It is appreciated that many good people work for and support MSF/Doctors Without Borders. The need has arisen, however, to inquire about Doctors without Borders' independence and the consequences of its work in Syria. An objective look is likely to reveal that while Doctors without Borders is helping in some areas, it is causing harm in others.

Open Letter to MSF/Doctors without Borders

by Rick Sterling / May 4th, 2016

Dear MSF International President Dr. Joanne Liu,

Your organization is well regarded and influential.  I appreciate that many good people work for and support MSF/Doctors Without Borders.  However, I need to inquire about your independence and the consequences of your work in Syria. I believe an objective look will reveal that while you are helping in some areas, you are causing harm in others.

Following are questions on this important issue:

(1) As you know, Aleppo is a large city with the government forces holding western Aleppo while other parts of the city are dominated by armed opposition groups, primarily Nusra/Al Qaeda.  About 1.5 to 2 million people live in the government areas with about 200 to 250 thousand in the areas controlled by armed opposition. So 80-90 % of the population is in government-controlled areas. This is rarely mentioned but seems important.  Given this fact, is it true that you provide aid and support only to the opposition held areas?

(2) On April 21 the Western and Gulf backed “High Negotiations Committee” announced they were quitting the Geneva negotiations. The next day, hundreds of mortars and bombs started being launched into western Aleppo from the zones controlled by Nusra and other terrorist groups.  These bombs are powerful, wounding and killing indiscriminately. Syrian journalist Edward Dark noted that western media and groups such as MSF were silent on this even though hospitals were being hit, dozens of children and civilians killed. On twitter he reported day by day …..

— West Aleppo is simply being obliterated by rebel shelling. A city of 2 million people is being butchered.

— Carnage and devastation as ‘moderate rebel’ bombs fall on west Aleppo like rain.

— Terrorist rebel bombs are still falling like rain on west Aleppo. 15 people murdered at a mosque in Bab Faraj after Friday prayers.

— This is the hospital where my son was born. Dabeet Hospital in W.Aleppo completely destroyed by rebel shelling.

Has MSF denounced these killings and attacks on hospitals in western Aleppo?

(3) The unconcern about indiscriminate attacks and killing in government-held areas of Aleppo has also been denounced by Syrian-Canadian physician Dr. Nabil Antaki. He has recently written:

With regards to recent events in Aleppo, I state very clearly that the mainstream media are lying by omission… All of us here in Aleppo are disgusted by their lack of impartiality and objectivity. They only talk about the loss of life in east of Aleppo which is entirely controlled by Al Nusra…. These are their ‘moderate rebels’ …This same media remains silent on the daily losses and suffering endured in the Western areas of Aleppo living under the rain of mortar fire from these terrorist factions. This media never mentions the continuous bombardment and the carnage we have witnessed in western Aleppo where every single sector has been targeted. On a daily basis we see dozens of people murdered….. For three days now, these media outlets have been accusing the “Assad regime” of bombing an MSF hospital to the east of Aleppo and of killing the last pediatrician in the city. This demonstrates that, for these media, the only priority is this pocket of the city where terrorists are embedded. The three quarters of Aleppo under Syrian government control, where numerous pediatricians are practicing, is of no consequence.

Dr. Liu, will you meet with Dr. Antaki?  Perhaps he could give you a tour and confirm to you what he says. He is a well known and respected doctor in Aleppo and fellow Canadian citizen.

(4) There are many discrepancies in reports about the April 27 attack on Al Quds Hospital. MSF Middle East Operations Manager Pablo Marco, interviewed the next day on CNN and PBS Newshour, said “there were two barrel bombs that fell close to the hospital …. then the third barrel bomb fell in the entrance of the hospital”. Barrel bombs are only delivered by helicopters. In contrast, your press release the same day says “the hospital was destroyed by at least one airstrike which directly hit the building, reducing it to rubble.” A CBC report continued this version, claiming “An MSF-supported hospital in the northern Syria city of Aleppo is now a pile of rubble. Airstrikes brought down the building on Wednesday.” The hospital photograph indicates it is not a “pile of rubble” and it’s unclear where the damage is. The sandbag reinforcement and damaged car in front indicate it might have been a battle scene but the rest is unclear.  Which story is correct and accurate?

The number of fatalities has varied from initial death counts of 14 to later reports of over 50. How are these numbers verified?

(5) MSF representatives Pablo Marco and Muskilda Zancada suggest this was a deliberate and intentional attack on the hospital.  In an interview Ms. Zancada says “Al Quds Hospital has been functional for more than 4 years so it was basically impossible that this information was not known… The facts are pointing to this being a deliberate attack.” In contrast with Ms. Zancada’s assertions, most Aleppans have never heard of “Al Quds Hospital”. The “hospital” did not exist before the conflict and the photo shows an unidentified apartment building.  Is it accurate to call this facility a “hospital”?  Mr. Marco claimed that MSF supported personnel visited the hospital every other week so there must be many reports, documents and photos confirming whether it was a 34 bed hospital. Otherwise, it seems fair to say this was actually a medical clinic in the ground floor of an unmarked and largely abandoned apartment building.

(6) Can Mr. Marco or Ms. Zancada please identify the damage inflicted by the airstrike (or barrel bomb) at Al Quds Hospital on April 27?  The Russian Ministry of Defense has released a photograph indicating the building had similar damage in October 2015.

(7) As you know, Nusra/Al Qaeda is considered ‘terrorist’ by all parties including the US, French, and Canadian governments.  Does the Al Quds Hospital primarily or significantly serve Al Qaeda and/or other terrorist fighters? If so, are your supporters aware they are assisting fighters who launched bombs attacking western Aleppo as shown here and previously destroyed the once prized Al Kindi Hospital with a huge truck bomb as shown here? I appreciate you have a commitment to the hippocratic oath but given the widespread medical needs, why are you prioritizing assistance to Nusra/Al Qaeda?

(8) Many videos from Al Quds Hospital feature members of the “White Helmets”.  Are you aware the White Helmets was established by the US and UK with initial training in Turkey by a UK military contractor?  Are you aware the organization is not independent or neutral and has explicitly called for western intervention in Syria? The origins of the “White Helmets” is documented here . There is an online petition denouncing this clever but cynical marketing campaign here.

(9) Can you you please compare and contrast the videos showing attacks at MSF- supported Al Quds Hospital with videos showing attacks in western Aleppo? The videos from Al Quds Hospital are here and here with an animated one here. The attacks in western Aleppo including an attack on Al Dabeet Hospital are here, here and here. Do you see the difference between videos from armed opposition area vs. those from western Aleppo? Some look authentic and some look possibly staged.

(10) We know that many Western and Gulf countries are providing funds to help the armed opposition in Syria.  For example in 2012 the Canadian government said: “The reason the $2 million was being channeled through Canadian Relief for Syria instead of the UN or International Committee of the Red Cross was because it was intended for Syrian opposition groups and was not humanitarian aid.” Is MSF directly or indirectly receiving grants or funds from the Canadian, French or US governments to serve Syrian opposition groups?

(11) There has been a wave of media coverage of Al Quds Hospital and the death of Dr. Moaz (sometimes spelled Maaz). Some of the reports are clearly intended to tug at the heart and natural sympathy of people. Unfortunately propagandists can be effective in this area as they seek to manipulate public opinion. There are many examples with the Kuwaiti babies and incubators being one of the most famous frauds as it successfully won public support for Gulf War 1. Both Amnesty International and the International Red Crescent were (unwittingly) part of the fraud. My point is this: Some of the Al Quds Hospital stories are questionable and may be fraudulent.

For example, the letter from a fellow physician acclaiming Dr Moaz was published by “The Syria Campaign” which is the marketing creator of the “White Helmets”. The letter is supposedly from a fellow doctor who might or might not be real. They use a false name yet claim he “manages the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo”. Another questionable piece of ‘evidence’ of the death of Dr. Moaz is the video supposedly taken just before the building was hit by missile or bomb. It’s curious that the building would be destroyed and the CCTV cameras (several of them) survive and be ready for editing. Is this real or is it just another example of the “moderate rebel’ social media propaganda?

(12) Biased media coverage on Syria serves to demonize the Assad government and prolong the conflict. It has made it easier for foreign aggressors to continue funding the proxy armies such as Nusra/Al Qaeda.  There is danger of vastly increased conflict and bloodshed if foreign governments or NATO intervene directly. In fact, calls for greater aggression are increasing in the wake of publicity around the attack at Al Quds Hospital.  Are you aware that the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia seemed to threaten an escalation of the conflict as he said “The world is not going to allow them to get away with this.”?

Dr. Liu, we agree with your insistence that medical personnel and facilities should not be attacked. That is in keeping with the Geneva Conventions on War.  There are other international laws, including laws against aggression and the right of self-defense.  It is clear that the Syrian government is being attacked by proxy armies funded by a coalition of foreign governments in violation of international law and the UN Charter.

Will you investigate whether the criticisms expressed in this letter are accurate and take appropriate action? It seems that current MSF actions and statements on Syria are biased and effectively serving the coalition of governments waging war on Syria in violation of international law.  The bias and propaganda sustain the conflict and threaten to make it even worse.

Best regards,

Rick Sterling

Rick Sterling is a retired engineer and co-founder of Syria Solidarity Movement. He can be emailed at: rsterling1@gmail.com. Read other articles by Rick.

This article was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2016 at 7:40pm and is filed under Media, Propaganda, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Terrorism (state and retail).

This article also published (4/5/16) on the Free Syrian Press. See also: The shameful traitors of Hamas show once again to be a bullhorn on the payroll of Erdogan-Saudis (2/5/16) | Syrian Free Press, Syrian Army, Palestinian resistance forces launch operations to recapture al-Yarmouk camp (17/4/16) | Syrian Free Press - previously published by the FARS News Agency.

[...]The evidence presented here is only the tip of the iceberg. No doubt that some Palestinians, like some traitorous Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese, joined the destabilization scheme, but when we get down to the nitty gritty, like most Syrians, most of Syria’s Palestinian citizens back the Syrian Arab Republic, the only Arab nation that has given them a home, supported their righteous cause and treated them as equals. It is shameful beyond shameful that these truths and more were not only ignored but deceptively covered up by “Palestine Solidarity Movement” activists to push a cookie-cutter propaganda line that meshed with the increasingly toothless nature of “solidarity” speak and praxis, not to mention the worldview of their Jewish and Khaleeji “colleagues”. [...] This publication is an extract only from the original article by Jonahtan Azaziah, published 18 April, 2016 at "Meet The Pro-Syria Palestinians That Electronic “Intifada” Will Never Tell You About."

Notable Palestinian supporters of the Syrian Government [Candobetter editorial heading]

[...]
~ Anwar Hadi, the spokesman of the PLO, who said from day one of the ungodly crisis in Yarmouk that the blame lies squarely at the feet of the Takfiri rebels, who entered the once-vibrant Syrian-Palestinian camp in massive numbers and committed massacres, chased out civilians and looted homes along with businesses. Electronic “Intifada” and company wrote numerous articles attacking the Syrian government for the humanitarian disaster, like Jabhat al-Nusra, the FSA and ISIS were/are mere daydream-constructs “the regime” and its “Shabiha” brought forth from thin air.

~ The Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), the Syrian Arab Army’s Palestinian branch, which has fought on numerous fronts throughout Syria and offered countless martyrs in the struggle against Daesh and its ideological counterparts.

~ Fatah al-Intifada, a Palestinian Resistance group which has been ultra-active in the ongoing fight to liberate Yarmouk. Many volunteers, like Tayseer Mousa and Waleed Suleiman, left their homes in the Damascus countryside city of Jaramana to defend their brethren. Portraits of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah can be found all over their offices.

~ Liwa Al-Quds, the third most powerful Syrian military force after the Syrian Arab Army and the Hizbullah-trained NDF according to Al-Masdar News. Liwa Al-Quds has been a tremendously key part of the battle for the liberation of Aleppo, particularly the camps of Handarat and Nayrab.

~ The PFLP-GC, led by the indefatigable Ahmad Jibril and known for their strong support of the democratically elected government in Damascus, these warriors have also been fighting in multiple arenas, from the capital to Aleppo to Latakia and elsewhere. They played an important role in the historic liberation of the besieged Shi’a towns Nubl and Al-Zahra, showing that there is a united Syrian-Palestinian-Lebanese-Iraqi-Iranian, Sunni-Shi’a, Muslim-Christian front against the usurping Zionist regime’s Wahhabi vassals.

~ Hizbullah moujahid Ali Fawzi Taha ( Haydar al-Hajj Jawad) from Bourj el-Barajneh. Born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, Ali was martyred during the liberation of the strategic, ancient city of Al-Quryatayn. He participated in many victories across Syria, including game-changers like Al-Qusayr and Al-Qalamoun. Considering he was a member of the Lebanese Islamic Resistance, the only Arab force to ever drive ‘Israel’ out from sovereign Arab lands, is it not significantly newsworthy that this hero had a Palestinian background?! If only he had been a BDS activist or an Amnesty International “researcher”, then Electronic “Intifada” would’ve assuredly profiled him.

~ Muhammad Rafeh, a beloved Palestinian-Syrian actor from the popular TV show Bab al-Hara and outspoken supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Muhammad had lost family members a year before in the Zionist entity’s massacre of protesters in the occupied Golan Heights on Naksa Day and was also known for his strong stance against the ‘Israeli’ enemy. The FSA kidnapped Muhammad and slaughtered him for standing with the Syrian government; very “revolutionary”, wouldn’t you say?

~ Archbishop Atallah Hanna, Palestine’s highest-ranking Orthodox Christian authority and a fiery, BLISTERING vocal backer of the Syrian Arab Republic. Not only has Theodosios of Sebastia spoken in no uncertain terms about the aggression against Syria being a Zionist plot, but he’s also defended Islam and the importance of Muslim-Christian unity in the face of Takfirism at length. The Archbishop is a true Arab hero and is undoubtedly on the path to sainthood.

~ Samer al-Issawi, Palestine’s most epic hunger striker (277 days) and a living legend in every sense of the phrase; the man’s will is of such an unbreakable nature that it will forever echo in history and forever haunt the Zionist enemy. Samer, whose fam goes way back with both the PFLP and the DFLP, supports the Syrian Arab Republic and stands firmly against the war on this sovereign nation. His steadfast anti-Imperialism only adds to his larger-than-life character. Yet, apart from PFLP and DFLP affiliated media, this fact remains largely unknown.

~ Palestinians across occupied Falasteen, not to mention Syrians throughout the Golan Heights, have protested in full support of the Syrian Arab Republic and Hizbullah on too many occasions to make mention of here. And we’re not talking about minuscule rallies but bright, rowdy, militant, BIG demonstrations with seas of Syrian Arab Republic flags waving and portraits of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad standing tall. Not even one of these events was covered by “Palestine Solidarity Movement” mainstreamers.[...]

[...] Simply put, to defend Palestine today is to defend Syria and vice versa, for as Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah declared years ago, the Syrian Arab Republic is the backbone of the Mouqawamah and only a fool or a traitor would sit idly by as his backbone is being broken. So what category do the “activists” of the “Palestine Solidarity Movement” fall under? Fools? Traitors? Or a lil’ bit of both?

Australian Politics Professor Tim Anderson recently wrote a book entitled, The Dirty war on Syria. In the embedded video, he describes the alarming ignorance of Australians generally about why the West is so down on Syria. This is a fascinating, humane and intelligent interview with Syrian TV. Among the many subjects covered are how the Australian media treats Anderson, how he became interested in the war in Syria, interpreting the propaganda war against Syria, and the future of Syria.

Tuesday's Syrian election was a vote of confidence by the Syrian people in their government. 5,085,444 voters cast their ballots out of a possible 8,834,994 eligible voters. The overall participation rate of 58% (virtually identical to Canada's last federal election) exceeded the government's expectations in most places but was low in others. For example, it was over 80% in Homs but only 52% in Tartous. What might explain the uneven results is the history of the war. People who suffered the most from the war, for example in Homs, were probably more grateful for their liberation and more motivated to exercise their political rights than people in Tartous who saw no fighting at all (though they lost thousands upon thousands of sons and grandsons in the war).

Ken Stone was an observer at the Syrian elections. He has an M.A. in political science from McMaster University.

Also significant was the fact that over 140,000 refugees returned across the Lebanese border in just one day in order to vote. And the polling hours in Damascus, which suffered a lot from the fighting, had to be extended until 11 pm to accommodate all the voters. There were even polling stations set up by the government in recently liberated Palmyra and Al-Qaryaten, though those polls were largely symbolic because the inhabitants of those towns have not yet been able to return to their homes due to widespread destruction, following liberation by the Syrian Arab Army.

The voter participation rate is key to this election, more important than the individual candidates who were elected. Here's why: you need to understand elections in a constitutionally-created state, in which one party dominates, in terms of a strike vote in a trade union. It demonstrates continuing confidence in the leadership at a turning point in the struggle. A union would not be satisfied with a strike vote of 58%, going into a strike. And probably the Syrian government would have wished for a higher rate going into the negotiations at Geneva. But it knew from the start that holding the elections under the conditions of war and occupation was a gamble, because there are a lot of eligible voters living outside of Syria right now, living in places besieged by the terrorists, and who have died but not yet been accounted for. Taking into account these factors, the participation rate would probably have been much higher.

Among our solidarity delegation, we have been pleased that the Syrian authorities did not try to inflate the figures to make the election results appear better than they actually were: it reinforces our contention that the Syrian government is a credible force in the serious negotiations ahead.

As mentioned, the turning point for Syria is the current round of negotiations taking place right now in Geneva to find a lasting political solution to the crisis. Today, the Syrian delegation took their seats with a mandate from the Syrian people, whereas the opposition delegation of head-choppers cobbled together at the last minute by the USA and Saudi Arabia have no mandate at all from the unfortunate Syrians who suffer under military occupation in “rebel-held” areas. No elections were held there. Western governments, such as the USA, have dismissed the Syrian election out of hand, though the participation rate in the last US election was only 48%.

But that's not to say there weren't any interesting candidates elected. The sister of a Syrian soldier, Noor Al-Shogri, stood for election as an independent in parliament. Her brother, Yahya Al-Shoghri, was filmed as he was being executed by ISIS terrorists in 2014 in Raqa. (If you can stomach the summary execution in cold blood of a prisoner of war, you will find the video brazenly posted by the terrorists on Youtube.) The barbarians demanded that he say, as his dying words, “Long live the caliphate!” He famously refused and declared instead that “It will be erased!” His last words then became a rallying cry in the national resistance against the foreign aggression. Noor Al-Shogri easily won her seat.

I met an independent candidate in the Old City of Damascus, Nora Arissian, a small Armenian woman with flaming red hair. She came up to me in the Greek Melkite Patriarch's procession to the polling station and thanked me for Canada taking in 25000 Syrian refugees and then she pointedly added, “We want them all eventually to come home!” She too won her seat.

The election results were delayed by a couple of days because the Syrian election commission was unsatisfied with the preparedness of eight polling stations in partially-occupied Aleppo. As I understand it, the elections in Aleppo had to be continued on the day following election day.

Some people have asked what is the role of Palestinian refugees in this election. The answer is that Palestinians, ethnically-cleansed in 1948 and after, do not vote in Syrian elections. The political and social status of Palestinians in Syria is the highest of any Arab country but the Syrian government doesn't grant them citizenship or let them vote because it doesn't want to dilute their right under international law, reaffirmed by numerous resolutions of the United Nations, to return to their homes and farms in Palestine. The fact that the Syrian government has been so adamant about this principle, it is one of the main causes of the foreign aggression against the country (and in support of the State of Israel.) So the Syrian government pays a heavy price for its strong support of the Palestinian people. In turn, the vast majority of Palestinian refugees in Syria strongly support their government, even though many have been made refugees a second time by the invasion into their neighbourhoods of the terrorist mercenaries from over 80 countries. For example, a fierce struggle is taking place in Yarmouk right now just a few kilometres from where I write, among Isis, AlNusra, and other terrorist gangs, over control of this former Palestinian neighbourhood/camp, which used to hold a quarter of a million people but is now a devastated ghost town with only a few thousand souls.

It bears repeating that these parliamentary elections were defiantly called by the Syrian government as “an exercise in national sovereignty.” The point was to show the world, especially those western and Gulf states, who have waged the five-year long war of aggression against Syria, that Syrians are united in the belief that Syrians, and only Syrians, will decide the fate of Syria.

It appears that the gamble paid off.

ps. For photos of the last few days of activities of the Second International Tour of Peace to Syria and to find out how to join the third or fourth tour, please go to:

https://www.facebook.com/International-Tours-of-Peace-to-Syria-454873351281581/?ref=ts&fref=tsheck

First published on 21st Century Wire.

“We declare our right on this earth…to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” ~ Malcolm X

Yesterday Parliamentary elections were held in Syria. 7000 polling booths were opened across the country. 11, 341 candidates were proposed from across Syria with 250 to be elected to Parliament, including a number of female candidates.

Candidates were spread out as follows: 988 in Damascus, 817 in Damascus countryside, Aleppo 1437, in Aleppo regions 1048, In Idleb 386, in Homs 1800, Hama 700, Lattakia 1653, Tartous 634, Deir Ezzor 311, Hasaka 546, Raqqa 197, Daraa 321, Sweida 263 and in Quneitra 240

Voting centres opened at 7.30 am and were obliged to extend their sessions by five hours to accommodate the high turn out of voters.

Some of the women candidates in Syrian Parliamentary elections.

“The voting centers include over 2,000 centers in Damascus, 17 in Deir Ezzor, 1,047 in Lattakia, 661 in Homs, 347 in Sweida, 741 in Hama, 368 in Hasaka, 816 in Tartous, and 347 in Sweida are receiving voters.

It should be noted that voting centers were opened in Damascus, Damascus Countryside, Hama, Lattakia, Aleppo, Tartous, Hasaka, and Deir Ezzor to receive voters staying in these provinces who are originally from other areas, namely the provinces of Idleb, Raqqa, Aleppo, Deir Ezzor, and Daraa.” ~ SANA

Students from Damascus University queueing to vote: SANA

So contrary to spurious claims from western governments and media, efforts were made to open the voting to all Syrian civilians including those who have fled terrorists held areas. We must also bear in mind that over 90% of IDPs [Internally displaced persons] have fled to Government controlled areas, thus further discrediting claims that these elections are non representative.

For a full photo report on the Syrian elections: Peoples Assembly Elections 2016

On an equally positive note, of course ignored in the western and gulf media, 1.7 million of these internally displaced refugees have been able to return home thanks not only to the SAA [Syrian Arab Army] liberation of whole swathes of Syrian villages and towns from US NATO terrorist occupation but also due to the Syrian Governments laudable efforts to rebuild and restore infrastructure in these areas.

Small government loans are being given to impoverished families to enable them to re-establish their lives torn apart by the illegal war of aggression that has been waged against Syria by the US, NATO, GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] and Israel for the last five years.

It is guaranteed that none of these initiatives will be reported in the mainstream media, including the Syrian Higher Committee for Relief’s efforts to facilitate the delivery of Humanitarian aid to the remaining terrorist held civilian areas in Syria.

As Professor Tim Anderson [who is in Syria to observe the elections as indeed he was in 2014] said:

“Syrian democracy needs no outside approval. Repeated outside demands that ‘Assad must go’, or that a Washington-approved executive ‘transition government’ be formed, have become meaningless, since the military tide turned in the embattled country’s favour.”

The Syrian elections proceeded according to the Syrian constitution and law. We see this being enforced in Aleppo for example where it was decided that violations of the voting process had taken place and a re-election was called for.

UNSC [Security Council] resolution 2254 stated clearly that Syria’s future is in the hands of the Syrians and the Syrians are proving that they are doing just that with little fuss but a lot of enthusiasm and determination to deny foreign intervention in their sovereign affairs.

The Syrian “Dictator” goes to Vote

Now lets have a look at the President that western governments and their media minions would have us believe to be a bloodthirsty, butchering dictator as he and his wife Asma head for the polling booths with no security in sight.

Compare this if you will, to the protests being held across Britain demanding that David Cameron aka “Dodgy Dave” resign over the Panama papers scandal, the subsequent police clamp down and the manhandling of protestors.

Perhaps even more laughable in the face of the UK Government’s own deteriorating human rights record at home and abroad, is their statement on the Syrian elections:

Britain said Damascus’ decision to go ahead with the elections in the war-torn nation, where hundreds of thousands cannot take part, shows “how divorced (the government) is from reality.” 

With homelessness and child poverty reaching Victorian levels in Britain, legal cases pending for criminal arms sales to the genocidal Saudi coalition conducting wholesale slaughter of Yemeni civilians, and recent reports on the British government clandestine assassination programmes, one would be justified in saying the British government has not only divorced itself from reality but from Humanity in every feasible way.

“Reprieve highlights the fact that Britain conspired in a US-inspired Kill List soon after 9/11. It says quite categorically that “Starting in 2002, working closely with the Americans, Britain had played a leading role in the euphemistic Joint Prioritized Effective List. As with Yemen, the JPEL Kill List was not even limited to a war zone – it spanned over into Pakistan, which was an ally, not an enemy at war.”

What this effectively means is that not only has Britain brought back the death penalty it has done so without public or parliamentary consultation, and carried out these deadly deeds regularly without even a basic trial.” ~ Britain’s Secret Assassination Programme

France takes the hippocritic oath.

France has also hit the deck with cries of illegitimacy regarding the Syrian elections.

“The idea that there could be elections is not just provocative but totally unrealistic. It would be proof that there are no negotiations or discussions [in Geneva].”~ Francois Hollande

This statement comes from the man who crossed an executioners palm with silver to secure a multi billion dollar arms deal with Qatar.

In this photo Hollande is presenting France’s most prestigious award, the Legion D’Honneur to Saudi interior minister, Muhammed Bin Nayef.  Bin Nayef is personally responsible for choosing who of the many prisoners in Saudi jails is eligible for execution or crucifixion without trial and usually on trumped up charges.

So one is once more justified to ask, which leg is Hollande standing on when he denigrates Syrian elections while commending one of the world’s most renowned terrorists on his efforts to combat…terrorism.

The award for hypocrisy goes to..

US State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said that the US “would view those elections as not legitimate in the sense that they don’t represent… the will of the Syrian people.

“So, to hold parliamentary elections now, given the current circumstances, given the current conditions in the country, we believe is at best premature and not representative of the Syrian people,” Toner said.

Early last week Toner said that “a political process that reflects the desires and will of the Syrian people is what should ultimately decide the future leadership and the future government of Syria.” ~ RT

Here is the response of the Syrian people to Mr Toner’s comments:

Mohammed Ali of Press TV reports from Damascus

Conclusions

As I said in yesterday’s exchange of messages with ex Ambassador to Syria and alleged death squad creator, Robert Ford:

“History is repeating itself a little too often Mr Ford, be very careful that you don’t bring your own house of cards down around your ears..Syria is denying your agenda time and time again and I can appreciate your Governments frustration but mistakes are being made and your propaganda apparatus is coming apart at the seams due largely to the integrity and unity of the Syrian people.

The day the US or any NATO member can say it had to extend the voting because such huge numbers turned out, is the day you can lecture me about “regimes”. The day your own Government is finally sanctioned and prosecuted as a war criminal for its policy of overtly or covertly butchering the peoples of sovereign nations is the day you can criticise any other duly elected world government.”

The US, NATO, GCC and Israeli agenda has careered into the brick wall of Syrian resistance, integrity and unity.  The will of the Syrian people is being listened to by the Syrian government.

Ideologically and spiritually the Syrian people believe in their political and military victory.  The Syrian people have said “no” time and time again to foreign intervention. They have endured crippling economic sanctions, invasions by proxy terrorist armies, occupation by mass murderers funded and armed by the US and NATO alliance but their resilience will ensure their self determination against all odds.

To achieve their objectives in Syria, the US and NATO are reliant upon mercenaries, terrorists, rapists and felons who have no vested interest in victory other than lining their own pockets with drugs and oil revenue.

The US and NATO agenda in Syria has no basis in law or even sound ideology, it is based upon pure greed and power sustained by corruption and inhumanity.  It shall fail and Syria will emerge unbowed, stronger and ultimately victorious.  The Syrian people have redrawn the geopolitical road map with strength of will alone.  This is the will you should be respecting Mr Toner, no other.

“The Syrian people are engaged in a war that has been going on for five years, through which terrorism managed to shed innocent blood and destroy much infrastructure, but it failed in achieving the primary goal it was assigned, which is destroying the principle structure in Syria, meaning the social structure of the national identity.” ~ President Bashar al Assad.

***

Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.

READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Syria Files

Previously published on the Syrian Free Press. Story includes embedded video (10:00 min). See also: Syria's Press conference the United Nations doesn't want you to see (20/6/14) | canDoBetter, Syria Elections 2016: US-NATO's Failed Attempt to Deny the Will of the Syrian People (14/4/16) by Vanessa Beeley | Global Research, Polling Stations Closed in All of Syria's Provinces – Elections Committee (14/4/16) | Sputnik News.

The voting takes place in areas under the government’s control. More than 7,000 polling stations have been set up. More than 3,500 candidates are competing for 250 seats. President Bashar al-Assad speaks of high voter turnout and says the candidates cover all sectors of the syrian society. Speaking after voting in Damascus, Assad noted that terrorism has been able to destroy much of Syria’s infrastructure, but not its social structure and the national identity. Parliamentary elections are held in Syria every four years. The last vote was held in May 20-12, four months after constitutional reforms were approved by President Assad.

Last month, US secretary of State John Kerry called for Syria to be partitioned saying it was "Plan B" if negotiations fail. But in reality this was always plan A. Plans to balkanize Syria, Iraq and other Middle Eastern states were laid out by former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a 2006 trip to Tel Aviv. It was part of the so called "Project For a New Middle East". This was a carbon copy of the Odid Yinon plan drawn up by Israel in 1982. The plan outlined the way in which Middle Eastern countries could be balkanized along sectarian lines. This would result in the creation of several weak landlocked micro-states that would be in perpetual war with each other and never united enough to resist Israeli expansionism.

"Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan… " Oded Yinon, "A strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties",

The leaked emails of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reveal advocates of the Oded Yinon plan were behind the US push for regime change in Syria. An Israeli intelligence adviser writes in an email to Hillary,

"The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies,".

Kerry's plan B comment came right before UN's special envoy de Mistura said federalism would be discussed at the Geneva talks due to a push from major powers. Both side's of the Geneva talks, the Syrian Government and the Syrian National Coalition flat out rejected Federalism. Highlighting the fact that the idea did not come from the Syrian's themselves. The Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Al Jaafari, said that the Idea of federalization would not be up for discussion. "Take the idea of separating Syrian land out of your mind," he would say.

But some may not completely understand the full implications of federalism and how it is intrinsically tied to balkanization. Some cite the fact that Russia and the United States are successful federations as evidence that federation is nothing to fear. However the point that makes these federalism statements so dangerous is that in accordance with the Yinon plan the borders of a federalized Syria would be drawn along sectarian lines not on whether any particular state can sustain its population. This means that a small amount of people will get all the resources, and the rest of Syria's population will be left to starve. Furthermore, Russia and the US are by land mass some of the largest nations in the world, so federalism may make sense for them. In contrast Syria is a very small state with limited resources. Unlike the US and Russia, Syria is located in the Middle East which means water is limited. In spite of the fact Syria is in the so-called fertile crescent, Syria has suffered massive droughts since Turkey dammed the rivers flowing into Syria and Iraq. Syria's water resources must be rationed amongst its 23 million people. In the Middle East, wars are also fought over water.The areas that the Yinon plan intends to carve out of Syria, are the coastal areas of Latakia and the region of Al Hasake. These are areas where a substantial amount of Syria's water, agriculture and oil are located. The intention is to leave the majority of the Syrian population in a landlocked starving rump state, and create a situation where perpetual war between divided Syrians is inevitable. Ironically promoters of the Yinon plan try and paint federalism as a road to peace. However, Iraq which was pushed into federalism in 2005 by the US occupation is far from peaceful now.

Quite simply, divide and conquer is the plan. This was even explicitly suggested in the headline of Foreign Policy magazine, "Divide and conquer Iraq and Syria" with the subheading "Why the West Should Plan for a Partition". The CEO of Foreign Policy magazine David Rothkopf is a member of to the Council of Foreign Relations, a think tank Hillary Clinton has admits she bases her policies on. Another article by Foreign Policy written by an ex-NATO commander James Stavridis, claims "It's time to talk about partitioning Syria".

The US hoped to achieve this by empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist groups, and introducing Al Qaeda and ISIS into Syria. The Syrian army was supposed to collapse with soldiers returning to their respective demographic enclaves. Evidence of this could be seen in the headlines of NATO's media arm in 2012, which spread false rumours that Assad had run to Latakia, abandoning his post in Damascus. The extremists were then supposed to attack Alawite, Christian and Druze villages. The US hoped that enough Alawites, Christians and Druze would be slaughtered that Syria's minorities would become receptive to the idea of partitioning.

Then NATO planned on shifting narratives from, "evil dictator must be stopped" to "we must protect the minorities". Turning on the very terrorists they created and backing secessionist movements. There is evidence that this narrative shift had already started to happened by 2014 when it was used to convince the US public to accept US intervention in Syria against ISIS. The US designation of Jabhat Al Nusra as a terrorist organisation in December of 2012 was in preparation for this narrative shift. But this was premature as none of these plans seemed to unfold according to schedule. Assad did not leave Damascus, the Syrian army held together, and Syrian society held onto its national identity.

It could be said that the Yinon plan had some success with the Kurdish PYD declaration of federalization. However, the Kurdish faction of the Syrian national coalition condemned PYD's declaration. Regardless, the declaration has no legal legitimacy. The region of Al Hasakah where a substantial portion of Syria's oil and agriculture lies, has a population of only 1.5 million people, 6% of Syria's total population. Of that, 1.5 million, only 40% are Kurdish, many of which do not carry Syrian passports. PYD's demand that the oil and water resources of 23 million people be given to a tiny part of its population is unlikely to garner much support amongst the bulk of Syria's population.

Former US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger understood that the key to dismembering a nation was attacking its national identity. This entails attacking the history from which this identity is based upon. In an event at Michigan University Kissinger stated that he would like to see Syria balkanized, asserting that Syria is not a historic state and is nothing but an invention of the Sykes-Picot agreement in the 1920's. Interestingly, Kissinger is using the same narrative as ISIS, who also claims that Syria is a colonial construct. In fact, ISIS has been a key tool for Kissinger and the promoters of the project of a New Middle East, as ISIS has waged a campaign of destruction against both Syrian and Iraqi historical sites.

In spite of efforts to convince the world of the contrary, the region that now encompasses modern day Syria has been called Syria since 605 BC . Sykes-Picot didn't draw the borders of Syria too large, but instead, too small. Historical Syria also included Lebanon and Iskandaron. Syria and Lebanon were moving towards reunification until 2005, an attempt at correcting what was a sectarian partition caused by the French mandate. Syria has a long history of opposing attempts of divide and conquer, initially the French mandate aimed to divide Syria into 6 separate states based on sectarian lines, but such plans were foiled by Syrian patriots. The architects of the Yinon plan need only have read Syria's long history of resistance against colonial divisions to know their plans in Syria were doomed to failure.

See also Assembly of Syrian Tribes and Clans in Hasaka reject so-called “federal region in Northern Syria”, previously published (19/3/16) on SANA. This article by Maram Susli was previously published on New Eastern Outlook. Maram Susli, also known as "Syrian Girl," is an activist-journalist and social commentator covering Syria and the wider topic of geopolitics. especially for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook."

Dr Bashar al-Jaafari is the Syrian UN ambassador. In this interview he refutes the ABC-US-NATO line that Tony Jones runs on Syria. Among other things, he says, "Number one, we are not regime. In Syria, there is no regime. There is a government. We are the legitimate government." Bashar al-Jaafari was present when independent international witnesses delivered their (positive) reports on the conduct of the Syrian elections of June 2014 (video included).

ABC Lateline’s Tony Jones speaks with Dr Bashar Jaafari, Syrian Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, as he attends the UN-brokered Syrian peace talks as the lead negotiator for the Syrian government.

TRANSCRIPT:

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: This story is about the conflict in Syria. After five years and more than 250,000 lives lost, a new round of peace talks is under way in Geneva to try to bring an end to the conflict. As the new talks enter their third day, we’ll cross in a moment to the Swiss capital to speak to Syria’s lead negotiator. The talks were made possible by the UN-backed ceasefire which came into effect on 27th February, the first major truce in the five-year war. The peace talks aim to establish a transitional government in Syria leading up to fresh presidential elections. One key stumbling block is the future of Syria’s President Assad. The chief negotiator for the Syrian opposition says the transitional period can only begin with the fall of Assad or his death. Well the Syrian delegation is sticking by their President and refuses to discuss his future, so how will that fundamental difference be resolved?

Dr Bashar Jaafari is the Syrian Government’s representative at the United Nations. He’s also a central figure at the peace talks and he joins us live from Geneva.

Thanks for being there, Ambassador Jaafari.

BASHAR JAAFARI, SYRIAN AMBASSADOR TO THE UN: Thank you so much for having me with you.

TONY JONES: Now with Vladimir Putin withdrawing most of his forces, can President Assad hope to remain in power without Russian military support?

BASHAR JAAFARI: Of course, definitely. We have been fighting the terrorists all over Syria for five years, as you know. The participation and contribution of our allies and friends, the Russians, started just a couple of months ago, as you know. But before that, we were doing the – the Syrian Army was doing the most important part of the mission of combating terrorism on the Syrian territory. But however, just to answer your question, the Russian decision has not been a unilateral decision taken by Moscow at the detrimental of Damascus, as some media anchors try to say. This decision was taken jointly by both President Putin and President Assad and it has, of course, definitely a political motivation, a political reason. The main reason for that is to encourage the process of the national reconciliation process, to give a chance to the talks, indirect talks amongst Syrians in Geneva, but also to give a signal that the biggest part of the mission of combating terrorism has been fulfilled successfully. So what we have here is not a Russian withdrawal. You may call it a partial withdrawal, but you may call it definitely a redeployment of the Russian forces deployed in Syria.

TONY JONES: OK. Well, ambassador, you are there in Geneva to talk peace with your delegation. President Assad in a recent interview said he would one day take back all of the territory that he lost during the conflict. Does your president still believe there is a military solution in Syria?

BASHAR JAAFARI: No, President Assad didn’t say that, actually. He didn’t mean that there is only a political – a military solution to the crisis. He said that there is only a military solution to the issue of combating terrorism. But definitely, President Assad and the Syrian Government are engaged in this – in the political process and this is – this is why we are here in Geneva. So there are two tracks parallel – the military track and the political track. The military track aims at destroying the terrorist and combating the terrorism, the international terrorism, whether you call it jihadist or, you know, mercenaries or pure international terrorist networks. But definitely there is another track which is called the political track and this is why we are here in Geneva.

TONY JONES: OK, I’ll come to that in a moment, but the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, quite clearly understood what President Assad was saying as being that there will be more fighting in the future, that he would fight to take back all that land and he said quite clearly a message to your President that this was something that Russia would not accept.

BASHAR JAAFARI: No, no, no. I’m sorry to tell you that I think that you are misleading this kind of statements. The point is the following, my friend: the Syrian Government has the constitutional duty to liberate all the Syrian territory from all kind of terrorist – all forms of terrorist active on the Syrian soil. So we are not – we don’t feel ashamed of what we are doing. It is our constitutional duty.

TONY JONES: But ambassador, …

BASHAR JAAFARI: … to get rid of the international terrorism active on the Syrian soil.

TONY JONES: … can I just – can I – sorry, ambassador – ambassador, can I just interrupt you there just for a moment because on this program just last month President Assad’s advisor Dr Bouthaina Shaaban told us that liberating the people of Aleppo was the most important thing, that Aleppo would have to be liberated and brought back under Syrian regime control in order for there to be any peace. Is that still true?

BASHAR JAAFARI: Again, again, allow me to clarify this kind of statements. Number one, we are not regime. In Syria, there is no regime. There is a government. We are the legitimate government and I am representing this legitimate government at the United Nations. So nobody has the right to monopolise or to deform our representativity. We are a legitimate government and everybody should call us a government. We are not regime. Number one. Number two, we have in fact priorities. Yes, Aleppo is more important than other less than important than Aleppo. So we may start with freeing and liberating Aleppo and then Palmyra and then Raqqa. We have the duty to liberate all these important historical cities in Syria. So, whether it is Aleppo or Raqqa or Deir ez-Zor …

TONY JONES: But ambassador, the point about Aleppo – the point about Aleppo is that you regard the opposition forces in Aleppo as terrorists and therefore reserve the right to continue military engagement against them, by the sound of it. Won’t that defeat the whole idea of a peace process with those opposition forces who are occupying half of Aleppo?

BASHAR JAAFARI: My friend, in Aleppo, most of the armed groups are not opposition. They are either mercenaries hired by the Gulf state’s money. They call them jihadist – you know that very well. They call them rebels, they call them revolutionaries, they call them even Syrian moderate opposition while they are foreigners and mercenaries. So most of those armed groups deployed in Aleppo and fighting the Government are nothing but terrorists. There is a slight margin of those people, of those fighters in Aleppo that you may consider opposition and I’m not talking about these people. I’m talking about the big part of those who are fighting the Government in Aleppo and its surroundings and they are nothing but international terrorists coming into Syria through our border with Turkey. So Turkey should be held accountable for facilitating the access of these terrorists to inside Syria.

TONY JONES: OK. The peace plan that’s been signed up to by Russia, Iran, the US and many others puts it forward that there should be an establishment of a transitional government, that after 18 months of that transitional government there should be elections, including for the President. Will President Assad stand aside from the transitional government as the opposition is demanding or will he insist on being a part of it and possibly even leading it as President?

BASHAR JAAFARI: No, I think you are anticipating on the results and outcomes of the Syrian-Syrian talks. We don’t anticipate, number one. Number two, the Resolution 2254 does not say anything about President Assad to be removed or to step down. Number three, the – what you have called Syrian national transitional body, we are not dealing with this kind of terminology anymore because in the 2254 we have the terminology of governance. We are not speaking anymore about what you – about the terminology that you used a few minutes ago. So we are ready to engage into the Syrian-Syrian talks without any foreign interference, without any preconditions or prerequisites to find out or to reach a Syrian-Syrian solution to this – to the Syrian part, Syrian side of the Syrian crisis, because in Syria, you have a huge international war by proxies. The CIA has its proxies, the Pentagon has its proxies, the Israelis have their proxies, the Saudis, the Turks, the Qataris have their proxies, the French have their proxies and all kinds of these international mafia is fighting in Syria, killing the Syrian people for – in favour of foreign agendas. So it is not a Syrian-Syrian war. It is Syria fighting an international war by proxies on the Syrian soil.

TONY JONES: Alright. Well let’s talk about what some Syrians in the opposition are saying and particularly we can point to the head of the High Negotiations Committee, Mohammed Alloush. He says the transitional period can only start after the fall of Bashar al-Assad or his death – or his death. Is the future – is the future – is the future of these peace talks going to depend on whether Assad stays or goes?

BASHAR JAAFARI: Well number one, we – we haven’t yet – we don’t have yet in Geneva all the Syrian oppositions, meaning that the special envoy did not yet fulfil the provisions of Security Council Resolution 2254, which stipulates that the special envoy should gather the broadest spectrum of Syrian oppositions. This, we don’t have it yet in Geneva. This is number one. Number two, this guy you have just named – pronounce his name, is nothing but a terrorist. He’s shelling Damascus, he’s killing students at the university and he’s – he belongs to a terrorist faction called Jaysh al-Islam. And this is why we objected to his participation at the talks in the first round. Now he is, through his statement, through this kind of irresponsible statement, he is inciting to terrorism in violation of Security Council resolution relevant to the issue of combating terrorism. Here I mean 1924, 1989, 2178 and 2199. So he is violating the Security Council resolutions en bloc, en bloc, and nobody is holding him responsible for what he is saying. By calling for the assassination …

TONY JONES: Ambassador, it’s – it isn’t – it isn’t only him, of course.

BASHAR JAAFARI: Give me one minute, please. Give me one minute. Give me one minute.

TONY JONES: Yes, OK. Alright.

BASHAR JAAFARI: Let me finish. Let me finish, please. By calling for the assassination of a head of state, that means he is a terrorist and he is calling – he is presenting himself as a terrorist. You may not be part of political talks aiming at bringing a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis and at the same time act as a thug and mobs.

TONY JONES: OK. So are you proposing – I mean, you’ve put forward a document entitled Basic Elements for a Political Solution. That is your document, your negotiating team’s document.

BASHAR JAAFARI: Indeed. Indeed.

TONY JONES: Are you proposing in that document that President Assad remain in charge of a transitional government for this transitional period that we’re talking about?

BASHAR JAAFARI: If you jump to this conclusion easily then why we are at Geneva? Why are we here? You are anticipating on everything. We are here to engage into a political process between the Syrians themselves. We don’t need to hear from anybody from outside how to proceed and how to form our national unity government, how to reconcile ourselves with the oppositions in plural. Here we are not talking about one faction. We are talking about all the oppositions in plural. So the future of Syria should be decided by the Syrians themselves. This is what the resolution says: Syrian-led political process without any foreign interference and without any preconditions. Everybody should understand the meaning of this magic sentence in the Resolution 2254.

TONY JONES: So without any preconditions, does that mean that you – your own delegation would, at some point, contemplate the possibility of President Assad stepping aside from the presidency to help create an atmosphere of peace?

BASHAR JAAFARI: Nobody has any right to anticipate on the final outcomes of the Syrian-Syrian talks. Any precondition is in itself a violation of the references of the Resolution 2254. So, nobody has the right to interfere into our domestic affairs and say who should govern Syria and who should be the president.

TONY JONES: So, does that mean you are open to the possibility of President Assad stepping aside?

BASHAR JAAFARI: I am not misinterpreting anything of what I have just said. I am saying that the future, our own future should be decided by the Syrians themselves. President Assad is not part of the resolution – the destiny President Assad is not part of the – of Resolution 2254. There is nothing in this literature and rhetorics and references adopted by the Security Council or the Vienna Declaration or the Munich Declaration that indicates anything about changing the President or changing the Government. Nobody has the right to change anything in Syria but the Syrians by themselves. We are not Somalia, we are not Libya, we are not Iraq, we are not Sudan. We are Syria.

TONY JONES: So does that include – does that include Russia, which of course is probably the most significant player outside of the Syrian delegations at these talks and it appears that there are serious reports now in fact that Russia is unhappy with the Syrian Government’s intransigence over the future of President Assad. They are prepared, so it is said, to offer him safe haven in Russia if he chooses to leave.

BASHAR JAAFARI: Sir, this is a wrong question. With all due respect, you cannot pose any kind of such, you know, question. You are yourself now misleading the public opinion by even providing such a scenario. Any – any scenario aiming at tailoring the future of Syria by foreigners is not acceptable by the Syrians. Number one. Number two, when you say that the Syrian people is – are asking this or that, did you consult the Syrian people? Did you organise a referendum? Did you seek the opinion of the Syrian people? How could you say that you are saying this on behalf of the Syrian people while you are not Syrian and you were not in Syria and you did not consult the Syrian people? Please, let us be responsible while using the terminology. The Syrian people is – is not a foreign – foreign matter. The Syrian people is a domestic matter for the Syrians themselves. Thank you so much.

TONY JONES: As we’ve seen – ambassador, as we’ve seen, the Syrian people are terribly divided. The country itself is split into a number of sections which may never be reconciled. Is one possibility that Syria must inevitably become three separate, possibly more than three separate, nations?

BASHAR JAAFARI: That will never happen, Sir. Take it from me, that will never happen. Once the Europeans and the Americans will leave their sanctions – economic sanctions imposed on the Syrian people, the Syrian people will not leave Syria. Once the so-called international community will take responsible steps to combating terrorism and make – exert pressure on the Turkish Government to stop these flows of terrorists crossing the border from Turkey inside Syria, Syria will be much better. Once the Syrian – the so-called international community will help Syria to overcome the burdens of combating terrorism, Syria will be much, much better. So there are important conditions that we need to fulfil if we really want to help the Syrians and to help Syria not being divided or separated into three or four or five, whatever, mini-states. That will never happen because we are a responsible government and we are implementing the Constitution. We have the duty to protect our country from all these hyenas and thugs and mobs. Thank you.

TONY JONES: Ambassador, you wouldn’t have a civil war in Syria if there wasn’t a significant proportion of your population that believed that President Assad is a dictator who has been repressing them for many years. So I’m asking you simply because I know that you know him: does President Assad personally believe that he can re-establish himself in power after five years of bitter conflict?

BASHAR JAAFARI: My friend, there is no civil war in Syria. I would strongly advise you and refer you to the WikiLeaks documents. The WikiLeaks documents prove that Washington instructed its ambassador in Damascus since 2004 to topple the Syrian Government by force. So please go back to the American documents called WikiLeaks and you will see that what we are suffering from nowadays was concocted since 2004, after the occupation of Iraq. Thank you so much.

TONY JONES: And very briefly – I know you’ve got to go, ambassador. Very briefly, this question about President Assad, does he personally believe that he can maintain himself in power after all this conflict?

BASHAR JAAFARI: The Syrian people will maintain him in power if the Syrian people wish to do so. It is not the business of foreigners to decide for the future of our president. It is a matter that is relevant to the – the will of the Syrian people. Of course it is a Syrian matter that will be decided by the Syrian people. So just give us a chance. Lift the sanctions, stop the terrorists from crossing the border from Turkey and Jordan and Israel, stop this support to the so-called moderate Syrian opposition while they are all foreigners and mercenaries, stop arming these terrorists and you will see that Syria will be much better and we will get back to you in a much better and fresh shape. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

TONY JONES: Ambassador Jaafari, we know that you need to race off to these talks and to other events.

BASHAR JAAFARI: I need – I need to leave, indeed. I need to leave.

TONY JONES: We thank you very much for taking the time to give us your perspective. Thank you.

BASHAR JAAFARI: Thank you.

It has been an enigma for me and others that Noam Chomsky seems to be blind to the covert war against Syria. One would normally assume that any Chomsky follower could see the US (and allies) hand behind the 'Arab Spring'. Chomsky had described the basic blue print. After investigating, for me, the only possible explanation for Chomsky not joining the dots in regard to Syria relates to his close friendship with Robert Fisk: Is Chomsky deferring to Fisk on matters related to Syria?

My political activism began in the late 1960s when my brother became a draft resister and a founding member of SDS in Melbourne. I also joined SDS.  One critical aspect of the anti-war efforts carried out by SDS was the printing and distribution of well-researched articles  For example, my brother once wrote a paper on the secret US bombing of Laos, and I remember its long reference list.  Noam Chomsky was always referenced. 

The hangman of Iraq was not content to kill tens of thousands of his own people. He came to Syria to carry out his favourite hobbies of killing, assassination and sabotage. That man has been sending arms for the criminals in Syria since he took power. 

The Syrian dissidents modus operandi will continue to be terrorism, particularly bombings and assassination. .. The covert war is unlikely to stop.. though there may be periodic lulls in the struggle. 

Although one must read a CIA report with a critical eye, it is interesting to note that according to the report the total casualties for the "Hama incident numbered about 2,000" (page 7 of the report).  This figure contradicts dramatically with that usually given by supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

The following is some of the transcript from the latest episode of 20 March of RT's In The Now entitled "Trump Card". In the first part program host Host Annissa Naouai interviews Doctor Theodore Karasik a senior advisor of Gulf State Anaytics to discuss how the Syrian conlict may develop now that Russia has decided to withdraw most of its forces from Syria.

Much of the interview consists of a long ostensible explanation by Dr. Karasik of Saudi Arabia's actions in the conflict. The transcript of the end of the interview concludes in the paragraphs immediately below. Below, at the end of the article, is a critical response to that interview posted to that In the Now page.

Transcript of the conclusion of Annissa Naouai's interview with Dr. Theodore Karasik

04:18 Annissa Naouai (AN): Critics in the West were just pointing out how this was all just an attempt to bolster Assad. Putin's gotten in and out. How is Bashar al-Assad really feeling about Russia leaving Syria? You know, I mean, Syria doesn't really have many friends out there world at the moment.

04:32 Dr. Theodore Karasik (TK): I think that the Assad government is very interested in what happens next clearly. Russia is telling Assad that there must be movement on the political front in order to rectify the problems within Syria today and to come to a new state entity, if you will, that will govern the Syrian state.

This point is something that Moscow has driven home since the entry of Russia into Syria six months ago – that the political solution must come first and dealing with Islamic State in total, particularly in Raqqa, comes second. You can't have it the other way around.

Therefore, you see Russia pushing Assad to go along with this settlement discussion that's ongoing in Geneva. The big question, of course, is what about Assad's other friends, particularly in Tehran – and the Iranian reaction is this one that seems very positive, so far, but we need to be very careful about the dynamics within Iran and how various schools of thought will look at Russia's latest move and what that means for the settlement of Syria in the coming months and throughout the rest of the year.

06:07 AN: What about other key players like Saudi Arabia? Are they going to use this as an opportunity to make some moves? I assume in Tehren that could possibly be one of the options that is being discussed.

06:21 TK: I think what the Saudis are interested in the most is the protection of their interests in the Levant. I think that it's clear that Riyadh and other allies of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were taken by surprise with the Russian announcement of quote unquote 'withdrawal'. I think Riyadh also recognises that this gives an opportunity for a diplomatic solution. I don't think Riyadh wants to use the Islamic military alliance completely in full operation within the Levant, but, if push comes to shove, they will.

So I think that this is a moment for Saudi Arabia to decide how best to proceed diplomatically on trying to find a solution to Syria where Assad does leave and I think that all parties are beginning to agree that President Assad's days are numbered in his current position.

07:23 AN: Doctor Theodore Karasik, a senior advisor at Gulf State Analytics, thanks so much for being In The Now.

Response to the above Interview posted to "In the Now"

I thought that Russia's stance on President Bashar al-Assad is that only the Syrian people were entitled to decide on whether or not he was to be their President and for how long he would remain President. All the evidence, of which I am aware, shows that, even with all the killing, destruction and other hardships faced by Syrians since March 2011, the Syrian President remains immensely popular. In fact, he enjoys far more popularity than the leaders of purported democracies of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Israel and others that have criminally conspired against him. Probably the only national leader who can claim to be more popular than Bashar al-Assad is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Syrians can count themselves lucky to have been led since March 2011 by such a capable and well-intentioned man as Bashar al-Assad.

I found outrageous the suggestion by your guest, Dr. Theodore Karasik, that a settlement of the Syrian crisis required that the Syrian President step down. By saying so, Dr. Karaz demonstrated ignorance at best, or contempt for the wishes of the Syrian people at worst.

Your failure to challenge Dr. Karasik's views is what I have come to expect of corporate mainstream 'journalists' in the West and not from RT.

Could I suggest that you look at the many interviews that the Syrian President has given to the newsmedia in recent years, including CBS's 60 Minutes of 2014, and compare his forthright and honest answers, to the most probing questions, to what was mouthed by Dr. Karasaik?

Were President Bashar al-Assad ever to find the time to appear on "In the Now" together with Dr. Karasik, he would easily be able to show him up for what he is and cut his arguments to ribbons. I wish more journalists were as capable as the Syrian President.

The Assembly pointed out that the timing of this declaration came as a reaction to the exclusion of Kurds from dialogue in Geneva, stressing that the Kurds constitute an important component of the Syrian society that cannot be excluded from the process of shaping the country’s future.

The statement noted that no party has the right to tamper with the form of state and its political system in a unilateral way and in an uncalculated, reaction manner, since such behavior constitutes a flagrant threat to the unity of the Syrian people and geography.

The Assembly said that the self-administration experience, even if it hides behind claims of democracy, is a reflection of the will of a singular component and constitutes an attempt to force others to comply with this will in order to impose a fait accompli.

The statement affirmed that declaration of the so-called “federal region in northern Syria” doesn’t express the will of millions of Syrians who stand by the Syrian Arab Army in its fight against terrorism to restore security and stability to the country.

The Assembly stressed that Syria’s future, form of state, and system of government cannot be subject to whims and short-sighted calculations, rather they are decided by the Syrian people, defined according to constitution, and protected by the will of the people and international laws.

The participants reiterated their rejection of any plot which undermines Syria’s unity, stressing that the residents of Hasaka province are united and will not permit any foreign schemes to pass.

They also called for enhancing national unity, adhering to Syria’s territorial integrity, rejecting federation, and intensifying efforts to combat terrorism and foil the conspiracy targeting Syria.

Washington’s intention to overthrow Syria's legitimate and democratically-elected President Bashar al-Assad results from his refusal to back a Qatari gas pipeline project, an attorney says. Article first published by Iranian Press TV at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

According to an article published by Politico on Thursday, American attorney and nephew of US President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wrote that the US decided to topple Assad after he declined to back a gas pipeline project of the Qatari government.  Article first published by Iranian Press TV at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

The project was aimed at building a gas link from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey to Europe.

The $10 billion pipeline project first surfaced in 2000 and the CIA went ahead with the plan until nine years later Assad announced that he would not support the pipeline initiative, a move that could grant Qatar direct access to European energy markets via terminals in Turkey.

“Soon after that the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria," said Kennedy.

“If completed, the project would have had major geopolitical implications. Ankara would have profited from rich transit fees. The project would have also given the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America's closest ally in the Arab world," he noted.

Kennedy added that the pipeline would have also strengthened Saudi Arabia by giving the kingdom additional leverage against Iran.

In a separate interview with Sputnik, Kennedy said, “If we study the history of America’s relation with Mideast and looking at the US’ violent intervention in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt over time and the extraordinary and astonishing thing is the solid record of the cataclysmic failure every time we venture there in violent fashion. Most Americans are completely unaware of us attempting to overthrow the democratically elected government in Syria, contrary to our own state department policy and contrary to American values.”

Since March 2011, the United States and its regional allies, in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have been conducting a proxy war against Syria. The years-long conflict has left somewhere between 270,000 to 470,000 Syrians dead and half of the country’s population displaced.

Read comments on the original article here: http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.

Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.

This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part Two of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Explains how Syrian society is secular, how women have freedom there, and that it is predominantly secular. For her it is very comparable to Australian society. So why don’t Australians know this? Furthermore, the Sunnis in Syria, who are in the majority, do not welcome the extremism that is being brought into the country.

Mystery of mass media’s motivation in supporting false government narratives

JEREMY SALT: Relates the problem back to the mass media again, ( as in Part One of this series). What people know about Syria is what the media chooses to tell them. There is a huge question about media ethics. Balance, objectivity are very big questions, which relate to media-ownership and the way the media operates generally. If we think about Australia, something close to 70 % of the print media is owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch. And we saw from what happened in England, how corrupt the Murdoch organisation can be, with the wire-tapping, the phone-tapping and all the rest of it. Murdoch himself is ultra, ultra conservative, very pro-Israeli. He is anti all the things we’re talking about and Murdoch runs his newspaper in the same way. The Australian newspaper, for example, is more or less like a free market Pravda.. It’s tightly controlled. There are gate-keepers. So all of this fits into the general context of the questions you are asking about why the media does what it does. The media will not say those things you are talking about - of course it won’t – because it disrupts the narrative. It doesn’t want people to know that women have freedom in Syria and that Syria is way ahead of most Middle Eastern countries in terms of women’s individual freedoms. Of course, if you are involved in political activity against the government, you’re in trouble. We know that. Well there is a good reason for that. Syria has been under siege for a long, long period of time. So the media is not going to bring out those positive aspects. But the interesting thing is, why does the media pick up a government narrative and reproduce it? Why? This is the real mystery. Why? I mean they did this over the Iraq war. It was seamless. 2003. It was very obvious that what Bush, Blair, Colin Powel were saying was without any factual basis. It was all propaganda. Blair’s dodgy dossier, all the statements they made about weapons of mass destruction, had absolutely no evidentiary basis. And, if you were a journalist, you should have been able to see that. I mean, a child could have seen it. So, where is the truth here? There is no truth. They couldn’t prove it, and yet they went with this government narrative. And then we have a war, which resulted in the destruction of a country, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and dispossession of many, many others. And at the end of it, when they’ve hunted for their weapons of mass destruction, and haven’t found them – because they weren’t there – the two papers I know of, the New York Times and the Washington Post, said, ‘Oh, we were wrong. We’re sorry.’ But this was another lie. Because they weren’t wrong. That wasn’t the explanation. The reason was they did not ask questions about the government narrative.

And so, after that incredible propaganda operation, I thought, well, that’s got to be it. Then along comes Syria – and they do the same thing all over again!

Why does the media do it? How does it interest the media to portray the Syrian war in such a fashion? The Guardian, for example, which is one of the worst culprits, why was the Guardian’s reporting up to this point so shocking? Anything a ‘rebel’ (so-called) or ‘activist’ said, the Guardian would snap up and publish. So why is the Guardian doing this? Does the Guardian have the same kind of antagonism towards Syria that the British Government has for its own strategic reasons? Because England lies with [?is allies with] America and America wants to bring down the Syrian Government, partly because Israel wants to bring down the Syrian Government – all these reasons. But why is the media going along with it? What are they getting out of it? Are they getting money? Why? How is it in their interests.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Is it because it’s a 9-5 job and …

JEREMY SALT: No, it’s not that. It’s something to do with the culture. It’s very hard for me to put my finger on it. Why they would do this. But it’s a pattern. That’s the whole point. It’s a pattern. It’s not an incidental thing. It’s not an aberration [….] And [they] will do the same thing with Iran. It’s like they have bought the government line in America and in England, on a whole range of issues.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Do they also help determine the government line?

JEREMY SALT: Well, there’s always interplay. […] But we have to ask the question about responsibility in the media. What is their responsibility? Where does it lie? What is the media there for? Well, it’s there to make money. To make a profit. If it doesn’t make a profit, it’s not going to survive. That’s one thing. But what else is the media supposed to be doing? The old-fashioned idea is the media was the watchdog of the public interest. And possibly that was more true up to about the 1970s, 1980s, than it is now. And then the newspapers started to go downhill, partly because of the internet, because people weren’t reading so much. They were watching television. They were doing social media, and all the rest of it. So, the quality of newspapers declined and they started – to keep up sales – they were doing different things. Infotainment. Celebrity gossip. All the rest of it. The quality of analysis and reporting fell. But we’re not really talking about that so much as we are talking about what should be reasonably good quality newspapers, like the Guardian, like the Washington Post. Why do they run this line on Syria? Why? Obviously what they’re saying is not true and, at the very least, is not balanced. Why did the Washington Post or the Guardian never report what the Syrian Government was saying?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: It gets back to money?

JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know. I seriously don’t know why. And with a paper like the Guardian I have to ask questions. Well, the Guardian can’t make all that much money. Maybe it does. I don’t think so.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Sponsors?

Mass media as a business

JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I really can’t explain this: why the media does this all the time.
So, when we talk about the media, what we are actually talking about is media as business. Business is money. And, you know, the diversification of ownership of the media. Like in America, for example, a number of very large corporations have media ownership. Like Westinghouse. Westinghouse is one of them, only one of them. Murdoch’s interests go all across the print media into film, into cable television, into fibreoptics – the whole thing. And the media has always worked closely with government because of this give and take. The media wants things from the government. It wants licences. And the media will give things to the government. It will give them [government] favourable publicity. In Australian or in England we know that politicians are very very quick to try to curry favour with the media magnates – with Murdoch, for example. They might fall out, but they do their best to stay on side with him. So the media functions as part of the business sector – fundamentally. And the business sector has close relations with the government. So there are interlocking systems, of which the media is part. I think this partly explains the kind of narrative we see about Syria and what we saw about Iraq. It’s pumping out a line.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Also, I was an activist during the Vietnam war – we’ve got some other activists here – and what we spoke of about then was the ‘military industrial complex’. That’s still alive and active. Can we also talk about the ‘media industrial complex’ and are there links?

JEREMY SALT: Are you talking about America?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Generally, but America in particular, of course.

JEREMY SALT: The media industrial complex. Can you just explain what you mean by that?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: It means that people don’t really have a voice; that you do have – as you are suggesting – companies that have this power that can determine what the narrative is. For example, on Syria. So you don’t get that balance. Journalists don’t have the freedom to present a balanced picture.

The ‘free’ press.

JEREMY SALT: They don’t. If you work for a big news corporation, you cannot write what you want. It might be just coincidental that your views are the same as Rupert Murdoch’s. That’s really nice. But if they are not the same as Rupert Murdoch’s, you’ve got to make sure that, pretty much, they are. Otherwise you’re not going to have much of a future. You can’t just wander off and write whatever you want. But the thing about the media is – a lot of people take these phrases for granted – like ‘free press’ – so forth and so on. Well, free for whom? Who has the right to speak? Who has the right to write in the media?

It’s very carefully controlled. It does vary a little bit from news organisation to news organisation, but basically it’s controlled. Some people have access. A lot of people don’t have access. I mean a lot of people in Australia who don’t have any access at all to the mainstream media at all. They’re very well informed, they’re very intelligent, they’re articulate, they’re experienced, they know their area, but they’re not going to be given any space in the mainstream media. Because they’re going to say things that the mainstream media – for whatever reason – doesn’t want people to hear.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: If you worked in the mainstream media today, and you wanted …

JEREMY SALT: Well I couldn’t –

SUSAN DIRGHAM: …and you’re a person of courage, what would you do …

JEREMY SALT: Well, I wouldn’t last. I wouldn’t last. I couldn’t last.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Even moving to another area? You wouldn’t be an ABC Middle East correspondent if you …

JEREMY SALT: I don’t … no, I wouldn’t …

SUSAN DIRGHAM: …integrity and courage…

JEREMY SALT: No, I wouldn’t because I would go to Syria and I’d want to go to the Syrian Government and get their take on what’s going on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the people…

JEREMY SALT: …and I’d want to go to the West Bank …

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the women. Don’t forget the women.

JEREMY SALT: Alright, okay, I’d talk to the women.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: The women of Syria…

JEREMY SALT: If I were in Palestine, I’d go to the West Bank and I’d talk to people there and I’d do it in a much more forceful way than the ABC would allow. So, therefore, someone like me – well, let’s not talk about me – someone like me is not going to be given the freedom to speak. Right? You’re sidelined. I know lots of people here, in this country, who are very well informed about the Middle East, about Syria, about Iran. They’ve no place in the media – and they’ve tried, but they’re shut out. And so the space is given to Greg Sheridan, for example, in The Australian, and… who was it, who wrote… Derryn Hinch!

SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Laughs softly).

JEREMY SALT: In the Age, wrote this silly piece about…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Comparing Assad to …

JEREMY SALT: Yes!

SUSAN DIRGHAM: To Pol Pot!

JEREMY SALT: Yes! So what is a quality, so-called ‘quality’ newspaper doing with Derryn Hinch on the Middle East? When there are many, many people in this country well-qualified to talk sensibly, and they use Derryn Hinch.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: I think Derryn Hinch was probably using his heart and he was going to the shallow analysis…

JEREMY SALT: But

SUSAN DIRGHAM: … of the mainstream media, and he just thought, well, Assad’s the criminal; he’s a brutal criminal; he’s killing his own people; he must be like Pol Pot.

JEREMY SALT: But why use Derryn Hinch for this anyway?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.

JEREMY SALT: He can write a letter to the editor…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.

JEREMY SALT: ‘Derryn Hinch of Armadale, Worried Reader’, whatever he wants to describe himself.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why don’t they ask you and me to write about it?

JEREMY SALT: Well, not me. Forget me. Just leave me out of it. There are a lot of other people who can write intelligently about it. Why do they go to Derryn Hinch? And the whole thing about the media is that the news is an artefact …
SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Joking) We’ll have a fight soon.

JEREMY SALT: No, we’re not going to fight. News is an artefact. It’s something that people who read newspapers might not necessarily be fully aware of. I mean they do generally or not. The newspaper is one dimensional. There it is, but there is a whole kind of, like, hive of activity befor that. So the raw news is shaped by the reporter, by the editors. It’s shaped according to where it’s placed in the paper. It’s shaped according to the headlines. It’s honed and whittled and refined. Until it gets to you. And you’ve got to think of the mass of information that comes into the media every single day, whether you’re talking about newspapers or television, immense mass. And what you are seeing is a tiny fraction. So ‘news’ should be put in quotes. News is something that the newspaper or television station wants you to know; chooses for you. It’s not unmediated. And then, the other part of that, of course, is the politics of it and the way that things are reported. For example, in the case of Syria, why Syria is reported in such a negative fashion and such an unbalanced fashion. Why have none of these news organisations seen as their business to try to be fair? This is what the so-called rebels are saying – let’s hear what the Syrian Government and people who support the government have to say and what the families of the soldiers have to say. We’ve seen nothing of that. Nothing whatsoever. So, it’s completely lopsided.

And, we go back to that basic question: Why do they [the mainstream media] do it? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for them? And there’s something grey here that I can’t really put my hands on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: At the moment, and the people in this room know this, because I’m asking them to help me, I’m working on a complaint letter to the ABC because they had a program on in December, on Radio National Earshot program, ‘The Drawers of Memory, Ahmed’s story.’ And the protagonist in this program was a ‘freedom fighter’ in Syria; someone who was running round …

JEREMY SALT: Described as a ‘freedom fighter’?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Well, he says he supports freedom, and his ‘friends’ the insurgents based in Damascus, who support ‘freedom,’ he reckons they will win in the end. And maybe they will; they’ve got so much ‘support’ from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar – Apparently he was a money-runner, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s money. But he is presented on the ABC as someone that’s credible. And the victims of these insurgents – ordinary people like us that live in the suburbs of Damascus – are just ignored. But, what I discovered when I did a little bit of research on this story is that this is basically an unofficial ABC policy, to present this side of things. As we’ve been discussing, basically. So you get MediaWatch saying, ‘Assad is a brutal dictator. Assad is a war criminal. Assad has used chemicals against his people …’ So, if Mediawatch says this, what mainstream journalist dares present another narrative, dares present the side of the Syrian people?

JEREMY SALT: Why should we use the word ‘dare’? What is the problem in reporting Syria in a more balanced way? I mean, Australians would like to know for sure. They would like to have a different picture. Why does the media pump out this completely lopsided view? Why are they doing it? What are they frightened of? Why are they buying this narrative in this fashion? This is really what I can’t understand. You know, they’re not being told to do it by the government. The government’s not issuing an edict, ‘Please report this situation like this’. No-one’s doing that. So, exactly, how does it work out like that? That they will just report the situation in this kind of grossly unbalanced fashion.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: People get intimidated. They don’t realise their power. Individuals don’t realise the power and influence they have.

JEREMY SALT: If you were – I imagine that if you were an editor of a mainstream newspaper and you suddenly had a rush of blood to the head and decided to report Syria what you or I would call ‘fairly and objectively’, you probably wouldn’t last. But why? Why would they not allow you to report Syria in a more balanced fashion? This is the mystery that we keep coming back to. Why does the media do this? I mean, no-one’s going to punish them if they report the Syrian war – I would think – in a more balanced fashion. Why do they do it? And this is happening all the time. This freedom fighter: ‘I’m a freedom fighter’, ‘I love freedom.’ Oh, great. Okay. Well, so do I.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: So do the Syrian people.

JEREMY SALT: Congratulations. We all love freedom. Freedom’s a really nice thing.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: But what is freedom? What is free?

JEREMY SALT: It’s a word. That’s what it is. It’s a word: ‘I love freedom’.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Freedom to live.

JEREMY SALT: Yes. ‘I’m going to kill people, but I love freedom.‘

SUSAN DIRGHAM: ‘And I’m going to kill them for Saudi Arabia, for America.’

JEREMY SALT: And this has just one on and on for the last five years. And it doesn’t stop. And the latest thing we have is this situation in this town of Madaya, north of Damascus. And the media is reporting Assad forces, or Assad loyalists, or Syrian Army – what are they saying – usually the first two – besieged this town. And we have the reports of the civilians starving – and all the rest. I’m quite sure they’re having a terrible time.

Susan Dirgham of AMRIS talks with Middle East and propaganda scholar, Jeremy Salt, about the history of western interventions in the Middle East and in Syria. She asks why the mainstream press don't tell westerners how Syria is secular and has good women's rights; women got the vote there in 1947. This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part One of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East

Jeremy Salt begins by talking about 19th century history of interventions in the Middle East, then about intervention in Iraq in 1990s. The UN ran this nominally, but really England and United States did. Two UN humanitarians objected to the inhumanity of economic sanctions against Iraq, possibly even mentioned ‘genocide’: they were Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck. [1] To Susan’s question, Dr Salt agrees that UN personnel no longer speak out. On the subject of the 2003 ‘weapons of mass destruction’: The use of no-fly zones to conduct aerial bombardments. [2] Libya. No-fly zone fig leaf. Syria: they wanted to get a UN resolution for a no-fly zone, but Russia and China blocked this with the UN. Next best thing [sic] was to pull down the government of Damascus by using armed gangs – mercenaries. From 2011 until now and still [the west]have not reached their main objective, which is the destruction of the government in Damascus, but they have destroyed a large part of Syria. This is similar to the Sandinista template of mercenaries used in Nicaragua.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why do these people choose to fight for/align themselves with western governments when they can see as clearly as you and I can see that these western governments are out to destroy Arab societies?

JEREMY SALT: [Ed: Not exact quotes always; some paraphrase] But we don’t know who these people are. Initially some of them were Syrians, but a lot were from Iraq. Because, in many ways, the war in Syria is the Iraq war exported. The Saudis and other Gulf states have pumped money into Sunni Muslim groups in Western Iraq to destabilise the government in Bagdad, which they didn’t like.

The whole protest movement in Syria was wildly exaggerated [by external war-mongering forces] who were waiting to seize just such an opportunity to make their move against Syria. We’ve seen this happen in Latin America, the Middle East over many, many decades. It happened in Chili, Iran, Ukraine. When the people begin to protest, you come in from behind and you turn those protests to your advantage.

So, for the question of why local people would support western-aligned interventions, the level of true support is unknown. This is not a civil war. This is a campaign against Syria orchestrated by outside governments, who want to destroy Syria and are using a protest movement. Infiltrating it.

You might remember the first week of that protest movement in Dada, in Southern Syria. We are told that the Syrian military started firing into peaceful protesters.

What the media didn’t report was the number of civilians and police who were killed by armed men in that week. And we were told by the same media that there were snipers on rooftops firing into peaceful demonstrators. They said, ‘government snipers’. Almost certainly, they were not. They were provocateurs, stirring as much trouble up as they could. Since those days, we know full well, that the number of foreigners coming to Syria has turned into a flood.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Jeremy, the thing you mention about snipers; I was in Damascus in April 2011, just one month after the start of the crisis, and I met a young man who had been to an anti-government rally just that morning and he said that two people were killed at the rally and others were shot. There were police at the rally with arms, but they did not draw their weapons. So it was just a mystery, who killed these people and Syrians know this.

Taksim Square Massacre template

JEREMY SALT: Once again, this is part of a template. This happens in many situations like this. Where you send your undercover agents into a situation. They open fire from a rooftop or from round a corner. No-one really knows who does it, but that’s the opportunity that the enemy wants, and its media wants, to portray the government as being brutal and oppressive – to killing its own people.

So, what we are seeing in Syria is just another repeat of what we have seen in many, many other countries. We had this in Istanbul, in the Taksim Square Massacre. There was a Mayday march and people started firing into the crowd. They were obviously agent-provocateurs. Turning the whole demonstration – disrupting it – turning it into a panic-stricken kind of riot. 'Cause people didn’t know what was going on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: One thing that people don’t know is that there was the CIA-orchestrated coup in Syria in 1949. The first CIA coup ever. The CIA had just been recently set up. This was in Syria. So Syrian people know their history, know their enemies –

JEREMY SALT: The whole thing is people in the Arab world generally have a very strong grasp of history and, you know, the people who suffer, who are the victims, remember the history. The people who do bad things to them; they want to move on, want to forget it.

So, of course there is a [?known] history. And it’s not just 1949; This goes back to the end of the first world war.

Syria has been ‘under siege’, effectively, all that time, up unto the present day. So, 1949, yes, that coup, Husni al-Zaim was put there by the CIA, and then he’s followed by a second man, Sami al-Hinnawi, then Adib Shishakli. And Shishakli, whether he was actually put-up to it by the Americans, is not clear. He probably wasn’t, but what he did, the Americans liked. Because, one thing that he didn’t like was a proposal to unite the fertile crescent. To bring Syria and Iraq together.

Iraq was under the domination of the British, so, if that had happened, it would have held a wonderful advantage for Britain – and the Americans didn’t want that. Because, beneath all of these things that we are talking about, all through the 20th century, up to the present day, there were these subterranean tensions between these outside powers.

Britain and France were wartime allies in 1914. Once the war was over, they were rivals.

And the British did what they could to limit French gains. And why did the French leave Syria in 1946? Because the British put pressure on them. Made them leave, because France was, relatively speaking, in a weak position. Britain was weak, but not as weak.

And we see, in the 1950s, Britain and the United States, this same sort of subterranean tension playing up because Britain’s fading as an imperial power, America’s moving into the region and doesn’t want the British to regain lost ground. So this is all part of the picture.

Secular society and women’s rights in Syria: if people knew the truth…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Another bit of history going back to those times, is that women were given the vote in Syria in 1949. And what disturbs me greatly is we [Australians/westerners] don’t really know what Syrian society is like. It’s hidden behind that ‘brutal dictator’. So our media is presenting a ‘brutal dictator’ versus ‘rebels’ and, behind that ‘brutal dictator’, you’ve got the army - a secular army - and you’ve got a secular society, and you’ve got women, who have extraordinary freedoms. Do you think, if we knew …?

Western governments and media do not want us to know the truth

JEREMY SALT: Yes, of course, if we knew; if people went there. I mean Syria had a quite reasonable tourist industry before this war broke out. We all know that Syria’s a fantastic country. A wonderful place, right. So, a number of people who go there would see that for themselves, but what the others have to rely on is what the media tell them. And the media doesn’t tell them the things that you’re saying. And the media wasn’t saying these things about many, many other countries.

The media will pick up a story, a narrative, which fits in with what they and the government wants. As it did over Iraq, as it has done with many other situations. So Syria becomes a target to be destroyed, therefore it’s not in the interests of the government or much of the media to talk about positive things about Syria. Not to talk about a secular society, freedom for women, and all the rest – because people would say then, ‘Well, why are we taking Syria? Why are we going for Syria?

And so the narrative over Syria has been shocking from the beginning. There has been no balanced reporting whatsoever about Syria. I mean, one or two reporters file reasonable reports from time to time, but 95, 97% of the coverage has not conformed in any way to the standards of proper journalism. It’s been completely biased. You haven’t seen the other side.

If you are a journalist the primary responsibility is what they call ‘balance’. You’re never going to achieve perfect balance, but in a situation like this, even if you want to report what the rebels are saying and doing - even if you and I don’t think they really are rebels – let them have their say. Let people think about it. But you have to report what the others are saying. You have to go to the Syrian government.

You’ve got to go to the victims of the rebels. They are very good – the media – for the last five years has talked about the ‘victims of the Syrian army’ – as they say it – but they haven’t paid any attention at all to the victims of these armed groups. And if they did, then naturally, people would get a very different idea.

If they [journalists] talked to the government and were able to see what happens in families who’ve lost young men. I mean, how many young men have died in Syria fighting these [‘rebel’] groups? Sixty thousand? Something like that. Plus all the others – tens of thousands – wounded.

If that were shown, the whole narrative would be disrupted. But it can’t be shown. It can’t be shown. You cannot really show the victims of war. This is common in all wars. They don’t like to show the gruesome detail.

We saw the other day how Obama was wiping away tears for children who had been shot dead in America. Well, this is the same Obama who has been ordering missile strikes in Yemen that have killed children.

Now if you show the victims of those missile strikes in Yemen – actually show the bodies – well then, the American public would do a double-take: ‘What on earth are we doing? Dead children! We’re killing children in Yemen.’

No, you don’t see those photographs. And the same in Syria. You don’t see the gory detail of what the armed groups are doing. It will be played down. But when the government does something, or the military does something, it’s magnified to the ultimate degree.

So there can’t be any trust in the mainstream media now, there cannot be. After the absolute pinnacle of propaganda about Iraq; Syria is even worse.

NOTES

[1] Denis Halliday - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Denis J. Halliday (born c.1941) was the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from 1 September 1997 until 1998. He is Irish and holds an M.A. in ..."

Economic Sanctions "Hit Wrong Target," Says Former U.N. ...
" “Economic Sanctions “Hit Wrong Target,” Says Former U.N. Humanitarian ... Iraq,” warned former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Hans von Sponeck, .... Commonwealth Club of California held at the swank Westin St. Francis Hotel in .."

[2] Use of ‘No Fly Zones’: The way this works is to accuse a government of bombing its own citizens then for external powers to declare a ‘no fly zone’, which is somehow interpreted to mean that those powers can enter the zone and bomb government planes which may actually be trying to defend themselves against armed takeovers that imperil citizens. So this stops a country from defending itself militarily and enables outside powers to take over, beginning with the airspace.

Dr Shaaban says UN Report claiming to uncover torture and murder by the Syrian government has no more credibility than the 'weapons of mass destruction' that the US used as an excuse to invade Iraq and which were later shown not to exist. "Everybody who is carrying arms against civilian and against the Government is a terrorist. The Russians are here according in response to the requests of the Syrian Government. The Russians are coordinating with us every single step and they are only fighting terrorists"; "The Security Council Resolution 2254 asked for one broad delegation from the opposition to represent the opposition in Geneva. Let us wait to see when that delegation is going to be made. The reality, Tony, again, is that these oppositions are paid by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. [They] represent the countries who are paying them, but they do not represent the Syrian people. However, we are ready to sit with them whenever they are ready for a dialogue as Security Council resolution say"; "President Assad has been elected by the Syrian people and it is the Syrian people who decide [whether he will go"; Transcript and link to videoed interview inside article.

Transcript of Interview

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: It's almost impossible to imagine what life is like for ordinary Syrians caught up in the multi-sided conflict where the rules of war are routinely ignored. This week the world got a rare glimpse into what conditions are like for those detained in Syria's official prisons and makeshift detention centres. UN investigators accused the Syrian Government of murdering and torturing prisoners on a scale so grand it amounts to extermination. Government soldiers have even filmed the abuses they're accused of.

The UN report also accused Islamic State extremists and other rebel groups of torturing and executing their detainees. It's estimated thousands have been killed over the past five years.

PAULO PINHEIRO, IND. COMMISSION OF INQUIRY ON SYRIA: Prisoners are routinely tortured and beaten, forced to live in unsanitary and overcrowded cells with little food and no medical care. Many perish in detention.

TONY JONES: Meanwhile, Russian air strikes continue to pound rebel positions. This amateur video shows just how devastating the conflict in Syria has become with civilians increasingly in the firing line. The video shows what's said to be a series of Russian attacks on Aleppo, the city where 50,000 people have been displaced.

Well as the war on the ground continues to escalate, there's a second track: a hard road towards peace through United Nations-mediated talks in Geneva which have stalled several times. Delegates from the Syrian Government and the opposition arrived in Geneva last week for the peace talks which will take place in two weeks' time at the end of February. Each side blamed the other for the collapse of the talks.

Well let's go live to Damascus now. Dr Bouthaina Shaaban is the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's top advisor and she joins us now.

Thanks for being there.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN, ADVISOR TO SYRIAN PRESIDENT: Hello.

TONY JONES: Is your government prepared to return to the UN Syrian peace talks in Geneva on February 25th?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, if you allow me first just to say that unfortunately what the UN report has mentioned at the beginning of this program is totally unfounded. They have never been to Syria, they haven't been talking to Syrian people, they have been making such a statement as means of targeting the Syrian people and Syria, part of this war on Syria, I consider that report. However, to answer your question, Tony, the Syrian Government has been prepared right from the beginning of this war to respond to every single effort that was made by Kofi Annan, by General Moon, by Lakhdar Brahimi, by General Dhabi and now by - by de Mistura. The problem is not with the Syrian Government; the problem is with the agents who had been created by other parties, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, claiming that those people represent the Syrian people. And I will put this question with your viewers, Tony: do Western people believe that Saudi Arabia is an example to bring an opposition that would make democracy and the freedom and the human rights? Is Saudi Arabia the example that the West looks up to?

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, I'm just going to interrupt the flow here to go back to what you said at the beginning because you took umbrage with the UN Human Rights Commission report into the deaths in detention.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Yes. Yes. Yes.

TONY JONES: Now the reports includes accounts from more than 500 survivors of the Government's detention centres. It of course goes on to talk about other deaths in militia-controlled detention centres. But you are the Government, so it says that some of the worst of the detention centres were controlled by the Syrian intelligence agencies. Almost all of the people, these 500, describe being the victims of or witnesses to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Are you saying that they're all liars?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I will answer you in two points, Tony. The first point is that this report, first Paulo Pinheiro was not allowed to come to Syria because we know how biased he is, but I will tell you that this report is as reliable as the claim that there was nuclear and mass destruction open in Iraq before occupying Iraq. And it is as - targeting Syria as a claim on Iraq was and we can see after 13 years of targeting Iraq what happened to Iraq and what happened to the Iraqi people because of all these unfounded claims that were targeting on Iraq. This is the first point. The second point: I will ask the UN, did they mention that millions of children that are being killed in front of our eyes in Yemen and Yemen did not do anything - isn't the obligation of the UN to question Saudi Arabia about this aggression, this horrible war on Yemeni people? What I'm saying is that ...

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, I'm going to - I'm sorry to ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: ... the UN report has no - has no credibility. One word, one word: the UN report has no credibility. It has not been done in Syria.

TONY JONES: The UN report, if I may say so ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: It has not been - yes. No credibility.

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, if I may say so, the UN report, as I say, sets out 500 witnesses who say they've all been in detention and they've witnessed horrors in detention in Syrian detention centres. More than 200 of those survivors say they witness one or more deaths in custody.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Those people ...

TONY JONES: They describe - if I can just finish. They describe their cell mates being beaten to death during interrogation or dying in their cells after being tortured. Have you taken the time to read the accounts of these individuals?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I did. I definitely did. And I will remind you of the first Geneva when we went to Montreal and there were pictures published in London claiming to be pictures of people who are dying of hunger in Syrian prison and later the whole world discovered that these pictures were made up by a cuttery - a company to be broadcast. I tell you, these people interviewed, if they were people who are interviewed, they are - they haven't been in Syrian prisons, they were not in Syria. This report was made in the Turkish and Jordanian camps of the supporters of the terrorists who had been targeting Syria for the last five years. It is another way of targeting the Syrian people and Syria,

TONY JONES: Well I'll just bring one particular case to your attention because there's so much detail around it. In 2014 a man held in the centre under the control of the Fourth Division of the Syrian Army had his genitals mutilated. There are case after case of torture and murder in this report and whether you believe the witnesses or not, can I ask you, how are you going to respond to it?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I - I would have believed a report that would be balanced and that would speak about ISIL crimes, about the moving of Syrian people from anywhere that terrorists occupy to God and the Syrian Government. If the Syrian Government is as this report describes, could you - could you tell me or could the UN tell me why 85 per cent of the Syrian population are in the areas controlled by the Government? Why wherever there is a terrorist organisation in any part of Syria, the whole Syrian people move to the areas where the Syrian Government is in full control? You know, I answered you, Tony ...

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban - Dr Shaaban, can I just make the point that's not entirely true as we see hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing the country and going to places like Turkey and making their way to Europe. Now this report calls for your government to take urgent action, to make direct orders to the military and the intelligence personnel associated with these prison camps, to order them to cease the arbitrary killing of prisoners. Will you do that?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: My government is not working for the UN to tell our government its duties. We are a responsible government, our people are extremely important to us, and as I said - I repeat again: such a report, plus the sanctions, plus all the measures that had been taken against the Syrian people to present food and medicine to arrive to the Syrian people, plus the terrorists - all these are different ways of targeting our country and our people.

TONY JONES: Alright.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: And this is why we have been suffering for five years from this war. It's about time that the world looks for the truth rather than for falsified accusations that are totally unfounded. It's about time. It's about time.

TONY JONES: OK. Bouthaina Shaaban, let's go back to these peace talks in Geneva which you say you are prepared to return to. The key condition for the peace talks to actually succeed is for there to be a ceasefire. Do you agree to that?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, the least thing that the world and the UN could have said is that the Syrian delegation arrived as scheduled by the - by the - by the Vienna group. The Syrian delegation was there ready with no pre-condition. The Syrian Government was - was - the Syrian delegation was positive and forthcoming. While the other side were fighting with each other and they were so irresponsible and they are the ones actually who brought the talks into an end. So, as I said, it is ...

TONY JONES: Yes, no, that is true. Dr Shaaban, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Dr Shaaban, that is true, they were squabbling amongst each other. But I'm actually asking if when you go back to the talks, you're prepared without conditions to offer up a ceasefire?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: You know, there is no - no such thing as this question. We are prepared to go back with no pre-condition and the other side should go back with no pre-condition. But then what the subject or the timetable of the talks is left up to the Syrian. This is what Security Council Resolution 2254 says. It says it is the Syrian people who decide what is the agenda, it is the Syrian people who discuss the agenda and it is the Syrian people who agree on the agenda.

TONY JONES: Yes.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: No-one should impose any agenda on the Syrian people.

TONY JONES: That is true, but there is also a plan to end the conflict which has been endorsed by Russia, by Iran, by the United States and many others. It's that the peace talks would establish a transitional government in Syria which would rule the country for 18 months, after which ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: You know ...

TONY JONES: I'll just finish the point. After which point there would be elections. In 18 months there would be elections. Do you agree to that plan?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Tony. Tony, Tony, I am here to be informative to your viewers and I respect your viewers. I'm speaking from thousands of miles away. The only way and the best way to end this war on Syria is to have Western countries truly wanting to fight terrorism, to join the Syrian Army and the Russians in fighting terrorism. You know at Ramadi in Iraq, they said that the American coalition liberated Ramadi. 90 per cent of Ramadi is destroyed. Our ecology is destroyed, our factories are destroyed, our country is destroyed, our agriculture is destroyed and yet Western countries say (inaudible) ... how to stop the conflict. It's very simple. Join us in fighting terrorism. That's how we stop the war on Syria. But not to speak about ceasefire and the human, etc. with the - with terrorism speeding in our country and with the Army financing and facilitating terrorism from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar with the full support of the US and the West. This is the reality of the situation, believe me.

TONY JONES: Well, I mean - well, one other - one other harsh reality is that the Russian air strikes that you're talking about, it said 90 per cent of them are not hitting ISIS terrorists, but they're hitting the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups backed by the United States. This is a huge problem, isn't it? I mean, if you're fighting terrorists rather than opposition groups, why are you bombing so many of the opposition groups?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: (Laughs) This is one problem with the language that the West is using. What is the difference between someone who kills in Nubl and Zahraa and someone who kills in Hama? Everybody who is carrying arms against civilian and against the Government is a terrorist. The Russians are here according in response to the requests of the Syrian Government. The Russians are coordinating with us every single step and they are only fighting terrorists, and Tony, allow me to give you one example. When 60,000 people in Nubl and Zahraa were liberated by the Syrian Army supported by Russian aircraft, the Turkish and the Western media said that all the roads to support the opposition had been cut. They did not speak about 60,000 people who were liberated. They were speaking about the ability of the Syrian Army to stop the financing and the arming of the terrorists. This is the truth, Tony, honestly.

TONY JONES: Do I take it ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I am Syrian. I have been here throughout.

TONY JONES: Can I interrupt you for another question?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please.

TONY JONES: Can I take it from what you're saying that a ceasefire is not even close, that there's no chance of a ceasefire while any opposition group is still fighting against your government? Is that what you're saying?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: No, no, that's not what I'm saying. Please don't let me say what I don't want to say. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the agenda of the talks would be put by the Syrian people with no pre-condition. But I'm saying the Western interpretation of what is going on on the ground does not at all correspond with reality.

TONY JONES: Alright. OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are fighting terrorists.

TONY JONES: OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are trying to liberate Aleppo.

TONY JONES: Yes,

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are trying to liberate Aleppo. Why the West doesn't want Aleppo to be liberated from terrorists? Why? This is the question. Why don't they want our city to be liberated?

TONY JONES: Can I ask you this - Can I ask you this then because it is a fundamental question strategically?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please, please, please. Please, please.

TONY JONES: Taking Aleppo back for the Government would be a huge win for the Government.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Ya.

TONY JONES: This could take a very long time and it does seem to me that you're saying the fighting will continue backed by the Russians at least until that happens.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Liberating the people of Aleppo is the most important thing. It is not taking Aleppo to Government. The Government is the Government of the entire Syria. There are two million people in Aleppo who have been without electricity, without water and missiles are falling on them, killing children, civilians. The historic city of Aleppo has been destroyed by these terrorists and yet there is someone in the West who would say why should Aleppo be liberated of terrorism? Is this something good to say?

TONY JONES: Well, I mean, once again I'll just make the point that the images that we just saw a moment ago were from Russian air strikes on Aleppo which were hitting civilians.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: That's not true. That's not true. Russian air strikes, they are only striking to help the Syrian Army to strike terrorists and the Russians do not do a single thing without co-operating with the Syrian Army. The so-called American coalition is not coordinating with Syria. They did not even strike one oil truck three years they were here before the Russians. Why did the Russians were able to discover that ISIL is the one who is selling the oil to Turkey and to Europe through Turkey. Why the Americans did not discover that before the Russians came?

TONY JONES: I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but there is one fundamental question that I need to ask you ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please. Yep, please.

TONY JONES: ... and that is that the pre-condition of the opposition groups and of the United States and other countries for any transitional process is that President Assad steps out of it, steps aside and removes himself from the process. Will that ever happen?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, you know, this - what you call opposition group, the Security Council Resolution 2254 asked for one broad delegation from the opposition to represent the opposition in Geneva. Let us wait to see when that delegation is going to be made. The reality, Tony, again, is that these oppositions are paid by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. They are not nationalists who grew up in the country, who have political parties, they are not like Australian opposition.

TONY JONES: OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I came to Australia and I visited the Opposition.

TONY JONES: Alright.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: There is a political party, there is government, there are representatives of people. Those represent the countries who are paying them, but they do not represent the Syrian people. However, we are ready to sit with them whenever they are ready for a dialogue as Security Council resolution say.

TONY JONES: And we're nearly out of time, but I've got to get you to answer this critical question: will President Assad agree to stand aside or will he put his own power ahead of the interests of his people?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I'm - President Assad has been elected by the Syrian people and it is the Syrian people who decide.

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, thank you very much for agreeing to speak to us again.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Thank you.

Going Underground's Afshin Rattansi interviews the former British Ambassador to Syria on the irony of London hosting a Syria conference to aid refugees while Cameron drops bombs to create more. "This week London hosted the Syrian Donor conference in an attempt to raise money for the people UK bombs continue to displace to the shores of Europe. But as Philip Hammond mulls sending guns to Libya to quell the rise of Isis - made possible by the British toppling of Gadaffi - should we really even believe his claims that Russia is helping ISIS/Daesh by bombing Cameron's supposedly 'moderate' rebels." (Afshin Rattansi) First published at https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/331567-assange-detainment-syria-conference/

Below is the video of the full show, embedded. The Peter Ford interview sequence starts at 17minutes 40 seconds into show:

Great advances this week by the Syrian army and Russian air force have broken the rebel siege of two towns, and broken their umbilical link with Turkey. But they have also revealed the truth about Western media 'journalism'...

Something really significant happened this week. It wasn’t the last-ditch attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict in Geneva, or their failure. Neither was it the game-changing developments on the ground in Syria and the tightening of the noose around the foreign-backed terrorist armies – though this was certainly ‘significant’.

What happened was that the mask of ‘humanitarian relief’ fell off the Western interventionists and their media cheer squads like so much dirty linen, exposing the naked self-interest behind the whole rotten Syrian conspiracy.
While the ridiculous deliberations over what style of terrorist was an acceptable participant in the Geneva talks may have been a vexing spectacle for Syrians, and the attention paid by the Western media to the ‘High Negotiations Committee’ an affront to their senses, it didn’t really surprise anyone.

Perhaps Syrians weren’t surprised either by the rapid gains of the Russian-Syrian offensive and moves to cut the last convenient border crossing west of Aleppo – something which so many had been hanging out for for so long and specially in rebel-besieged Aleppo. Unlike all those ignorant souls unable to see out of the Western media bubble, they had been watching it all unfold for weeks, as well as being conscious of the strategic significance and urgency of cutting Turkey out of the Syrian war – thanks in no small part to the Russian military’s free supply of information.

But as a collective cheer echoed around Syria when it was announced that the border had been cut, a collective spasm engulfed Western media commentators and government spokesmen, rapidly spreading to UN representatives and Aid agencies, Foreign Ministers and leaders.

“Rebel supply lines have been cut!” they cried indignantly, as if Russia had cut them by accident, not realising the rebels depended on these ‘supplies’ that came in from Turkey just to survive.

It may be a struggle to understand how it can be that all these people ‘just don’t get it’- don’t understand that the Syrian army and the Russian air force, Hezbollah and Iran are targeting their ‘rebels’ intentionally; that they are trying to kill them or drive them out, or trap them so they are forced to surrender. This is after all what military campaigns do, and it is abundantly clear that only a military solution is now possible against these murderous militants.

But perhaps they do understand it, and this is just ‘wilful ignorance’ – an attempt to maintain the sham reality of the ‘revolution’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’ so they can go on using it to conceal their unrelenting campaign to seize power from Damascus.

What the falling of the ‘humanitarian mask’ has revealed is that all these drivers and accomplices to the armed insurgency have lied and obfuscated and spun their dirty conspiracy from the start. But now that Russia has ripped off their cover they are shameless about what they’ve done.

What is more, the admissions of complicity in this illegal armed insurrection against Syria’s elected government have come first from Western reporters and commentators, such as the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Matt Brown, who framed the news on the breaking of ‘rebel supply lines’ like this:

MATT BROWN: "It's substantial because of that supply line. It demonstrates the power of Russian air strikes because the UN says that they were unprecedented in this operation.

It's also cut the rebels off from supplies of food, fuel, ammunition, weapons and fighters that they were getting down that supply route from Turkey."

That’s right – the ‘rebels’, who we have been told for years need our ‘aid’ because they are being massacred and starved by the Syrian government have not been doing so badly after all.

Every time there was a new ‘massacre’ we have listened to earnest discussions on supplying ‘non-lethal aid’, and humanitarian aid, and demands that ‘humanitarian corridors’ must be opened.

And when the Syrian government has opposed these plans on the grounds that arms and ammunition might be smuggled in with the humanitarian aid, it has then been blamed for the failure and the ongoing war.

How astounding it is then to hear this admission from someone like Brown – who despite his record of advocacy for the rebel cause, has never revealed his knowledge of its umbilical connection to Turkey. In fact this reality has been concealed from his Australian audience at all costs, even though it’s been plain as daylight to the rest of us.

Back in 2013 Matt Brown made a documentary called ‘Ibrahim’s war’, which told the story of a 11 year old boy living in the rebel-occupied part of Aleppo, whose father had abandoned his job and went out every day to fight ‘on the front’. That this was actually with the Front – the Al Nusra Front – was never admitted by Brown, even less what this terrorist group was actually doing – targeting neighbouring residential areas with snipers and indiscriminate rocket and mortar fire.

Brown related his experience at the time he made his ‘UN award-winning’ documentary in the report above:

"In 2013, I drove down to Aleppo from the north, a little further to the east than where this has happened in what is now territory controlled by the Islamic State group; and earlier I had hiked in further to the west across the border into the towns west of Aleppo.

We slept in the same houses as foreign fighters actually, who were also crossing in, and the government is now pushing in that direction.

So, it just gives you some idea of how cut off the rebels in Aleppo are becoming. That's underlined the power also of Iranian advisors, the pro-government militias and those Russian air strikes and the rebels say it proves that the government isn't serious about those peace talks."

It might sometimes be a narrow line between journalism and political advocacy, but for Brown and his media colleagues this line has evidently now become invisible. But whether they identify themselves as political actors has almost ceased to matter, because as far as their audience is concerned they are only journalists, award-winning ones. When they report what 'the rebels say' - how would this audience know they are hearing dangerous nonsense?

As is was, proof that the rebels aren't serious about peace talks was just provided by the ABC's sister state TV channel, SBS in its evening news bulletin about the latest developments around Aleppo. Opinion was sought from the Syrian Opposition's 'Chief Negotiator', who turned out to be none other than Mohammed Alloush, the new leader of one of the Saudi's most favoured terrorist groups in Syria.

Do they really believe that the Syrian government could 'negotiate' with this man?

Article first published in Russian Insider. Check the comments out there too.

Videos inside: These films are dated 21 January 2016. They show successful attempts by the Syrian government to make Syria safe again. The government has been able to reconcile with 'rebel groups' that recognise that war is tearing their country apart. Refugee activists please take note. Nearly the biggest problem that Syrians continue to face is the refusal by US-NATO and its allies, such as Australia, to recognise that we must all work with the Syrian Government to make Syria safe. Because of these evil US-NATO policies, it is most unlikely that these positive developments will be promoted in the Australian media, if they are transmitted at all. So, please send these films round to everyone you know, to help end this war and place pressure on western governments to stop intervening.

Getting back to a normal life in Al-Hussinieh

Getting back to a normal life in Al-Hussinieh

Al-Hussinieh was the first quarter in Damascus and its countryside to witness a reconciliation which allowed its residents to return and live there.

The reconciliation process took 3 months to be achieved, and it followed a bloody three-year war in the village which led locals to evacuate it, because of the clashes between the Syrian army and armed groups, but now, after the reconciliation, life is gradually getting back to normal.

100s of displaced families return home in southern Damascus

Hundreds of displaced Syrians have been able to return to their homes in a district in southern Damascus. This comes as part of a reconciliation deal between the Syrian government and foreign-backed militants. Press TV’s Mohamad Ali has more on the story from the Syrian capital. [1]

US-NATO policies in Middle East threaten whole populations and societies

As mentioned in the first paragraph, nearly the biggest problem that Syrians continue to face is the refusal by US-NATO and its allies, such as Australia, to recognise that we must all work with the Syrian Government to make Syria safe.

Unfortunately there are many signs that US-NATO actually wants to completely destroy Syria in crimes that would, without exaggeration, dwarf Hitler's 'final solution'. Despite US-NATO's irreversible destruction of Iraqi and Libyan society, the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has recently agreed with the criminally destructive US-NATO desire to subdivide secular Syria into many different religious and ethnic models.

To her credit, shadow foreign affairs minister, Tania Plibersek has said what a bad idea this is, that:

"The prospect of of partitioning Syria or Iraq, or redrawing its boundaries to reflect the sectarian divisions already consuming the country, was easier said than done and would likely result in fresh fighting.[...] “There are generations of ­people who have grown up with an identity as a Syrian or an Iraqi,’’ Ms Plibersek said. “Recent polls confirm many people feel a sense of national identity and feel the conflict is soluble.’’ For that reason, Ms Plibersek said, talk of redrawing borders was unhelpful at this stage of the conflict. “While the borders are reasonably modern constructs, opening the possibility of redrawing borders is not likely to reduce conflict,’’ she said. “New conflicts would emerge about where these borders were drawn.’’ Source:"Tanya Plibersek rejects Bob Carr’s Syria plan."

NOTES, SOURCES, LINKS FOR LIVE REPORTS ETC

[2]
Read More http://me-channel.com/

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I was honoured to have met the Syrian Foreign Minister Mr Walid Mouallem yesterday in New Delhi. Also present was the Syrian Ambassador Mr Riad Abbas and a host of other Indian and foreign dignitaries and veteran journalists. Mani Shanker Aiyar, the veteran Parliamentarian is also seated to the right, at the table in the photogram.

A high powered Syrian delegation has been present in Delhi, where the Govt of India has supported the Syrian-Russian position, that the Syrian crisis must be resolved by Syrians alone through a process of dialogue, constitutional reforms and elections. The Syrian delegation met the Indian PM Narendra Modi, the Foreign Minister Ms Sushma Swaraj and the National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.

The two governments share a common political position and have decided to exchange Intelligence on ISIS and other terrorist organizations. On the economic front many agreements have been reached and Syria sees India as a major contributor to the growth of the Syrian economy, even in the current crisis, but especially in the post-war reconstruction phase, in the sectors of Energy, Agriculture, Food Grains, Infrastructure, Pharmaceuticals and other sectors.

The Syrian delegation was earlier in Moscow and Beijing before they arrived in New Delhi, as part of the international diplomacy prior to the Geneva Talks scheduled for the 25th of January 2016.

On 10 January 2016 SBS (Australian multicultural television) screened Martin Smith's Inside Assad’s Syria. Australia is blatantly aligned with US-NATO forces that seek to remove the Syrian Government and Australian media propaganda means that we don't usually hear from the other side. Surprisingly Smith interviewed many supporters of the Assad Government and the Syrian Arab Army. But it was as if, to get this other view onto SBS the [almost theatrically grim-faced, suspicious and disapproving] journalist had to use some standard anti-Assad techniques:

Standard anti-Syrian government techniques

These were:

Continuous use of the word 'regime' instead of government, although Bashar al Assad was legally reelected in June 2014 by an overwhelming majority, despite opposition alternatives. See /taxonomy/term/6173

Early mention of the 'notorious barrel bombs' (showed footage of bombs dropping from aircraft). No views or analysis countering these dubious claims were given. The President's own exhaustive responses to these explanations were not referred to. The video below is of an interview by Sixty Minutes with Bashar al Assad on accusations about the use of barrel bombs and of chlorine as a poisonous gas (although I don't think Martin Smith's doco mentioned chlorine.)

Although Smith interviewed people who had lost relatives to the 'rebels', the use of bloody footage seemed confined to illustrating the effects of bombing designated as carried out by the Government. There was no equivalent criticism of the 'rebels' techniques and casualties. Smith's allocated Syrian journalist, however, was killed by rebels a couple of days into the doco, which also meant that the journo was unable to complete his original itinerary. There was no sensible reflection on the killing of his journo by so-called 'rebels', although Smith did describe himself as shaken by the death.

The handling of an invitation by the government to a cultural event in Syria, a performance by the Syrian Symphony Orchestra, seemed insensitive and manipulative. Rather than appreciating that the people of Damascus are heroically maintaining cultural and state institutions, there seemed to be an implication that something else might be going on.

Visit to the famous coastal resort of Latakia, in Syria

Smith's film characterised this resort more or less as a rich Alawite stronghold. This is in line with the mainstream propaganda that Alawites in Syria are oppressing a Sunni majority. As Assad says himself, if this were true, then surely the armed forces would have got rid of him long ago, since they are 60 - 65% Sunni, and Sunnis form the majority of the population. Many Syrians will tell you, however, that they are not Sunnis or Alawites or Christians; they are Syrians. In this they are emphasising the non-sectarian nature of Syria. Smith did disclose that more than a million refugees are now living in Latakia resort.

This effect of presenting the resort as the exclusive preserve of Alawite hippocrites works to create cognitive dissonance against the information about the refugees that contradicts that first impression. A friend who is well informed on Syria told me that an acquaintance of hers seemed to derive from the Latakia part of this documentary that the Syrian wealthy, despite the war, were living high on the hog whilst the poor suffered, and entirely overlooked the part of the report that noted the presence of the refugees who now live in this 'exclusive' Alawite resort.

Sophie Shepnardze interview: Assad asks how, if most of Syria is against him, they have not got rid of him.

Despite Smith's biasing presentation, nonetheless, we did hear almost exclusively the pro-government side. We also heard the story of someone who defected from the Syrian Arab Army to the rebels then back again, although somehow the punchline escaped me. The journo's comment seemed gratuitous, that he suspected that the government had wanted him to hear about this.

Does SBS accept non-propaganda items?

Conclusion. Is it actually possible to get the other side onto SBS (or the ABC)? If you wanted to, would you have to present it within those trophes of barrel bombs and 'regime' and wear an exaggeratedly sceptical expression when interviewing pro syrian government people? In other words, should we give this journo, Martin Smith, credit for getting the other side onto SBS? Or might we assume, unfortunately, that many people would respond to Smith's propaganda techniques and his stagey suspicion by assuming that the many Syrians who openly prefer Assad leading Syria to the prospect of the country being divided up among a bunch of religious gangs, are poor brainwashed idiots in need of western intervention.This was a PBS funded documentary and they are leaders in western propaganda.

To paraphrase that old Pete Seeger song, "Where have all the ISIS gone? Gone to Turkey -- every one." (Except of course for the ones who tried to return to Saudi Arabia, foolishly thinking that just because the House of Saud paid their salaries, they would be welcomed back home.) "When will they ever learn?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KLNwPppKTM

American neo-colonialists has supposedly been bombing ISIS positions in Syria and Iraq for over a year now -- and during all that time ISIS has, coincidentally, been getting stronger and stronger. However, Russia bombs ISIS for only three months and suddenly ISIS is gone! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LZ2R2zW2Yc

But where did ISIS go to?

According to journalist Finian Cunningham, "Also missing or downplayed in the Western media coverage of the truces across Syria is the question of where the surrendering mercenaries are being evacuated to. They are not being bussed to other places inside Syria. That shows that there is no popular support for these insurgents. Despite copious Western media coverage contriving that the Syrian conflict is some kind of 'civil war' between a despotic regime and a popular pro-democracy uprising, the fact that surrendering militants have nowhere to go inside Syria patently shows that these insurgents have no popular base....

"So where are the terrorist remnants being shipped to? According to several reports, the extremists are being given safe passage into Turkey, where they will receive repair and sanctuary from the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – and no doubt subsidized by the European Union with its $3.5 billion in aid to Ankara to 'take care of refugees'". http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43837.htm

I mean seriously, President Erdogan, do the people of Turkey really want to have thousands of ISIS foreign fighters descending on them in mass -- men who have been raping, pillaging and beheading at will for the past four years? Once a brigand, always a brigand? Turkish citizens, sucks to be you. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34373-focus-the-misinformation-mess

But several of the rumors I've been hearing lately suggest that many of these foreign fighters are also being shipped off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban as well. Which brings up my next point. After Russia destroyed the weapons supply lines to ISIS in Syria, ISIS was dead in the water within just three months. So why are the Taliban still fighting on (and on) in Afghanistan after 14 long years? Who is running weapons supply lines to them? http://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-air-force-us-airstrike-takes-out-battalion-of-iraqi-troops-who-were-battling-isis/5496826

The Taliban aren't exactly manufacturing weapons back in the caves of Tora Bora, now are they? Hardly. But those weapons have to come from somewhere. My guess is that the same weapons-manufacturers who have been supplying ISIS for the past four years have also been supplying the Taliban for the past 14 years. Now who could that be? It's definitely not Russia or Iran. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2015/11/yemen-syria-palestine-paris-gun-sales.html

And why has it taken 14 years to cut off weapons supplies to the Taliban when Russia was able to cut off weapons supplies to ISIS in just three months? Who the freak knows? Certainly not me. But if it were up to me, I would follow the money. And I would start by asking myself just two questions. "Which country is the largest manufacturer of weapons in the world today?" and "Why have heroin sales in Afghanistan increased forty-fold since America invaded it -- and what is that money being spent on?" http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-to-Blame-for-Spike-in-Opium-Production-in-Afghanistan-20150416-0028.html

Article originally published on Jane Stillwater's blogspot on January 10, 2016.

Zahran Alloush, the leader and founder of Jaish al Islam Alloush, an extremist Salafi group supported by Saudi Arabia, was killed by an airstrike whilst attending a meeting with other armed Syrian groups on Friday. The group's ideology is similar to that of ISIS, and they have planned to overthrow the secular Syrian government and replace it with an Islamic dictatorship. Bizarrely, SBS, an Australian television station has reported on Alloush as if he were a leader of one of the key opposition groups who ‘would negotiate with the Syrian government’ next month.

Following the UN negotiated settlement in Yarmouk yesterday, there was a report on Australia’s SBS World News which presented the whole situation from the opposition’s point of view.

Once upon a time, there was a terrible tyrant who lived in an ancient castle with his family in the land of Sham. They lived in decadent luxury, feasting it was said on the young and succulent progeny of the land they ruled over. The people living below slaved to scratch a living and keep some food for themselves, suffering constant fear of the tyrant's soldiers and their terrible weapons.

But one day the benevolent rulers of the neighbouring lands got together and agreed to help the poor peasants of the land of Sham fight for their rights, and even overthrow the wretched tyrant. The royal leaders of these lands, who followed a faith of tolerance and peace and love, opened their gold purses for the people of Sham, and bought them gleaming swords to protect themselves from the tyrant's raiders, as well as new tunics of black goat hair and supplies of grain and oil and incense for their homes. But they also gave them wonderful books full of sacred words and prayers that the people could recite, and shout out to curse the wicked tyrant and his dreadful men.

But the people of Sham still struggled, as the tyrant found new ways to steal their food and to terrorise them, so the kings got together again and hatched a plan. They would send some of their own honoured knights and courtiers to the land of Sham and lay siege to the castle, cutting the vital supplies of oil and of fuel and food to the tyrant and his family by kidnapping his men with their cargoes. The oil which came from the land of Sham was very valuable, so the benevolent kings of Krisis - which was the name of their lands, traded the special oil they had captured for tools and weapons for the peasants of Sham. Then the kings sent instructions to their knights and courtiers on how to strike at the castle when the tyrant had been so weakened by the siege that he could no longer resist the swords and curses of the knights of Krisis and the armies of 'Free Sham'...

This is an ancient story, and the ending we can only guess at now, because the land of Sham, which is now known as 'Syria', looks very different. In fact it is almost the mirror image of the old fable, as Syria's ruler is anything but an evil tyrant and lives in a small palace far from his family's home and lands. He doesn't need to protect himself from his people with walls and weapons, because they will protect him, while he keeps them safe from the evils of the world. And those evils are now all around, as the lands of Krisis are now occupied by kings and princes who know nothing of justice and humanity and occupy themselves in counting their gold and polishing their swords and guns, and plotting on how to attack their neighbours to steal their property and drive out their people....

- and thus begins the story of St George and the Dragon of Da'esh...