US-NATO propaganda

During a Barcelona concert on April 13, Roger Waters denounced the Syrian White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists.” Warning that the groups’ unverified claims about chemical weapons attacks across insurgent-held territory were aimed at triggering Western military intervention, Waters cautioned his audience, “If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings.”

In fact, Waters had first hand experience with the powerful pro-war PR operation behind the White Helmets. Back in October 2016, a public relations firm representing the White Helmets called The Syria Campaign attempted to recruit Waters by inviting him to a lavish dinner organized by a Saudi-British billionaire, Hani Farsi. The rock legend and renowned activist was told that by signing on to the organization’s mission, he could help “elevate the voices of Syria’s peaceful heroes”

[This article, by Max Blumenthal, is republished in part from Gray Zone.]

Just days before his recent concert in Barcelona, Waters was lobbied again to support the White Helmets, this time by an eccentric French photojournalist affiliated with what he described as a “very powerfull [sic] syrian network.” The activist demanded to join Waters on stage and deliver a message for the “children of syria.”

Waters did not respond to either request.

These emailed solicitations from White Helmets representatives and activists were provided by Waters to the Grayzone Project, and are published in full at the bottom of this article. The documents demonstrate how the organization’s well-funded public relations apparatus has targeted celebrities as the key to the hearts and minds of the broader Western public.

Unlike many other A-listers, however, Waters took time to research the White Helmets and investigate its ulterior agenda. 

“I was quite suspicious after I was invited to that [White Helmets] dinner,” Waters told the Grayzone Project. “And now my worst suspicions have been confirmed.”

The Syria Campaign’s initial approach

The October 2016 dinner invite was delivered to Waters by a representative for the Corniche Group, an international holding company belonging to the family of the London-based Saudi billionaire Hani Farsi. Farsi was seeking Waters’ presence at a fundraising dinner he had organized on behalf of The Syria Campaign.

The Syria Campaign is a well-funded public relations front established to promote The White Helmets as a group of heroic rescuers who require the protection of Western militaries. Through series of petitions and public demonstrations, The Syria Campaign has unsuccessfully pushed for a No Fly Zone in Syria that would have likely resulted in the kind of Western military intervention that toppled Libyan President Moammar Qaddafi and destabilized Libya.

The slick PR firm has also resorted to astroturfed public stunts like a pro-White Helmets flash mob and orchestral performance at New York City’s Grand Central Station where participants were paid up to $600 each.

Farsi’s relationship to the The Syria Campaign had been kept private until now. A Syrian-British oil tycoon named Ayman Asfari has taken a much more vocal role with the PR group, providing it with seed money to advance his mission to stimulate US and UK support for regime change in Syria. Waters was informed that Asfari’s wife, Sawsan, would be on hand for the 2016 White Helmets fundraising dinner.

Read more and see the emails at https://grayzoneproject.com/

Dear Marina,

As producer of the segment this morning about the current campaign to liberate Eastern Ghouta from its terrorist besiegers, I would like to offer this alternative perspective on what is actually happening in Syria. I understand only too well that all Western governments, NGOs and UN organisations, including Amnesty International, speak with one voice, but they still present the situation in Damascus and its suburbs in completely misleading and false terms.

While these voices talk of a “humanitarian disaster”, and make many claims regarding deaths of children and attacks on “hospitals” and “Syrian civil defence”, their sources are not in any way trustworthy.

The armed groups who have occupied Damascus eastern suburbs since 2012, holding the local population under siege, are the very same groups who staged the so-called Sarin attack in Ghouta in 2013, distributing videos of kidnapped children they had themselves gassed through the sympathetic media networks supporting the Syrian insurgency.

Regardless of whether we believe this in the West, or dismiss it as propaganda from “Assad apologists” or “Kremlin Stooges”, the fact remains that the vast majority of Syrian citizens know it to be the case, along with most Russians, Iranians and Lebanese. Their media do not present videos produced by the “White Helmets” as credible evidence of crimes by the Syrian Army, but as evidence of the criminals behind the White Helmets organisation in Westminster and Washington.

And while our media and leaders just dismiss Russian opinion and expertise as invalid, and portray Russia’s role at the UN as criminal, it is only the media who actually believe this. There would not be an intelligence agency in the US/UK/French/Israeli/Saudi network who does NOT know the truth of what their countries are trying to do to Syria, which makes their crime in fomenting and sponsoring the war on Syria truly the crime of the century.

People close to Syria and Russia, including myself, have been trying to bring the truth to the attention of the media here for the last seven years, as it was apparent within weeks of the so-called uprising that it was not genuine and not supported by Syrians.

There are now many commentators and journalists presenting the truth in alternative internet sites in the West, and in public broadcasters in the ‘non-West’ such as on RT, Al Mayadeen, Press TV and Xinhua.net, and at some point the Western mainstream is going to have to come to terms with this.

But things don’t look good. Many people fear that a “World War” is imminent, because of the US and Israeli attacks on Syria, and the NATO moves in Ukraine. Given the US recent talk of using tactical nuclear strikes against conventional attacks, such a conflict will rapidly become an inferno.

We have reached a crisis point, but it will not be solved by UN meetings calling for ceasefires, or Amnesty calling out the alleged war crimes of America’s enemies. What must be called out is OUR OWN direct sponsorship of terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria, including IS, to achieve our global strategic objectives.
These objectives have absolutely nothing to do with “democracy and freedom” or “responsibility to protect”, as the war on Syria so amply demonstrates. This war would have been finished in 2013 had the West’s media organisations done their job, and exposed the sponsors of the Sarin attack – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the US.
It is these countries, including all their partners – Australia, UK, France, Qatar, UAE, who hold responsibility for the half million deaths in Syria, and the swath of destruction across the region, NOT the Syrian government, nor its allies, Hezbollah, Russia and Iran and Iraq.

Veteran correspondent Robert Fisk is one journalist who has learnt the lesson that the mainstream needs to learn, and wrote this particularly accurate article about the campaign on Ghouta yesterday.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ghouta-siege-syria-death-toll-civilians-armed-attack-rebel-aleppo-latest-a8221086.html

I would like to think that all at the ABC read this and think about it, as they – and probably quite innocently – shield the real criminals from the public’s view. Fisk used to regularly get interviews – with Fran Kelly amongst many others – on the ABC, perhaps until he started showing sympathy towards the Syrian army. It is urgent that his view is now shared with your audience again, along with that of many other investigative journalists and commentators who write in the alternative press, and are frequently interviewed on its programs.

I hope you can bring this to the attention of your colleagues, and senior staff.

I welcome your response.

kind regards,

David Macilwain,
Sandy Creek, Victoria, 3695

A recent article speculating that the U.S. and Russia may be trying to form five new states in the Middle-East relies on some inaccurate assumptions that could be quite dangerous if they were really to become the basis for policy:

1) "Sunni Syria" as a separate entity from "Baathist/Allawite Syria." Most of the Syrian Arab Army that has been fighting foreign-backed rebels in Syria for 4 years are in fact Sunni Arabs. Despite immense bounties (by Syrian standards) offered to officers and soldiers to defect, there have been few takers. While about 70% of the population may be Sunni Arabs, 55% of Syrians told a Qatari-funded YouGov poll in December 2011 that they did not want President Assad to resign, even as the U.S. and its allies were launching a proxy war with that objective. So dividing the country on this kind of quasi-sectarian basis could be as dangerous and destabilizing as it has been in Iraq.

2) "The US doesn't trust anyone but the Kurds." The U.S. only trusts some of the Kurds: the KDP and PUK (barely) in Iraq, not the PKK in Turkey nor the newly autonomous Rojava in Syria. It is unlikely that the Kurds the U.S. "trusts" could dominate the others, and a U.S.-backed effort to establish them as the dominant party in a Kurdish state could lead to yet another bloody and intractable conflict - one reason it has not been tried by previous U.S. interventionists!

3) "Sunni Iraq and Shi'a Iraq". The demonstrations taking place in many parts of government-controlled Iraq are directed at the sectarianism as well as the corruption of the Abadi government. The sectarian division of Iraq was the result not of long-standing divisions in Iraqi society but of U.S. divide-and-rule policy. The conversion of a majority of Iraqis to Shiism took place in the 19th century, not earlier, as formerly nomadic tribes settled down to an agricultural way of life in newly fertile areas around the Shiite shrines of Najaf and Karbala, after the completion of the Hindiyya Canal in 1803. In the 20th century, urbanization brought millions of Shiites to Baghdad and other cities, but many tribes had members of both sects and intermarriage of Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites was common. After the 1958 revolution, many urban Iraqis became atheists and many grew up without ever knowing which sect their parents or grandparents had belonged to. After the US invasion, a survey by Oxford Research International in February 2004 found that only 14% of Iraqis preferred sectarian politicians and parties to secular ones. While the U.S. policy of sectarian and ethnic division has to some extent been self-fulfilling, it would be a travesty to formally divide the country on that basis without giving the people of Iraq a real choice in the matter.

In Iraq and Syria, imposing policies based on self-serving, simplistic, foreign projections of these complex societies is as dangerous as it has ever been. The goal must be negotiated ceasefires followed by political transitions through which the people of Iraq and Syria can determine their own future.

About the author

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapter on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader. He is also the author of this 2012 article about the crisis in Syria : http://www.alternet.org/world/armed-rebels-and-middle-eastern-power-plays-how-us-helping-kill-peace-syria

Regime change PR: Your guide to Western-sponsored propaganda in Syria “Propaganda is the spreading of information in support of a cause. It’s not so important whether the information is true or false or if the cause is just or not — it’s all propaganda.” “The word, propaganda is often used in a negative sense, especially for politicians who make false claims to get elected or spread rumours to instigate regime change [sic]. In fact, any campaign that is used to persuade can be called propaganda.” Russia’s involvement in Syria has caused a flurry of “cold war”, Assad/ISIS co-dependency propaganda, all being produced by the usual suspects and all with the primary objective of invoking a No Fly Zone in Syria and stoking the “Russian Bear threat” fires that have been smouldering for some time. I am going to attempt to dismantle this propaganda edifice one brick at a time. Article first published at http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/10/02/humanitarian-propaganda-war-against-syria-led-by-avaaz-and-the-white-helmets/ on October 2, 2015 by Vanessa Beeley at 21stcenturywire.com.

Russia Attacks CIA’s ‘Moderate Rebels’ in Syria 

In a Telegraph article dated 1^st October 2015, with the headline British Troops Head to Saudi Arabia to train Syrian rebels, it was stated:

“The FSA is considered the most moderate of factions fighting Bashar al-Assad’s government, but has been increasingly side-lined on the battlefield by more extremist Islamist factions. It has also been riven by leadership disputes.

“American-led attempts to train up moderates to hold ground against ISIL are months behind schedule because of the difficulty of finding groups which were not linked to the extremists.” 

The term “moderate rebels” has become one of the most significant misnomers (by now, a running joke in international intelligence circles) of this soon-to-be five year conflict.  The hijacking of any semblance of a legitimate opposition to the Syrian Government by NATO, the US and regional allies including Israel in order to achieve their desired regime change – has been well documented.

Who are these elusive “moderate rebels”?  You may well ask. Traditionally it is the US-backed “Free Syria Army” (FSA) which has long been marketed as the cuddly, viable alternative to the duly elected government led by President Bashar al Assad – which incidentally is the internationally recognised (outside of Washington and London) official government of Syria, supported by the majority of the Syrian people. Recent polls place Assad’s popularity at around 80%. Unfortunately, we don’t have to dig too deep to reveal the hard-line Islamist, Salafi affiliations of this so-called ‘moderate’ group of brigands.

Journalist Daniel Greenfield puts it most succinctly:  “Few media outlets are willing to say that out loud, but it’s quite true. There is no Free Syrian Army. It’s an umbrella for providing Western aid to a front group run by the Muslim Brotherhood.”  He deplores the shaky Pentagon math that Obama and Congress have used in an attempt to downplay the reality that even in 2013 Pentagon sources were reluctantly admitting that extremist groups constituted over 50% of Syrian “opposition” and that these numbers were steadily increasing.

SEE ALSO: Soros in Syria: ‘Humanitarian’ NGO Deployed For Regime Change, Not Aid

This map below clearly shows the weakness of this “moderate rebel” argument as it unequivocally demonstrates the minor FSA presence at the frontline of Syrian opposition.  They compose of fragmented mercenary groups largely unable to operate without extremist logistical support.

So this rather dispels the “moderate” myth and leads to the conclusion that, in reality, Russia was targeting areas north of Homs that contained very few civilians and is an area controlled by a dangerous conclave of militant fighting groups that include the Muslim Brotherhood, Jabhat al Nusra, and other Jihadist opposition fighters supported by the US alliance.

It must also be remembered that the majority of civilians will flee an area infested by such mercenaries and seek refuge in Syria government-held areas. That fact alone should indicate who the people of Syria really favor. So, 90% of IDPs are in government-held areas. This is another fact conveniently omitted from most mainstream media reports. 

It also makes a mockery of Defence Secretary Ashton B. Carter’s claims in the New York Times yesterday:

“By supporting Assad and seemingly taking on everybody fighting Assad,” Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said Wednesday, Russia is “taking on the whole rest of the country that’s fighting Assad.” Some of those groups, he added, are supported by the United States and need to be part of a political resolution in Syria.

“That’s why the Russian position is doomed to fail,” Mr. Carter said.

Despite Carter’s pleas, the opposite seems to be true. Russia is effectively exposing US policy in Syria as naked hegemony, and America is not happy.

While the US has been supplying TOW missiles and a variety of arms/equipment to extremists and deliberately funding any group that will secure regime change, Russia is actively deploying its military to target the nests of terrorist mercenaries and opportunists waiting eagerly for the political vacuum that would be created by the “removal” of Assad, in order to inflict their extremism upon the Syrian people.  They may not be technically called ISIS but they are cut from the same cloth of US/Israeli proxy terrorism and should be eliminated from any sovereign nation. Failure to do so has catastrophic results as seen in Libya and Iraq.

The Propaganda Trail

As soon as Russia launched its first airstrike against terrorist positions this week, the western media immediately piled-in with disinformation, in an attempt to demonize their efforts to support the Syrian government’s own 4 year-long war on terror.

Now let’s examine the unsavoury marketing aspect of the propaganda campaign being waged by a frustrated and increasingly infuriated US alliance.  Of course the usual triad has leapt into action. Human Rights Watch (HRW), Avaaz and the White Helmets. 

Avaaz has produced one of its most poisonous and misleading petitions to date. The inevitable eyewitness statements claim that Russia targeted civilian areas utterly free of ISIS operatives.  These statements are already rendered questionable by the evidence I have submitted above.

When we watch the videos, particularly the longer Live Leak version, it is hard to detect the women and children that are being described.  The majority of protagonists appear to be male and of fighting age.  There is no evidence of “civilian” life among the deserted buildings, the only movement is of males, some on foot, some on scooters and presumably some taking the time to film events even as the bombs are falling.  Not the actions of terrified, innocent civilians.

Live Leak Video of Russian bombing of Homs:

There is one other video that does show about 2 seconds of a young boy crying and obviously injured.  However this video must be questioned as to its authenticity as the claims are that the initial shot of planes overhead is not even of Russian planes. The quality of the video is poor and apart from the footage of the one child, again demonstrates that the majority of people involved are men of fighting age in a deserted built up area to the north of Homs.

In this disgusting display of blatant propaganda calling for the long sought after no fly zone, Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of the activist web portal, Avaaz.org, makes this extraordinary statement:

“Russia says it’s bombing ISIS, but eyewitnesses say their brutal attacks targeted areas way outside of ISIS control. This will only sow instability and radicalisation and should be an urgent wake-up call to the US and its allies to enforce a targeted no-fly zone to save lives, counter ISIS and alleviate the refugee crisis. Syrians civilians need protection now, not further attacks from Russian bombs.”

Speaking to one Damascus resident this morning, I asked for their opinion on this statement.  His reply was simple, “I am just relieved that the Russian Air Force is in action”.  The hypocrisy of this statement from Ruby-Sachs perfectly mirrors the hypocrisy of Congress, Obama’s Teflon speech at the UNGA, Pentagon’s barefaced obscurantism over the US role in creating exactly this instability and radicalisation in Syria and bringing misery, terror and bloodshed to the people of Syria with the sole aim of securing their interests in the region [and those of their staunchest partner in crimes against Humanity, Israel]

If we wish to speak of real civilian casualties, then perhaps we should turn the spotlight on the pre- existing Coalition bombing campaign.  The civilian death rates from these strikes is rarely discussed and often concealed by the Pentagon and US/European associated analysts like the British-led ‘humanitarian’ organisation – the Syria Observatory for Human Right (SOHR). 

Where for example was the Avaaz petition calling for a No Fly Zone when the coalition air strikes resulted in a multitude of non-combatant deaths including children?  This report from Airwars reveals the disturbing numbers:


“Syria has also seen a number of troubling mass casualty events attributed to Coalition actions. On the first night of bombing on September 23rd 2014, US aircraft killed as many as 15 civilians in the village of Kafar Daryan. On December 28th at least 58 civilians reportedly died when the Coalition struck a temporary Daesh prison at al Bab (see report). And on April 30th 2015, 64 civilians died in a likely Coalition airstrike at Ber Mahli. In these three incidents alone, 106 non-combatant victims have so far been publicly named – 38 of them children. It remains unclear whether any of these events have been investigated by the Coalition.”

Avaaz did actually promote a petition for a No-Fly Zone back in March 2015 – a PR campaign which just happen to align perfectly with Washington plans for a No-Fly Zone for the purpose of dominating the skies over Syria in the same way it did in the NATO’s intentional destruction of the nation-state of Libya.

In order to spare more innocent lives and preserve the secular nation-state of Syria, its citizens will need to a spanner placed in the spokes of this trendy ‘change’ propaganda vehicle that rides roughshod over their genuine needs with devastating consequences. Those needs are simple:  stop the lying, stop fabricating and stop creating, funding, arming and incubating the terrorist cancer in Syria.

The White Helmet element

Now we come to perhaps one of the most insidious and damaging elements of the propaganda machine. 

In September, we first introduced readers to the humanitarian interventionist, covert intelligence program and regime change PR operation known as the White Helmets, created by the Soros partnered, Svengali of PR giants, Purpose.com. The White Helmets with the debonair, Sandhurst-educated James Bond of humanitarianism at its helm, James Le Mesurier, a high-level British mercenary commander and trainer whose CV reads like a NATO itinerary, and whose high-level connections delve deep into the Empire’s underworld of international subterfuge, media manipulation and strategy cultivation.

The first slick photo campaign was hot off the press almost immediately after the first Russian air strikes in the Homs region:

Unfortunately for them, perhaps White Helmets are exhausting their supply of heart string tugging images as their twitter campaign almost immediately came under attack by those who are waking up to this cynical propagandization of human misery.

See this Tweet here.

This was incredible sloppy work by this western-backed propaganda outfit. The following is a quote from Sott.net:

“The White Helmets in their haste to point the finger of blame at Moscow, managed to tweet about Russia’s air strikes several hours before the Russian Parliament actually authorized the use of the Air Force in Syria.”

This image was also picked up and run with by RT who accurately pinpointed the deep-rooted deceit that lies at the heart of the majority of White Helmet publicity campaigns.  The flurry of activity on the White Helmets Twitter page must have taken, even them, by surprise.

The result was a series of fake and fraudulent Tweets churned-out by the White Helmets, like this Tweet:

Russia strike in Homs today. 33 civilians killed including 3 children and 1 @SyriaCivilDef volunteer. pic.twitter.com/5aYYSrwv2d

— The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) September 30, 2015

For so long they have enjoyed the fruits of their marketing campaign depicting them as selfless heroes, saviours of humanity, impartial protectors of kittens and Syrians in equal measure. Their self-styled image is that of unarmed, neutral, demi-saints climbing the “Mount Everest of war zones”.  Unfortunately so many of their masks have slipped that they can no longer bask in their Purpose reflected glory.

Yesterday like HRW before them they were exposed to be the fabricators and deceivers they really are.  Anyone can make a mistake I hear you say, yes sure, one mistake is acceptable, 2 is questionable but a consistent conveyor belt of misleading, perception altering, “nudging” images ceases to be innocent and enters the realm of manipulation on a terrifying scale with horrifying ramifications for the people of Syria who so far, have resisted their country being plunged into the same abyss as Libya or Iraq.

Just one other example of the White Helmets duplicitous image use:

Another image was brought to my attention this morning that further shatters the high-gloss White Helmet image.  Whilst it is now well-known that far from being neutral, the White Helmets are in fact embedded with Jabhat al Nusra aka Al Nusra Front [the Syrian arm of Al Qaeda], it is perhaps not so well-known that their southern Damascus depot is situated at the heart of ISIS held territory, to the south of the notorious Palestinian Yarmouk Refugee Camp.  This image shows their insignia and emblem clearly on the wall and gates behind the selfie-taking ISIS mercenary in the foreground. 

It is becoming harder and harder for White Helmets to maintain their veneer of impartiality, a fact that is borne out quite effectively by the fact that the majority of Syrians in government held areas have never heard of them, even unbiased civilians in Aleppo have not come across them.  Their association is exclusively with the extremist elements of the Syrian opposition. Their purpose is to facilitate calls for a No Fly Zone, cue Avaaz, and destabilize the region in the manner demanded by their masters in the US, UK and Syrian National Council.

These same agents of change can also be seen organising various NGO-affiliated live events in both Europe and the US, in order to drum-up political support and cash for the western-backed regime change project. This aspect of the campaign is detailed here in the article by Tim Hirschel-Burns, entitled, Developing Change A blog on development, activism, political advocacy, and NGOs.

Conclusion

We can safely conclude that the US, Israel and their allies are furious that they have been out-manoeuvred and outsmarted by Russia and Syria, despite billions of dollars and countless man hours that have already spent by the US, UK and the NATO aligned allies – all the while in open violation of numerous international law and “norms”. The West’s initial No Fly Zone plans in Syria have been consistently thwarted and derailed. Russia has effectively demanded a No Fly Zone for the US-led coalition – which is the ultimate insult to US hegemony and self-proclaimed world police status.  Russia, unlike the US, is targeting ISIS in all its distorted guises and nomenclature. It’s expected that Russian airstrikes will be more accurate and efficient than the US-led coalition for the simple fact that their targeting is based on actual ground intelligence from the Syrian Arab Army.

And yes Mr Defence Secretary, Russia is bombing US supported “rebels” in Syria for the very simple reason that, in one way or another, ever since Washington DC had first started down the blood strewn road of regime change, the US has either equipped or funded every single extremist faction in Syria.

If we lived in a just world, we would see Avaaz and their ilk clamouring for an end to interventionism and demanding diplomatic solutions to support internal, sovereign nation, peace processes [as in fact Russia has unwaveringly called for in Syria].  However, we do not live in a world based upon a universal understanding of justice, we live in a world governed by the powerful and the greedy, devoid of compassion, intent only on their geopolitical prowess and humanity-exempt colonialism. 

For the sake of the Syrian people and all other nations being crushed by this well used, well-oiled propaganda machine we must question, we must demand answers, and we must wake up to our responsibility to reject calls for the destruction of nations and peoples who ask only for their basic human right to determine their own futures.

Avaaz, HRW, White Helmets and their associates have no place in that brave new world.

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 Will The Fall.

READ MORE: ‘White Helmets': New Breed of Mercenaries and Propagandists, Disguised as ‘Humanitarians’ in Syria