Daily Archives: December 16, 2016

News

Assad propagandist Eva Bartlett busted for making things up

Just after Assad propagandist Eva Bartlett debated the brilliant Dilly Hussain about Aleppo on RT, it was announced Facebook would be hiring a squad of independent fact checkers to monitor fake news. Coincidence?

It’s an issue of civil liberties & free speech but I still didn’t feel sorry for her, Beeley, or all the other lying-assed Assadists who’ll be forced to stop making things up & start reading mainstream media again. Or they’ll have to start working for Modi who has a special relationship with Facebook.

In truth, it’s us that tell the truth they’ll be double-checking. Bartlett has a whole stable of dictators she can shill for.

Snopes fact-checkers on Eva Bartlett’s claims: Busted!

http://www.snopes.com/syrian-war-victims-are-being-recycled-and-al-quds-hospital-was-never-bombed/

News

We live in barbarous times with no respite for the persecuted or suffering humanity. The fall of Aleppo has been wrenching & so monumental that I haven’t kept pace with the crisis in Kashmir, still under military siege, or the horrific genocidal assault on Rohingya in Myanmar. That neglect is not a measure of suffering but a matter of time–though for most of us, the grief about Aleppo has been overwhelming.

This weekend I will try to catch up on Kashmir, Palestine, & the Rohingya. If anyone has information they would like me to use, please let me know.

News

The reluctant Assadists

There’s a current of what is loosely called thought in the Syria debate that dummies up & goes all agnostic. This is what they whine: “It’s too hard for anyone to understand & no one can know who’s right. I only know for sure there are no good guys in Syria, no side one can defend.”

What a load a crap. Who the hell do they think they’re kidding with that phony evasion? Poke around a little in their defense of ignorance & you find a whole new breed of political animal called the “reluctant Assadist.”

The reluctant Assadist can’t quite face, or at least won’t admit their support for dictatorship & carpet bombing of civilians. So drawing on cognitive derangement, they magically disappear millions of Syrians & make that popular revolution against Assad evanesce into thin air.

They replace reality with a melodrama obsessed with those “US-backed head-chopping jihadist terrorists” & willfully maintain ignorance of what in the Sam Hill those terrorists are doing or where they’re doing it.

That little schtick they act out isn’t unique to politics & it isn’t innovative. The history of genocides & holocausts is filled with reproaches for those who pretended they didn’t see & out of laziness or fear denied solidarity to the persecuted. Who in their right mind would choose to end up like that? But that’s where agnosticism takes you.

News

Solidarity rally for Aleppo in Gaza

Gaza boy for Aleppo (REUTERS:Suhaib Salem) Dec 16 2016

There have been rallies around the world in solidarity with east Aleppo but none seem as poignant or powerful as the one yesterday in Gaza city.

This little guy who is six or seven years old is nearly old enough to have lived through three major Israeli bombing campaigns over Gaza: December 2008-January 2009; November 2012; the summer of 2014. Human rights organizations cited Israel for directly targeting not just civilians, but children.

Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured, many of them permanently disabled. Schools, hospitals, residential areas, markets, ambulances, even UN refugee centers were bombed to smithereens. Four little boys on the Gaza beach were gunned down by bombers. So if anyone in the world understands the profound suffering in Aleppo, it is Palestinians in Gaza.

Over a million people around the world marched in 2014 in outrage & solidarity with Gaza, including solidarity marches in occupied Kashmir.

There’s too much suffering in the world during the barbaric phase of capitalism. The only way humanity can take control & end these monstrous crimes is by standing with the oppressed as brothers & sisters.

The iron law of social transformation will always be “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That is the way activists in US history expressed the law of social transformation but there are likely more powerful, more poetic expressions from other cultures. Please tell us here how your traditions have expressed this universal law of human solidarity & profound mutual respect.

We stand with Aleppo. We stand with Palestine. We stand with Kashmir. We stand with the Rohingya.

(Photo by Suhaib Salem/Reuters)

News

Assadist propaganda reaches new lows

Anissa Naouai video on In the NOW

This is a screenshot from a video posted on the FB wall of In the NOW which is part of Russia Today (RT), wholly owned by the Russian government. The commentator is Anissa Naouai who manages In the NOW as an employee (one hesitates to defame journalism by calling her a reporter) of RT.

This video which has been viewed over 1.7 million times & shared nearly 75,000 times is lowbrow Assadist propaganda making the rounds on social media.

The videos of Syrian reporters & activists in east Aleppo, terrified as the Syrian army advances towards them, are so compelling & wrenching that Assadists have lost their marbles trying to discredit them. They drag out three white women–Naouai, Beeley, & Bartlett–formally associated with Russia & Assad & who have never set foot in east Aleppo to claim the Syrians are fakers. A grade school video class could do better propaganda. Why 75,000 people find it convincing is probably psychologically related to why so many people find Trump persuasive. Or Rodrigo Duterte.

Naouai does not point to a single piece of evidence that the Syrians are fakers; it just doesn’t feel right to her. She’s paid big bucks to be stupid. She actually said on her own wall: “I can’t tell you what’s happening in East Aleppo, because I’m not there. So I won’t. But I also don’t believe a word the mass media is saying because they are not there. All we can do is question the message & do our best to find holes.”

But just a moment here: RT is mass media with millions of viewers around the world. As an employee, does she have inside information that RT is peddling lies & misinformation? Because it sure looks like it when they report on Syria & the Ukraine.

It would be troubling that so many find this scurrilous rubbish & Assadist propaganda convincing but it is almost certain their political affinities for Assad, Putin, & Duterte render them incapable of judgement.

To show how reactionary & contemptible all this is, In the NOW on FB & Twitter & Naouai on her Twitter wall posted this video of a smug Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte & chirpy music threatening the lives & wishing a last Merry Christmas to drug addicts & thieves:

https://twitter.com/IntheNow_tweet/status/806589125071552512

News

On the need to read the damn newspapers

Factoid # 2 about mainstream media, so derided by those who prefer ignorance or propaganda:

When the military junta in Myanmar went on a genocidal rampage against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan state in 2012, most of the world had never heard of the Rohingya. Genocide was Myanmar’s dirty secret. But the internet made it possible to access media from around the world & to find out who they were & why they were fleeing.

There were no books available in the library about Rohingya Muslims. So I spent weeks pouring through media reports no matter what the political persuasion; human rights reports, reports & public statements by the junta, & every resource I could find until I understood what was going on. That’s when I began writing about these extraordinary people & their struggle against genocide.

Unless you want to remain a dumpkoff all your life, you have to read mainstream media. You don’t read it uncritically but you also don’t approach it as if you’ll catch diphtheria from exposure. Above all in politics, don’t admire stupid.

News

The libertarian paranoia about mainstream media

Factoid about mainstream media, so derided by those who prefer ignorance or propaganda:

In writing about the occupation of Kashmir, Indian media sources are invaluable. Not because they report the struggle from the point of view of Kashmiris or support self-determination but because what happens in Kashmir involves legal actions, military events, politicians touring in Kashmir or defending the occupation in India, information about India’s economic operations in Kashmir, actions by the Modi regime regarding Kashmir, reports about the conflict between Pakistan & India over Kashmir.

Indian media doesn’t report the massive protests in Kashmir, the arrests, forcible disappearances, mass rapes, home invasions by soldiers, or any of the human rights crimes of Indian military forces. But just on the issue of pellet munitions, Indian media was a goldmine of information. On some of the court maneuvers against Kashmiri human rights & on the arrest & imprisonment of Khurram Parvez, reading Indian media was essential.

Is Indian media biased against Kashmiri self-determination? Do they misrepresent the occupation? Of course they do. They’re not stupid. They don’t want to inspire anti-occupation sentiment in India or God forbid, an anti-occupation movement to emerge. They also don’t want Modi to close their operations down like it does to Kashmiri media.

This nonsense about not reading mainstream media is on the one hand a triumph of idiocy & anti-intellectualism & on the other hand a malignant attempt to censor & limit access to information.