Massacres in Syria: the awful truth

By Tim Anderson
Contrary to the deluge of corporate media lies, the recent massacres in Syria are not being carried out by the Syrian Government, but rather by the fundamentalist Free Syrian Army (FSA), backed by NATO and the Saudis, with the aim of inciting international outrage and thus support for regime change.

With the ghoulish figure of Hilary Clinton repeating her mantras of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘Assad must go’, the usual chorus line (CNN, Fox News, the BBC and Qatar’s Al Jazeera) at first blamed government artillery, then ‘pro-regime thugs’ (called the Shabiha) for the massacres. This is a terrible lie.

Without any real evidence, the accusation that the Syrian government carried out the Houla massacre was written into UN Security Council and UN Human Rights Commission statements - statements which were in turn rejected by Russia and China.

In addition, ‘embedded diplomats’ like Ban Ki Moon and Navi Pillay repeatedly attack the Syrian Government, as though the government had been found guilty. Beware: neither they nor the US-based ‘embedded watchdogs’ Human Rights Watch and Avaaz are independent players.

‘Killing civilians’ is the same lie used to wage war on Libya. After helping spread that lie, after Gaddafi had been murdered and the country had been devastated by NATO bombing, Amnesty International retracted many of its accusations (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbUnTelwJU )

The awful truth is that the US-NATO backed fundamentalists are responsible for the recent massacres in Syria. This fact can be verified by several independent sources.

Let’s start with the Catholic Church. You can read here (http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/syrian-violence-drives-50000-chri... ) what that Church said about the FSA’s ethnic cleansing of Christians in Homs. This process is not carried out by street demonstrations but by murderous violence.

It is not just Syria’s minority Christians who are the targets. This blog (http://www.atthegrapevine.com/wordpress/politics/road-to-damascus-from-a...) is one of several sources telling us that Syria’s fundamentalists can be seen and heard chanting ‘Allawis to the grave, Christians to Beirut’. It has become a slogan of the armed opposition in Syria, backed with arms by the oil-rich Saudis and Qatar, and funded by the Syrian National Council, a NATO-backed exile group with its main base now in Istanbul.

The subsequent massacres of civilians, including children with their throats cut, in Houla and then Mazraat Al Qabeer, follow this ethnic cleansing drive. British intelligence officer Alastair Crooke said (http://www.rt.com/news/houla-massacre-executed-militia-480/ ) these attacks were not characteristic of the cultural region to which Syria belongs. ‘This type of killing, beheadings, slitting of throats (of children too), and of this mutilation of bodies, has been a characteristic not of Levantine Islam, not of Syria, not of Lebanon, but what happened in the Anbar province of Iraq … in the sense that Zarqawi and Iraq gave birth to this very strong, bigoted, anti-Shia, anti-Iranian rhetoric. Much of that came into Syria when fighters from Anbar returned to their homes around Homs and Hama. So yes, we’re talking about Al-Qaeda like groups … they are defining the war,’ Crooke said.

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta accepted that ‘Al Qaeda’ has a presence in Syria, but claimed the US did not know much about it. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/may/11/al-qaida-syria-leon-pa...)

Then there is the Syrian Government. Yes, we should listen to them too. The big powers try to disqualify any words at all from a government that (according to the last poll funded by their enemies in Qatar - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians-support-assa... ) has majority support within the country – something few western governments can boast.

Syria’s President Bashar al Assad said this: ‘What happened in Houla and elsewhere are brutal massacres which even monsters would not have carried out’ (http://dawn.com/2012/06/04/assad-rejects-govt-involvement-in-houla-massa... ).

Syrian media has shown repeated interviews with survivors of the massacres, first in Houla then in Mazraat al-Qubeir and Marzaf (in the Hama countryside). They say that armed terrorists attacked their villages and they called Syria’s security forces for protection (http://www.sana.sy/eng/21/2012/06/08/424129.htm). There are many videos to this effect, online.

Russian journalists have collected eye-witness reports from the Houla massacre, reports that are not repeated in the western corporate media (Russian sources having been ‘disqualified’ along with Syrian official sources). But they are there for anyone who wants to see. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyi-tJ_0PPg)

Most eyewitness accounts, of course, appear in the Syrian state media - that forbidden source - some of it subtitled in English (see: http://www.syrianews.cc/syria-anna-news-witness-hula-massacre-746.html; and http://www.syrianews.cc/syria-what-really-happened-in-al-hula-homs-689.html)

Some North American sources have written up critical details about Houla.

(http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31184) and here (http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/05/29/the-houla-massacre-as-pre...)

There is already foreign military intervention in Syria. NATO forces are on the ground now: (http://nsnbc.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/nato-special-forces-in-syria-now-o...). They are only there to carry out the will of their political masters, like Hilary Clinton, and she wants ‘regime change’. That is why they support the armed opposition.

After you have read a bit, tell your friends to read a little more. Only by being better informed can we understand and resist this latest war propaganda.