Cockburn writes: "The dominance of propaganda over news in coverage of the
war in Syria has many negative consequences."
Those left in east Aleppo report confusion as thousands wait for evacuations
in freezing weather. (photo: Aleppo Media Center)
There's More Propaganda Than News Coming Out of Aleppo This Week
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent
16 December 16
There was a period in 2011 and 2012 when there were genuinely independent
opposition activists operating inside Syria, but as the jihadis took over
these brave people were forced to flee abroad, fell silent or were dead
It has just become more dangerous to be a foreign correspondent reporting
on the civil war in Syria. This is because the jihadis holding power in east
Aleppo were able to exclude Western journalists, who would be abducted and
very likely killed if they went there, and replace them as news sources with
highly partisan "local activists" who cannot escape being under jihadi
control.
The foreign media has allowed - through naivety or self-interest - people
who could only operate with the permission of al-Qaeda-type groups such as
Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham to dominate the news agenda.
The precedent set in Aleppo means that participants in any future conflict
will have an interest in deterring foreign journalists who might report
objectively. By kidnapping and killing them, it is easy to create a vacuum
of information that is in great demand and will, in future, be supplied by
informants sympathetic to or at the mercy of the very same people (in this
case the jihadi rulers of east Aleppo) who have kept out the foreign
journalists. Killing or abducting the latter turns out to have been a smart
move by the jihadis because it enabled them to establish substantial control
of news reaching the outside world. This is bad news for any independent
journalist entering their territory and threatening their monopoly of
information.
There was always a glaring contradiction at the heart of the position of the
international media: on the one hand it was impossibly dangerous for foreign
journalists to enter opposition-held areas of Syria, but at the same time
independent activists were apparently allowed to operate freely by some of
the most violent and merciless movements on earth. The threat to Western
reporters was very real: James Foley had been ritually beheaded on 8 August
2014 and Steven Sotloff a few days later, though long before then foreign
journalists who entered insurgent-controlled zones were in great danger.
But the threat was just as great for a local persons living under insurgent
rule who criticised their actions or ideas. This is made clear by an Amnesty
International report published in July this year entitled Torture Was My
Punishment. Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa
Programme of Amnesty International, says that in these areas civilians "live
in constant fear of being abducted if they criticise the conduct of armed
groups in power or fail to abide by the strict rules some have imposed".
Any genuinely independent journalists or activists are targeted, according
to the report. Speaking of Jabhat al-Nusra (which has renamed itself Jabhat
Fatah al-Sham and was formerly the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), a 24-year-old
media activist called "Issa" said "they are in control of what we can and
cannot say. You either agree with their social rules and policies or you
disappear."
What follows after such an abduction is made clear by a political activist
called "Ibrahim" who in 2015 organised a peaceful protest in support of the
2011 uprising. Such independent action was evidently unacceptable to Nusra
who kidnapped him. He says: "I was taken to the torture room. They placed me
in the shabeh position, hanging me from the ceiling from my wrists so that
my toes were off the ground. Then they started beating me with cables all
over my body. after the shabeh they used the dulab (tyre) technique. They
folded my body and forced me to go inside a tyre and then started beating me
with wooden sticks."
Bassel, a lawyer in Idlib, said: "I was happy to be free from the Syrian
government's unjust rule, but now the situation is worse." He criticised
Nusra on Facebook and was immediately detained. Amnesty says the main armed
opposition groups are equally severe on anybody differing from them.
There was a period in 2011 and 2012 when there were genuinely independent
opposition activists operating inside Syria, but as the jihadis took over
these brave people were forced to flee abroad, fell silent or were dead. In
August 2013, I appeared on the same television programme as Razan Zaitouneh,
a renowned human rights lawyer and founder of the Violations Documentation
Centre which recorded crimes and atrocities. She was speaking by Skype from
the opposition stronghold of Douma in north east Damascus where I had been
the previous year, but it had become too risky for me to visit.
Zaitouneh was describing the sarin poison gas attack that had killed so many
people in rebel-held districts of Damascus and denouncing the Syrian
government for carrying it out. She was an advocate for the non-jihadi
Syrian opposition, but she also criticised the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam
movement that controlled Douma. On 8 December, its gunmen broke into her
office and seized her and her husband Wael Hamada, and two civil rights
activists: Samira al-Khalili, a lawyer, and Nazem al-Hamadi, a poet. None of
the four have been seen since and are very likely dead.
t was convenient for the international media to broadcast the videos and
Skype interviews from east Aleppo as if they had been given as freely as in
Copenhagen or Edinburgh. To do otherwise would have damaged the credibility
of the graphic and compelling material in which the speakers looked
frightened, and with good reason, and there was the crackle of gunfire and
the boom of exploding shells.
None of this was necessarily fake - but there were many omissions. There was
no sign of the 8,000 to 10,000 armed fighters whom the UN estimated to have
been in east Aleppo. In fact, I cannot recall seeing anybody with a gun or
manning a fortified position in these heart-rending films. The only visible
inhabitants of Aleppo are unarmed civilians, in complete contrast to Mosul
where the Iraqi armed forces are battling thousands of Isis gunmen who are
using the civilian population as human shields.
It would be simple-minded to believe that this very appealing and
professional PR for the Syrian armed opposition is all their own work.
Foreign governments play a fairly open role in funding and training
opposition media specialists. One journalist of partly Syrian extraction in
Beirut told me how he had been offered $17,000 a month to work for just such
an opposition media PR project backed by the British government.
The dominance of propaganda over news in coverage of the war in Syria has
many negative consequences. It is a genuine civil war and the exclusive
focus of on the atrocities committed by the Syrian armed forces on an
unarmed civilian population gives a skewed picture of what is happening.
These atrocities are often true and the UN says that 82 civilians may have
been summarily executed in east Aleppo last month. But, bad though this is,
it is a gross exaggeration to compare what has happened in Aleppo to
genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or the massacre in Srebrenica the following year.
There is nothing wrong or surprising about the Syrian opposition demonising
its enemies and hiding negative news about itself. The Iraqi opposition did
the same thing in 2003 and the Libyan opposition in 2011. What is much more
culpable is the way in which the Western media has allowed itself to become
a conduit for propaganda for one side in this savage conflict. They have
done so by rebranding it as authentic partisan information they cannot
check, produced by people living under the authority of jihadi movements
that tortures or kills any critic or dissenter.
News organisations have ended up being spoon-fed by jihadis and their
sympathisers who make it impossible for independent observers to visit areas
they control. By regurgitating information from such tainted sources, the
media gives al-Qaeda type groups every incentive to go on killing and
abducting journalists in order to create and benefit from a news vacuum they
can fill themselves.
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Those left in east Aleppo report confusion as thousands wait for evacuations
in freezing weather. (photo: Aleppo Media Center)
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/aleppo-crisis-syrian-war-bashar-al-assad
-isis-more-propaganda-than-news-a7479901.html?cmpid=facebook-posthttp://www.
independent.co.uk/voices/aleppo-crisis-syrian-war-bashar-al-assad-isis-more-
propaganda-than-news-a7479901.html?cmpid=facebook-post
There's More Propaganda Than News Coming Out of Aleppo This Week
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent
16 December 16
There was a period in 2011 and 2012 when there were genuinely independent
opposition activists operating inside Syria, but as the jihadis took over
these brave people were forced to flee abroad, fell silent or were dead
t has just become more dangerous to be a foreign correspondent reporting on
the civil war in Syria. This is because the jihadis holding power in east
Aleppo were able to exclude Western journalists, who would be abducted and
very likely killed if they went there, and replace them as news sources with
highly partisan "local activists" who cannot escape being under jihadi
control.
The foreign media has allowed - through naivety or self-interest - people
who could only operate with the permission of al-Qaeda-type groups such as
Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham to dominate the news agenda.
The precedent set in Aleppo means that participants in any future conflict
will have an interest in deterring foreign journalists who might report
objectively. By kidnapping and killing them, it is easy to create a vacuum
of information that is in great demand and will, in future, be supplied by
informants sympathetic to or at the mercy of the very same people (in this
case the jihadi rulers of east Aleppo) who have kept out the foreign
journalists. Killing or abducting the latter turns out to have been a smart
move by the jihadis because it enabled them to establish substantial control
of news reaching the outside world. This is bad news for any independent
journalist entering their territory and threatening their monopoly of
information.
There was always a glaring contradiction at the heart of the position of the
international media: on the one hand it was impossibly dangerous for foreign
journalists to enter opposition-held areas of Syria, but at the same time
independent activists were apparently allowed to operate freely by some of
the most violent and merciless movements on earth. The threat to Western
reporters was very real: James Foley had been ritually beheaded on 8 August
2014 and Steven Sotloff a few days later, though long before then foreign
journalists who entered insurgent-controlled zones were in great danger.
But the threat was just as great for a local persons living under insurgent
rule who criticised their actions or ideas. This is made clear by an Amnesty
International report published in July this year entitled Torture Was My
Punishment. Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa
Programme of Amnesty International, says that in these areas civilians "live
in constant fear of being abducted if they criticise the conduct of armed
groups in power or fail to abide by the strict rules some have imposed".
Any genuinely independent journalists or activists are targeted, according
to the report. Speaking of Jabhat al-Nusra (which has renamed itself Jabhat
Fatah al-Sham and was formerly the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), a 24-year-old
media activist called "Issa" said "they are in control of what we can and
cannot say. You either agree with their social rules and policies or you
disappear."
What follows after such an abduction is made clear by a political activist
called "Ibrahim" who in 2015 organised a peaceful protest in support of the
2011 uprising. Such independent action was evidently unacceptable to Nusra
who kidnapped him. He says: "I was taken to the torture room. They placed me
in the shabeh position, hanging me from the ceiling from my wrists so that
my toes were off the ground. Then they started beating me with cables all
over my body. after the shabeh they used the dulab (tyre) technique. They
folded my body and forced me to go inside a tyre and then started beating me
with wooden sticks."
Bassel, a lawyer in Idlib, said: "I was happy to be free from the Syrian
government's unjust rule, but now the situation is worse." He criticised
Nusra on Facebook and was immediately detained. Amnesty says the main armed
opposition groups are equally severe on anybody differing from them.
There was a period in 2011 and 2012 when there were genuinely independent
opposition activists operating inside Syria, but as the jihadis took over
these brave people were forced to flee abroad, fell silent or were dead. In
August 2013, I appeared on the same television programme as Razan Zaitouneh,
a renowned human rights lawyer and founder of the Violations Documentation
Centre which recorded crimes and atrocities. She was speaking by Skype from
the opposition stronghold of Douma in north east Damascus where I had been
the previous year, but it had become too risky for me to visit.
Zaitouneh was describing the sarin poison gas attack that had killed so many
people in rebel-held districts of Damascus and denouncing the Syrian
government for carrying it out. She was an advocate for the non-jihadi
Syrian opposition, but she also criticised the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam
movement that controlled Douma. On 8 December, its gunmen broke into her
office and seized her and her husband Wael Hamada, and two civil rights
activists: Samira al-Khalili, a lawyer, and Nazem al-Hamadi, a poet. None of
the four have been seen since and are very likely dead.
t was convenient for the international media to broadcast the videos and
Skype interviews from east Aleppo as if they had been given as freely as in
Copenhagen or Edinburgh. To do otherwise would have damaged the credibility
of the graphic and compelling material in which the speakers looked
frightened, and with good reason, and there was the crackle of gunfire and
the boom of exploding shells.
None of this was necessarily fake - but there were many omissions. There was
no sign of the 8,000 to 10,000 armed fighters whom the UN estimated to have
been in east Aleppo. In fact, I cannot recall seeing anybody with a gun or
manning a fortified position in these heart-rending films. The only visible
inhabitants of Aleppo are unarmed civilians, in complete contrast to Mosul
where the Iraqi armed forces are battling thousands of Isis gunmen who are
using the civilian population as human shields.
It would be simple-minded to believe that this very appealing and
professional PR for the Syrian armed opposition is all their own work.
Foreign governments play a fairly open role in funding and training
opposition media specialists. One journalist of partly Syrian extraction in
Beirut told me how he had been offered $17,000 a month to work for just such
an opposition media PR project backed by the British government.
The dominance of propaganda over news in coverage of the war in Syria has
many negative consequences. It is a genuine civil war and the exclusive
focus of on the atrocities committed by the Syrian armed forces on an
unarmed civilian population gives a skewed picture of what is happening.
These atrocities are often true and the UN says that 82 civilians may have
been summarily executed in east Aleppo last month. But, bad though this is,
it is a gross exaggeration to compare what has happened in Aleppo to
genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or the massacre in Srebrenica the following year.
There is nothing wrong or surprising about the Syrian opposition demonising
its enemies and hiding negative news about itself. The Iraqi opposition did
the same thing in 2003 and the Libyan opposition in 2011. What is much more
culpable is the way in which the Western media has allowed itself to become
a conduit for propaganda for one side in this savage conflict. They have
done so by rebranding it as authentic partisan information they cannot
check, produced by people living under the authority of jihadi movements
that tortures or kills any critic or dissenter.
News organisations have ended up being spoon-fed by jihadis and their
sympathisers who make it impossible for independent observers to visit areas
they control. By regurgitating information from such tainted sources, the
media gives al-Qaeda type groups every incentive to go on killing and
abducting journalists in order to create and benefit from a news vacuum they
can fill themselves.
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http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
