In a report published on the 11th of April French daily Le Monde admits that rebels fighting the government of the Syrian Arab Republic are dominated by Japhat Al Nosra, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaida. The admission comes after two years of non-stop disinformation trumpeted from all French mainstream media outlets from the official right to the official left, disinformation that has attempted to convince the French public that democratic revolutionaries are fighting a war for human rights and freedom against a brutal, tyrannical dictator, who is ‘’ killing his own people’’.
This puerile and deeply dishonest narrative has now been utterly discredited, as the facts about the terrorist nature of the Syrian rebels have become too obvious to ignore. In an article entitled ‘The New Visage of French Jihadism’ it is reported that French jihadists are leaving France in their hundreds to join the ‘holy war’ against the Syrian Arab Republic, with many more joining jihadist groups in Mali.
On the same page in an article entitled ‘Al Qaida extends its territory and unites its forces in Iraq and Syria’, Le Monde’s Christophe Ayad reports:
‘The head of Iraq’s Islamic state, the Iraqi branch of Al Qaida, announced in a recorded message on April 9th, that his group would be fused with the Japhat AL Nosra( Support Front), the principal armed jihadist organization in Syria. The new group will be called Al-Qaida in Iraq and the Levant. This announcement comes two days after the call of Ayman Al-Zawarhiri, the successor of Osama Bin Laden in the leadership of Al-Qaida ‘headquarters,’ for the establishment of an Islamic state after the fall of the regime of Bachar-Al-Assad, afflicted since two years by an insurrection by the Sunni majority.’[1]
So, here we now have the French establishment press, who has been working overtime since two years to convince us that those fighting Assad are democrats, admitting that they are in fact Al Qaida. According to an October 2010Fox News report, the above-mentioned Al Qaida leader Al-Zawarhiri dined at the Pentagon just months after 911. Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge claimed she had documents to prove this. Of course, Fox News being a corporate propaganda agency did not pursue this story any further, nor did any other international mainstream media outlets. In the war on terror ignorance is strength and questioning is stupid.[2] The Fox News reporter earns 900,000 dollars per annum.[3]
In order to soften the blow and reassure French readers that the Quai d’Orsay’s support for the ‘rebels’ does not contradict France’s commitment to ‘human rights’, Le Monde’s Christophe Ayad tells us that:
‘Contrary to the Islamic State in Iraq the Al Nosra Front have made an effort not to systematically target civilians. It has not insisted, for the moment, on imposing an Islamic order that is too strict in the zones under its control, and has even concluded honorable agreements with the Kurdish rebellion, as in at Ras Al-Ain and more recently at Aleppo’[4]
These rebels Le Monde attempts to whitewash have been systematically targeting civilians from the start of this conflict. They have put bombs in cars in busy market squares, they have bombed universities murdering and maiming hundreds of innocent civilians. They have been torturing and beheading civilians and soldiers alike [5], even forcing children to participate in the decapitation some of their victims. Children have also been used as soldiers.[6 ]
They have forced women to wear the chador in the ‘liberated’ parts of once beautiful Aleppo.[7] They have desecrated and ruined the country’s religious and cultural heritage. They have blown up pipelines and wrecked infrastructure. They have destroyed thousands of schools, libraries and public service buildings. They have used chemical weapons. They have slit the throats of little children in order to blame the Syrian government. They terrorists are now even taking photos of themselves with the decapitated heads of their victims.[8] None of this is a secret. They have continously posted videos boasting about their crimes.
Yet Le Monde wants us to believe that Japhat Al Nosra [image above] is a good, more civilized version of Al Qaida, one perhaps worthy of Western military support! Of course, Le Monde will reply that they do not support Japhat Al Nosra, that they support the secular rebels. But where are the secular rebels?Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states very clearly that ‘any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law’. [9 ] The attempt by Western journalists to portray terrorist groups as freedom fighters and the use of information sources emanating exclusively from these groups to justify foreign aggression against a sovereign state recognized by the United Nations constitutes a war crime.
The French ‘special envoy’ seems to lament the fact that the announcement of this new fusion of terrorist groups will discredit the French government’s attempts to convince its European Union partners to officially arm the ‘rebellion’. While the French press admits that the Syrian armed opposition is predominantly Al-Qaida, it continues to insinuate and suggest that the bulk of the armed opposition is in fact secular and liberal. However, no evidence to support such insinuations has ever been forthcoming, while evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and impossible to dismiss.
In another article published on March 5th entitled ‘The Syrian Rebels take control of the Village of Raqqa in the North of the Country’, reporter Khalid Sid Mohand tells us just who these ‘rebels’ are. They are, he admits a few lines into his report:
‘A coalition of armed groups, some of whom are affiliated to the jihadists of Japhat-al-Nosra, who are behind the fall of Rakka.’[10]
How lovely! Al Qaida have captured a Syrian town and the French liberal media seems to be very excited about the prospect of armed barbarians taking over the Levantine state. From the title of the article, one is led to believe that the Syrian rebels have taken the town, the Syrian rebels being the French media’s designated ‘Arab Spring’ good guys. So, even though the news is bad, the headline suggests that it is good. Reality is turned upside down.
This technique of editorializing terrorists as rebels, while at the same time admitting that they are terrorists has the effect of confusing the public and preventing the uncritical reader from understanding the real forces at play in the Syrian conflict. The technique was repeatedly used during the Russian-Chechnian war when Islamist terrorists were repeatedly described as ‘rebels’. The double-standard, double-speak and double-think are techniques which are now part and parcel of ‘professional journalism’.
While such villainous and schizophrenic behavior may appear to some as a diabolical conspiracy, the reality is far more complex. This schizoid way of thinking and speaking is simply the psychological reflection of a global economic system that is collapsing upon its own internal contradictions. The extraction of surplus value from labour and the globalization of this capitalist mode of production have made a tiny section of the global population extremely rich and powerful.
The rich and powerful not only own the means of production, they also own the means of communication and as rule by a financial oligarchy is objectively contrary to democratic principles, a double-language and double-think is necessary in order to make people believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5. As a result, armed groups that serve the interests of the financial oligarchy will be mediatized as ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘human rights’ activists. However, as reporters cannot always control or ignore the complex realities they report on, the truth also emerges between the lines, in the margins and interstices of their own discourse. However, the job of rational analysis and interpretation of information is only being carried nowadays out by alternative media outlets whose goal is to serve the public good and tell the truth.
Thus, articles reporting the ‘good news’ that the Syrian rebels have taking another town will also have to admit that these same rebels are actually Al Qaida. But because double-think is so deeply embedded in Western culture, the contradictions of these reports are rarely noticed or analyzed The task of molding the public mind to support the ‘cruel but necessary’ geopolitical strategies of the global financial elite falls to the mass media , who orient and distort information to suit imperial designs and the corporate interests of the media’s owners.
In a Guardian article of 2002, the Western establishment’s policy of total hypocrisy was eloquently expressed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief strategist Robert Cooper who wrote:
‘The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle’[11]
Since unknown snipers opened fire on protestors and police in the town of Daraa on March 15th2011, the Syrian nation has been assaulted by death squads armed and trained by the Gulf emirates and Nato intelligence. The result has been the death of thousands and the destruction of a nation. This is a repeat of the Arc of Crisis created in Afghanistan in 1979 when US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski organized the arming and training of Mujahedeen terrorists in order to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The result was the creation of Al Qaida, a data-base of military-intelligence assets, who have since the very beginning, always served Nato geopolitical interests. The same technique is now being used against Syria.
It is quite possible the French government’s admission that Al Qaida have taken over large parts of Syria could serve as an excuse in the weeks, months or years ahead for direct military intervention to ‘free’ Syria from Al-Qaida, just as French intelligence’s fomentation of jihadism in Libya and their transfer to Mali served the cause of military intervention there. Meanwhile,the media demonization of Bachar-Al Assad will continue. However, the existence of Al Qaida in Syria could eventually become the final justification for intervention if the terrorists succeed in sufficiently weakening the Syrian state and Russia can be persuaded to acquiesce in the loss of its Eastern Mediterranean client state.
The dupes of Nato’s media empire can continue to comfort themselves that their governments are fighting terrorists in some countries, while helping ‘democratic rebels’ to fight ‘brutal regimes’ in others, but as savage austerity cuts and the militarization of urban space afflicts European cities, the reality that it is the degenerate Euro-Atlantic elites who are fomenting jihadist terrorism, the nightmarish reality that this is in fact both the ‘brutal regime’, and the opaque, loose ‘terrorist network’ which wants to take away our freedoms and destroy civilization, this reality will become impossible to ignore. For in truth the war on terrorism is ultimately a war on humanity.
