Politics
Here We Go Again: YouTube Clips Of Syrian “Chemical Attacks” Are Back – Meet The Man Behind The Propaganda
by Tyler Durden, via Zero Hedge.com:
US foreign policy is becoming so easy and predictable, even Derek Zoolander can do it.
Two weeks ago, when discussing the relentless attempts to provoke, or at least greenlight another quasi war with Syria’s president Assad, we wrote “one can be confident that the ISIS “campaign” will continue and get ever
closer to Damascus until yet another appropriately-framed YouTube clip appears and leads to another war with Assad.”
Fast forward to today, when precisely this script which by now everyone could predict, is being rerun.
According to Reuters, “a group monitoring the Syrian civil war said on Tuesday government forces carried out a poison gas attack that killed six people in the northwest,and medics posted videos of children suffering what they said was suffocation.” Of course it could be just a bunch of actors like in the summer of 2013, but that’s irrelevant – there is a YouTube clip out there and it is only a matter of time before John Kerry latches on to it as this year’s pretext to declare war on Syria.
Syria would laugh if it could, however it can’t: “a Syrian military source described the report of an attack in the village of Sarmin in Idlib province as propaganda. “We confirm that we would not use this type of weapon, and we don’t need to use it,” the source said.”
Too late: the “facts” are out there: “The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict through a network of sources, said the six dead included a man, his wife and their three children. It cited medical sources as saying they died as a result of gas from barrel bombs dropped late on Monday and that the chemical used was likely chlorine. Dozens more were wounded in the attack, the Observatory said. Reuters could not independently verify the report.”
The propaganda is coming hot and heavy:
The Idlib branch of the Syrian Civil Defense rescue organization, which operates in insurgent-held areas, posted seven videos on YouTube, some at nighttime and some in a medical center.
One video showed three children and a woman, all apparently unconscious, in a medical center. A voice off camera said the name of the village, Sarmin, and Monday’s date.
“One of the infants, only a few months old,” a male voice says, shaking, as he films a baby on a gurney with liquid around its mouth. Two more infants with limp bodies are brought in, one by a man wearing a gas mask and another carrying a young girl.
“She’s still alive doctor,” a man checking the girl says. “Doctor, doctor, she is still breathing.”
The Syrian Civil Defense includes more than 2,000 humanitarian volunteers, known as the “White Helmets” for the hard hats they wear, who work as first responders in a country where the medical infrastructure has broken down.
Another video posted by the group and shot at night showed a very young girl, naked except for underwear and pink shoes, being doused in liquid by people wearing white helmets, her horrified expression illuminated by their headlamps shining on her face.
This is a good time for a look at just who this Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is, aside from an organization with some pretty impressive video editing skills. Here is areport from April 2013 written before the release of the infamous summer of 2013 YouTube clip which almost provoked world war over Syria, and should provide sufficient doubt about the veracity of any YouTube-based clips.
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Pro-Democracy Terrorism”: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is a Propaganda Front funded by the EU
The NYT admits fraudulent Syrian human rights group is UK-based “one-man band” funded by EU and one other “European country.”
In reality, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has long ago been exposed as an absurd propaganda front operated by Rami Abdul Rahman out of his house in England’s countryside. According to a December 2011 Reuters article titled, “Coventry – an unlikely home to prominent Syria activist,” Abdul Rahman admits he is a member of the so-called “Syrian opposition” and seeks the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad:
After three short spells in prison in Syria for pro-democracy activism, Abdulrahman came to Britain in 2000 fearing a longer, fourth jail term.
“I came to Britain the day Hafez al-Assad died, and I’ll return when Bashar al-Assad goes,” Abdulrahman said, referring to Bashar’s father and predecessor Hafez, also an autocrat.
One could not fathom a more unreliable, compromised, biased source of information, yet for the past two years, his “Observatory” has served as the sole source of information for the endless torrent of propaganda emanating from the Western media. Perhaps worst of all, is that the United Nations uses this compromised, absurdly overt source of propaganda as the basis for its various reports – at least, that is what the New York Times now claims in their recent article, “A Very Busy Man Behind the Syrian Civil War’s Casualty Count.”
The NYT piece admits:
Military analysts in Washington follow its body counts of Syrian and rebel soldiers to gauge the course of the war. The United Nations and human rights organizations scour its descriptions of civilian killings for evidence in possible war crimes trials. Major news organizations, including this one, cite its casualty figures.
Yet, despite its central role in the savage civil war, the grandly named Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is virtually a one-man band. Its founder, Rami Abdul Rahman, 42, who fled Syria 13 years ago, operates out of a semidetached red-brick house on an ordinary residential street in this drab industrial city [Coventry, England].
The New York Times also for the first time reveals that Abdul Rahman’s operation is indeed funded by the European Union and a “European country” he refuses to identify:
Money from two dress shops covers his minimal needs for reporting on the conflict, along with small subsidies from the European Union and one European country that he declines to identify.
Abdelrahman is not the “head” of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, he is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, run out of his UK-based house as a one-man operation.
And while Abdul Rahman refuses to identify that “European country,” it is beyond doubt that it is the United Kingdom itself – as Abdul Rahman has direct access to the Foreign Secretary William Hague, who he has been documented meeting in person on multiple occasions at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. The NYT in fact reveals that it was the British government that first relocated Abdul Rahman to Coventry, England after he fled Syria over a decade ago because of his anti-government activities:
When two associates were arrested in 2000, he fled the country, paying a human trafficker to smuggle him into England. The government resettled him in Coventry, where he decided he liked the slow pace.
Abdul Rahman is not a “human rights activist.” He is a paid propagandist. He is no different than the troupe of unsavory, willful liars and traitors provided refuge in Washington and London during the Iraq war and the West’s more recent debauchery in Libya, for the sole purpose of supplying Western governments with a constant din of propaganda and intentionally falsified intelligence reports designed specifically to justify the West’s hegemonic designs.
Abdul Rahman’s contemporaries include the notorious Iraqi defector Rafid al-Janabi, codename “Curveball,” who now gloats publicly that he invented accusations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the West’s casus belli for a 10 year war that ultimately cost over a million lives, including thousands of Western troops, and has left Iraq still to this day in shambles. There’s also the lesser known Dr. Sliman Bouchuiguir of Libya, who formed the foundation of the pro-West human rights racket in Benghazi and now openly brags in retrospect that tales of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s atrocities against the Libyan people were likewise invented to give NATO its sought-after impetus to intervene militarily.
Unlike in Iraq and Libya, the West has failed categorically to sell military intervention in Syria, and even its covert war has begun to unravel as the public becomes increasingly aware that the so-called “pro-democracy rebels” the West has been arming for years are in fact sectarian extremists fighting under the banner of Al Qaeda. The charade that is the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” is also unraveling. It is unlikely that the New York Times’ limited hangout will convince readers that Rami Abdul Rahman is anything other than another “Curveball” helping the corporate-financier elite of Wall Street and London sell another unnecessary war to the public.
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This was written in April 2013, before the person above with the wilful assistance of his UK and EU funders, released the first YouTube clip meant to unleash war in Syria, and permit the passage of a Qatari gas pipeline under the nation, ending Gazprom’s energy monopoly over Europe. The first time failed, and now the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” is back and eager to succeed where its warmongering propaganda failed the first time around.
Draw your own conclusions.