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.

Trump and Le Pen: What Would Hitler Say?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

16 December 16

onald Trump poses many dangers, high among them the way he plays to the economic rage of workers losing their jobs to globalization and automation, the racial rancor of whites losing their privileged majority status, and the religious resentment of Evangelicals who fear losing their last, best chance to impose their religious views on “a Christian America.”

Trump pushes all their hot buttons. He also empowers the alt-right, Ku Kluxers, and others who openly preach White Supremacy, explicit Nazi ideology, and extreme measures against Muslims, Jews, and immigrants.

Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon continue to pander to these nasties on both sides of the Atlantic, nowhere more than in France, where Marine Le Pen has turned her father’s Jew-baiting Front National, or FN, into Europe’s leading anti-Muslim political force. Understanding all this properly offers an insight into where Trump and Bannon are heading.

Are Marine Le Pen and her FN truly neo-fascist, as I have described them over the past several years? A brilliant French academic says I’m dead wrong.

“Referring to fascism or Nazism with regard to the FN, commonplace in some militant circles, can only obscure understanding,” writes Joël Gombin, a 33-year-old political scientist who specializes in French elections and the far right. “The FN, as a party, has nothing to do today with (neo)fascism or (neo)Nazism.”

I disagree. My understanding begins with Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper and intelligence officer whose unit brutally tortured and killed “Arab terrorists” in Algeria. In the late 1960s, he ran a record company that produced “The Third Reich: Voices and Songs of the German Revolution.” The album included such old favorites as “Vive Hitler” and “The Hymn of the Nazi Party.” On the record jacket, Le Pen characterized Hitler and the National Socialists in their rise to power as “a powerful mass movement, altogether popular and democratic, that triumphed through elections.”

Jean-Marie followed up on this idea in 1972, helping to bring together self-proclaimed fascists, Vichy collaborators, well-known war criminals, ultra-rightwing Catholics, and supporters of Algérie française and the terrorist Secret Army Organization, which had failed in its attempt to keep the French government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle from withdrawing from Algeria. These militants all saw themselves, in Gombin’s perfect phrase, as “the losers of history, the forsaken, those that the account written by the victors ? the Allies, the Gaullists, the communists ? had consigned to the dustbin of history.”

Merging their differences, they formed the Front National, receiving support from the Movimento social Italiano, or MSI, who remained followers of Mussolini.

FN became Jean-Marie’s base as he built a reputation for being soft on Nazi Germany and shamelessly provocative toward Jews. He publicly dismissed the Holocaust as “a mere detail in the history of the Second World War.” He publicly made puns about the Nazi gas ovens. He accused President Jacques Chirac of being “in the pay of Jewish organizations” and argued publicly that the Nazi occupation of France “was not especially inhumane.”

Having forgotten Voltaire’s historic commitment to free speech, French authorities used various laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial to repeatedly prosecute Le Pen, which only increased his popularity among certain sectors of the French population. This led to his greatest success, when in the 2002 presidential election he beat the Socialist Party prime minister Lionel Jospin to win a place in the second round against Chirac, who trounced him with massive support from the left.

Flash forward to 2012, when Marine Le Pen took over as FN’s president, and to 2015, when she expelled her father from the party for continuing to make provocative statements. In those years and down to the present, she has worked hard to “de-demonize” the FN, emphasizing new issues and changing the party in ways that break sharply with its past.

She tossed out the more radical fringes of the party. She supports gay rights and secularism. She calls herself a Gaullist and “a moderate,” and claims the FN is on neither the right nor the left. She scathingly attacks neoliberal economics and finance-dominated capitalism. She calls for a referendum to take France out of the European Union, or Frexit, as it’s called here. She criticizes Nazi Germany, calls the gas chambers a non-negotiable fact of history, and describes the Holocaust as “the summit of human barbarism.” She roundly condemns anti-Semitism, openly seeks Jewish support, and with her live-in lover Louis Aliot – who boasts of his North African Jewish grandfather ? has even made friends with Israel.

But, for all this, she retains a defining element of her father’s Front National and of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany. She blames a “foreign” group for a large share of France’s problems. Only instead of pointing her finger at “the Jews,” she castigates “the Muslims” and even opposes letting schools provide Muslim students with an alternative to pork.

“It’s the same politics of scapegoating that it always has been,” explains Professor Nonna Mayer, an expert on the French far right at the prestigious Paris Institute for Political Studies, or Sciences Po. For me, this more than justifies calling her and her Front National neo-fascists, and Trump’s “friending” her on the international stage suggests that his anti-Muslim rhetoric will lead in an extremely dangerous direction.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.