Intelligent skeptics should see through the media’s smoke screen in order to work out what is really going on in Syria
Patrick Henningsen
Infowars.com
May 28, 2012
If you are still needing an academic tutorial on exactly how the mainstream media is able to generate a completely phony public consensus to support foreign intervention projects, you need look no further than the dangerous, fictional narrative currently being rolled out regarding Syria.
This past Saturday and Sunday morning, almost every major corporate mainstream newspaper and TV network in North America and in Europe ran with the average headline, “Massacre of the children as Syrian forces hit rebels”, giving hundreds of millions of readers and viewers to artificial impression that it was Syrian government forces – and not western-backed terrorist groups, who carried out a massacre on children and others days ago - even though, the true culprit of these attacks has not yet been determined – a fact which was only briefly mentioned later on in these very same media reports.
One of the UK best-selling weekend papers and most widely read online journals, Guardian media group’s The Observer, ran such a headline – one which shamelessly implied that the Syrian government carried out a massacre in Houla. This was used to shape public opinion in Europe, a reality which is later shaped for the North American market.
Corporate Journalism: The Art of Deception
It shouldn’t take a genius to see through this relentless western effort to takeover Syria, but not having learned their lesson from Libya, so many hard working and well educated westerners are bound to fall for it all over again.
Cui bono? Who benefits… from another civilian massacre? Clearly not the Syrian government. But western-backed terrorist groups who have been working to destabilize the country for over one year now, do clearly benefit.
Who would be the chief suspect for this latest massacre? How about the western-backed terrorists in Syria – the very same terrorist groups admitted to their own bombing campaign that killed many innocent people in Syria only weeks ago.
Important to add here also, that the latest child massacre in Syria has been reported as being “done with knives” – which doesn’t sound like a government attack to any intelligent reader.
Do not underestimate for one second just how pivotal the western corporate media is in advancing an agenda of global destabilization:
As we have seen used before in Syria and Libya, the alleged massacre in question is based entirely on unsubstantiated evidence, in this case its more uploaded ‘Youtube’ footage:
“Videos uploaded to the Internet and purporting to be from Houla show many dead and badly mutilated infants. Residents say some victims were killed with knives, while many more died from 18 hours of relentless shelling that left buildings wrecked and homes destroyed in a large residential area near the centre of town.”
Origins of these ‘Youtube video’ are still unknown, but the media machine and certain UN officials have already cited them as “evidence”. Also note that in the YouTube videos, many of the dead children appear to be shot in the heads with fire arms at close range, but this has not stopped certain ‘UN observers’ from accusing the Syrian government from killing children with tank shelling.
Mainstream Media 101
In order to shape consensus reality, first you need to frame the event. Here the story begins by laying soft blame on the Syrian government…
“Syria‘s fragile peace process is in shreds after what was claimed to be a regime-backed massacre…”
… and then proceeding to carefully cover themselves, so to speak, but retracting the allegations deeper into the article:
“Major General Robert Mood, head of the UN team in Syria, deplored the attack, which began at midday on Friday, as “indiscriminate and unforgivable” but did not say who had been to blame.”
Notice how the article itself states clearly that the persons responsible for the massacre is yet to be known, but The Observer has already framed the conclusion within the headline and in the beginning of the story, in order to fit a pre-determined conclusion. This conclusion happens to be directly in line with Washington and London’s foreign policy objective of regime change in Syria.
Take notes. Because this is how it’s done, time and time again – another clear example how large media outlets can effectively drive reality in the direction of their choosing, and this is why so many millions of public media consumers are left misinformed and dis informed, eventually leading to a marginal public endorsement of Washington, London and Tel Aviv’s interventionist foreign policy objectives.
Hours after this fake story was circulated in the GMT timezone, it made its way to EST, as the New York Times picks up the ball and runs it down the field. Here the story is further refined to streamline it with regime change policy objectives, codifying reality within North American sector, claiming that:
“More than 90 people, including at least 32 children under the age of 10, were killed in a central Syrian village, top United Nations officials said Saturday, accusing the government of perpetrating the “indiscriminate” shelling of civilian neighborhoods.”
No real details are actually given to support this media-generated verdict, only that, “A United Nations statement said the observers confirmed that “artillery and tank shells were fired at a residential neighborhood.”
And finally, the Washington Post weighs in with their attempt to corner Russia and China on the issue, rounding out the artificial verdict today with their headline, “U.N. Security Council blames Syrian government for civilian massacre”, claiming that:
“The U.N. Security Council on Sunday blamed the Syrian government for most of the deaths in a massacre of 116 civilians in the village of Houla, issuing a unanimous statement condemning the killings that was supported by Syria’s staunch allies Russia and China.”
Shortly thereafter, the UN’s Ban Ki Moon and Save the Children charity weigh in with carefully-craft statements, but statements that are obviously framed and directed towards Syria’s Assad government, and not Gulf States, Washington and London-backed terrorist gangs currently operating under an all but official western mandate within Syria and from their NATO-sanctioned base over the border in southern Turkey. Reality is further shaped by the London Guardian’s Observer and others, with an official “international outcry”:
“The international community was united in its condemnation. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said the killings were a “flagrant violation of international law” while the White House called the violence acts of “unspeakable and inhuman brutality.” Arab League head Nabil Elaraby said the killings were a “horrific crime” and urged UN action.
Save the Children’s chief executive, Justin Forsyth, echoed calls for intervention. He said: “This indiscriminate killing must stop now. The world cannot sit back and allow this to happen. Children are suffering terribly in this conflict.”
Even the BBC have gone so far as to run 9 year old photographs from Iraq, and sell them as from this latest massacre of children in Syria. Any other foreign media outlet in the UK would have its broadcasting license pulled for such a propaganda stunt. In the face of such damning manipulation, why then would so many people still believe the mainstream media’s version of reality in countries like Syria?
But what is a more closer version of reality is this:
Western-backed terrorists, many of whom are al-Qaida, mostly hailing from outside of Syria, are fomenting civil war and carrying out a series of attacks on UN observers and civilians, in order to create the preferred western narrative that “Assad must go.”
Western readers should be under no illusion – your government operators are sanctioning civilian killing in places like Syria, and your corporate media are being used to place the blame on the west’s political enemy in the region – and therefore influence western public support for regime change.
After over one year of intervening through their own favored terrorist guerrilla proxy fighters and running arms into Syria – arms that are admittedly for going into the hands of western-backed al-Qaida groups there, the west has not yet succeeded in toppling the Assad government and installing a new puppet regime, as they did by using NATO military force in Libya last autumn. But western project managers like Hillary Clinton and William Hague have not given up, and if their corporate media outlets are allowed to determine their version reality in Syria, they will eventually get their “humanitarian intervention”, and the country will slowly be destroyed from within. Then regime change will happen.
It’s as simple as that.
The Syrian people are the ones who will eventually lose if Washington, London, Tel Aviv and the Gulf States succeed in destroying that country, as they have done in Libya and Iraq.
When this is done, then they will move on to destabilize Lebanon in order to unseat and neutralize Hezbollah.
After that, the door to attack Iran will be wide open.
There’s your World War Three in earnest.
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BBC Caught In Syria Massacre Propaganda Hoax
News agency uses picture of dead Iraqi children to depict alleged government atrocity
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, May 28, 2012
The British media has been caught yet again with its pants down in the effort to sell a NATO-led attack on Syria, with the revelation that BBC News used a years-old photo of dead Iraqi children to depict victims of an alleged government assault on the town of Houla.

Click for enlargement.
In a report issued hours after the massacre, the BBC used a photo that was first published over nine years ago and taken in Al Mussayyib, Iraq. The image shows a child skipping over the dead bodies of hundreds of Iraqi children who have been transported from a mass grave to be identified.
The caption used by the BBC to describe the image stated that the picture was provided by an activist and “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”. After the “mistake” was exposed, the BBC changed their original article but did not issue a retraction.
The photographer who took the original picture, Marco Di Lauro, posted on his Facebook page, “Somebody is using my images as a propaganda against the Syrian government to prove the massacre.” Di Lauro told the London Telegraph he was “astonished” the BBC had failed to check the authenticity of the image.
“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That’s all,” said Di Lauro.
Information surrounding the massacre at Houla clearly suggests that the murders were carried out by death squads and not shelling by government tanks. Video footage of the child victims (warning – graphic) appears to show gunshot wounds to the face and stab wounds. None of the victims appear to have lost any limbs.
As RT reports, “Many of the victims were executed at point blank-range,” a fact inconsistent with the explanation that tank shelling was responsible for the bloodshed. It’s equally as likely that terrorist death squads, responsible for numerous deadly bombings in Syria that have killed scores of people, were responsible for the massacre.
As Tony Cartalucci writes, “Why on earth would the Syrian Government want to kill Syrian children? And even if for some reason they did – why would they do so in a way more or less guaranteed to attract international condemnation and renewed calls for intervention? In other words, ‘cui bono‘?
“Who really benefits from this atrocity – and who doesn’t? Surely the insurgents and their foreign backers benefit. and the Syrian Government most certainly does not! Given that recent bomb atrocities in Damascus have been blamed – almost universally – on extremist opponents of the Assad Government, isn’t it at least plausible they’re also behind this latest horror?”
Whatever the truth behind events over the weekend, the mass media has once again prostrated itself as a rolling propaganda mouthpiece for the claims of dubious anonymous “activists” who have proven to be adept at staging propaganda time and time again.
This is by no means the first time the British media has salaciously claimed that Assad’s forces are indiscriminately killing babies and children.
Back in February, the London Independent reported, “President Assad’s security forces have indiscriminately killed scores of newborn babies in Homs this week.”
As we documented, the source for this claim did not originate in Syria but in London, from an organization called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which is little more than a lobbying group with intimate ties to the UK Foreign Office.
The propaganda tool of falsely accusing governments of killing babies and children is not new to the middle east. Before the first Gulf War, then largest public relations firm in the world Hill & Knowlton crafted a hoax centered around the lie that Saddam Hussein’s troops were ransacking hospitals in Kuwait and throwing babies out of incubators. Despite later being proven to be a complete fabrication, George H.W. Bush administration aggressively pushed the story as part of their build-up to war.
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