Simon Wood : Correspondent

It has been almost a year since the contorted body of little Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, oblivious in death to the fact that he was to become the key pawn in a global media campaign seeking to cement public opinion in favour of intervention in Syria. The UK’s Guardian newspaper intoned at the time:“To begin restoring that hope will inevitably mean international intervention of some kind. The establishment of credible safe havens and the implementation of a no-fly zone must be on the table for serious consideration.”

A 2015 analysis on the 99,99998271 percent blog provided a detailed anatomy of the methods and aims of this form of propaganda with regard to Syria, concluding:

“The corporate media has concealed covert activities within Syria going back several years; has blacked out a Pentagon report demonstrating US prediction, supply and use of ISIS as a strategic asset; is again reporting selectively regarding ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dictators; and has engaged in this precise kind of rhetoric in the past before every intervention.

“Rupert Murdoch is a board member of a company that is drilling for oil in the Golan Heights while his newspapers sound the clarion call that may open the way for a (hoped for) post-Assad Western puppet government.

“Meanwhile stocks in arms companies are at record levels and the refugee crisis is now a major humanitarian disaster at World War 2 levels, with refugee populations particularly high from nations where the US and its allies have acted (covertly or overtly).”

[Note: See original article for detailed discussion and sources for these conclusions]

If at first you don’t succeed: now it is the turn of another hapless child – this time thankfully alive.

The excellent OffGuardian news/analysis website demonstrates that another mass push for intervention is underway, with the corporate media content to use a terrorist-sympathising “media centre” as the story’s primary source:

The boy is allegedly five-year-old Omran Daqneesh. According to the AP report neither he nor the rest of his family sustained anything but superficial cuts and bruises.

Yet, in a conflict that has already claimed the lives of more than 100 000 people nationwide, the media wants us to believe this story is somehow unique and that the “horror generated” by a video of some people looking quite well but dusty and bloodstained will shock us more than the piles of corpses , “echo the anguished global response” to images of drowned A[]lan Kurdi and galvanise us all into “doing something” – i.e. supporting a NATO intervention to save the terrorists in eastern Aleppo.

If the sight of all the major outlets who cheer on Western-backed slaughter every day, running wall-to-wall op-eds and features about the tragedy of a little boy with a cut on his face, simply because it serves the empire’s agenda, doesn’t convince you of the moral and intellectual blank they’ve become then keep reading. It gets better.

AP and other outlets tell us the vid was “filmed and circulated” by a group called the “Aleppo Media Centre”. Who/what are they? Well, the Graun links to their Twitter, which is in Arabic, and which boasts over 20 000 alleged followers,including several members of the Western media, and a plethora of similar short and often murky vids beside this one. We can also quite easily find their Facebook page.

The Facebook page contains a post cheering on al-Nusra, the US-designated terrorist group, referring to them as “rebels”, not “terrorists” and also calling the Syrian government a “regime”, the standard terminology of the corporate media when referring to Assad’s administration. Such phrasing destroys the Aleppo Media Centre as a neutral, credible source.

OffGuardian further notes that there are serious discrepancies about the timeline with respect to when the video was made and uploaded:

“We’re also a bit curious about why the AP report claim the video was made Wednesday night, when it was uploaded to Twitter at 13:52 BST Wednesday afternoon, which would equate with 15:52 in Aleppo. Is this a time-zone anomaly? But then there’s the added confusion of the [t]weet itself, which seems to say pretty clearly that the vid was made on Sunday evening.”

In a later article, Catte at OffGuardian noted:

“After the recent revelation that almost every major news site has been promoting unverified video and eye-witness testimony originating in some of the most extreme, violent and debauched terrorist elements currently operating in Syria, we have to ask – is there any longer even a minimum of verification or investigative process required before news agencies and publications endorse a breaking story?”

In the case of that notorious “Omran rescue vid”, for example, AP broke the story, but of the three journalists credited, one was in Beirut, one in Geneva and one in Moscow.

None of them were in Aleppo, or even in Syria. Given what’s now transpired about the discredited and even criminal nature of the source, we need to ask – how did they get word of this event and how did they verify it?

Did AP talk to ordinary people on the spot, and directly interview the witnesses? Did they get this video direct from the terrorist-supporting “Aleppo Media Centre”, or via an intermediary? Did they know about the terrorist-connections of both the AMC and the “photo-journalist” Mahmoud Raslan, and just not inform their readers, or did they genuinely not know who their sources were?

The media train wreck was made complete when it emerged that the Guardian had deleted 45 percent of reader comments below a related opinion piece to preserve its obviously bogus Syria narrative for those precious few readers still somehow unaware that their newspaper of choice is nothing but a shill for the arms industry and Western imperial interests:

“This narrative has never really got much traction, mostly because it’s stupid, and right now it’s not going over at all. The latest serving of it,” The Guardian View on Syrian civilian casualties: Omran Daqneesh – a child of war” was published at 7:58pm on August 18 and remained open for comments for no more than two hours.

In that time the BTL section erupted in outrage and was shredded by the moderators. The results are shameful. Of the 75 comments not entirely obliterated (which happens), 34 (45 percent) had their content deleted. And after all that not even all the remaining 55 percent were supportive of the ATL line.

The Guardian had to delete 45 percent of its own readers opinions, just to ma[i]ntain a bare semblance of its agenda.

No comment that mentioned the terrorist source of the video was allowed to remain. Every comment that identified the media “hero” of the hour, Mahmoud Raslan as a supporter of al Nusra or a friend of child-beheaders was removed. Many others that merely pointed out the gaps and absurdities in the narrative were likewise deleted.

There are lessons here. First, if you want to be brazenly lied to or misled in a way that wins your support of Western bombing under the guise of “humanitarian intervention” (and therefore arms sales) along with the furthering of Western geopolitical objectives in Syria, go no further than the corporate media; even – and especially – the self-described “liberal-left” wing. Second, if you want the truth – or at least honest people trying in good faith to get to the truth – you’ll have to rely on unpaid bloggers and the credible independent media, especially those that publish source documents like WikiLeaks.

And third, no doubt should remain in anyone’s mind of the depths of moral depravity to which the corporate media and its paid, indoctrinated stenographers will sink in order to achieve the objectives of their paymasters: namely, the utilization of images of injured or dead children in an attempt to bring about a state of affairs that will with certainty create many more such suffering souls. – Counterpunch.

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