Houla horror: truth is elusive, lies are easier to spot [View all]
May 27th, 2012 by Syd Walker
Over the last 24-hours there’s been a renewed media storm over Syria – prompted by a horrific story of atrocities in the town of Houla. Very gruesome images of dead children have been offered to the media, which has lapped them up and used them again and again on our screens and in our newspapers.
The UN observers in Syria, so far, have declined to draw definite conclusions about who’s responsible for this terrible massacre. But unsurprisingly, western media has been less circumspect. There’s a deafening chorus of howls complaining ‘The World’ isn’t doing anything, while President Assad gets away with murdering his own people – again!
I’ve no doubt some of the Twitter users tweeting and re-tweeting this type of sentiment on the #Houla hashtag are genuine in their concern. Yet remarkably few people ever seem to pause and ask themselves the obvious question – 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?
Yet just as mainstream media doesn’t want to give that line of inquiry much encouragement, major ‘human rights’ NGOs like Amnesty have also rushed to judgement. Their weekend tweeps have been hammering away, sneering at the Assad Government and spinning the incident as grounds for outside “intervention”… just like they did last year over Libya.
Read more: http://sydwalker.info/blog/2012/05/27/houla-horror-truth-is-elusive-lies-are-easier-to-spot/
= new reply since forum marked as read