And why wouldn’t they? Israel has been treating injured terror group fighters for years with British government’s full knowledge, but UK msm don’t seem to think that matters
Keir Starmer has welcomed the fall of the ‘barbaric’ and ‘brutal’ Bashar al-Assad in Syria – Assad is said to have escaped to Russia and received asylum there – while Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has described the regime change as historic.
UK media are in unison in echoing the Establishment line – just for a change, you understand – and some have given away some of the reason that the UK wanted Assad gone. The Times has described Assad’s defeat as a ‘humiliation for Putin’. The UK government-funded think-tank Chatham House said that the defeat weakens Iran and Russia, two of the biggest bugbears of western governments and intelligence services. What is certain is that the human rights and freedoms have little if anything to do with the jubilation, as the new regime’s largest factions are made up of terrorist group al-Qaeda, rebranded as ‘HTS’, ISIS and other terror groups.
Both al-Qaeda and ISIS are ‘proscribed’ (banned) terrorist groups under UK law, making any expression of support for them a crime under anti-terror legislation, but this has not stopped the UK from assisting in their fight against Assad. It has not stopped UK media falling over themselves to whitewash their involvement in the Syrian ‘resistance’, either.
Sky News, for example, was eager to convey the supposed rehabilitation of HTS and its leader, claiming that HTS (a rebrand of the ‘Nusra Front’ al-Qaeda group) and its leader Abu Mohammed al Jolani had ‘cut ties with al-Qaeda in 2016’ and that Nusra Front had only been a ‘former wing of al-Qaeda’ when it rebranded to HTS. The UK ‘mainstream’ media have also made much of Jolani’s claimed comment that he supports ‘diversity’. However, even cursory research of the history of the group shows that as of the end of 2016, the year of the supposed tie-cutting, Nusra/HTS was run by at least a dozen senior, current al-Qaeda figures.
Other media are busy ‘fact-checking’ video circulating on social media last week of a captured Syrian soldier being beheaded by ‘freedom fighters’. France24 said that the video can be traced back to 2020 and did not take place last week when it began to circulate – but could not say that the murder was not committed by the factions now in control of Syria.
Israeli PM and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, hailed the regime change as ‘historic’ and claimed credit for the events that led to it. This is not an idle boast – Israel was exposed years ago in its own media using its own military facilities to treat wounded fighters from anti-Assad terrorist groups so they could return to the fight:
And the UK government is very well aware of it – at the very latest since then-International Development Secretary Priti Patel was forced to resign for trying to funnel ‘aid’ funding to the Israeli military hospitals treating the terrorists.
The assistance of western governments and media for the ‘rebels’ has been far from mere (im)moral support. The US military was filmed last week aiding ‘rebels’ against Syrian government forces and the UK Ministry of Defence has admitted carrying out airstrikes in support of the rebel groups in April. Continuing the PR make-over, a former head of intelligence service MI6 has called for HTS to be removed from the UK’s list of proscribed groups.
The UK media, with only the rarest exceptions, have for years helped promote atrocity propaganda against the Assad regime, notably pushing a narrative that Assad’s forces attacked civilians with chlorine despite mounting evidence that the ‘attack’ had been staged – a reality admitted by the media of other countries – potentially assisted or even organised by British intelligence.
The OPCW officially maintains that these canisters were probably dropped by an aircraft – probably a helicopter, presumably Syrian – over Douma on 7 April 2018. But the dissenting assessment, which the OPCW made no reference to in its published conclusions, finds there is a “higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft”.
The late award-winning journalist Robert Fisk, writing in the Independent’s Voices section.
The upshot of all this is that, with western and Israeli assistance, the ‘barbaric’ Assad regime is gone but Syria and its people now face a regime in which terrorist groups rule the roost who have a history of violence against anyone who will not adhere to their ways, with Israel already exploiting the change to take further Syrian territory as a supposed ‘buffer zone’ against the factions it has been helping.
While all this is being ‘welcomed’ by Keir Starmer, the Starmer regime is conducting a war on UK journalists and activists who expose Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and who stand up against Israel’s genocide and for the self-determination and human rights of the Palestinian people.
And the people of Gaza face ongoing and probably intensified slaughter beneath the bombs and weaponised starvation of the genocidal Israeli regime, with the eyes of western media turning elsewhere and with Netanyahu emboldened by the replacement of an ally of Iran, one of the mainstays of the regional resistance to his ambitions and his mass murder of innocent women and children who dare to exist within territory Israel claims, by a new regime he helped to install.
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