Divorced from Reality!

The British veteran journalist, Patrick Cockburn, wrote to the Independent an interesting report from Syria about foreign media manipulations of the ongoing crisis in Syria as ” dangerously inaccurate “.

“Every time I come to Syria I am struck by how different the situation is on the ground from the way it is pictured in the outside world. The foreign media reporting of the Syrian conflict is surely as inaccurate and misleading as anything we have seen since the start of the First World War. I can’t think of any other war or crisis I have covered in which propagandistic, biased or second-hand sources have been so readily accepted by journalists as providers of objective facts.” Says Cockburn, citing the recent report on Syria published last week by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, which pointed out that “once confident of swift victory, the opposition’s foreign allies shifted to a paradigm dangerously divorced from reality”.

It is difficult to prove the truth or falsehood of any generalization about Syria. But at the very time I was in the town, Tal Kalakh,  Al Jazeera Arabic was reporting fighting there between the Syrian army and the opposition. Smoke was supposedly rising from Tal Kalakh as the “rebels” fought to defend their stronghold. Fortunately, this appears to have been fantasy and, during the several hours I was in the town, there was no shooting, no sign that fighting had taken place and no smoke. Added Cockburn.

Cockburn asserted that the plan of the CIA and the “Friends of Syria” to somehow seek an end to the war by increasing the flow of weapons is equally absurd. War will only produce more war.

Thus, the ongoing distortions of the reality on the ground in Syria aims but at bedeviling the majority, while at the same time showing al-Qaeda affiliates as “innocent lambs”! In the world of today, the enemies of Syria have exploited every media outlet as to distort, misinform, fabricate and disseminate lies, if  not in some cases to give instructions and orders to the terrorists on the ground to carry out their heinous crimes against the Syrians.

Dr. Mohammad Abdo Al-Ibrahim