Syria or not?

Many media outlets are talking about how a Danish TV mistook a video game version of Damascus for the actual city.

 On February 26th during a news report on Syria the image behind the news presenter in Danish TV2, was supposedly of Damascus. Only it wasn’t- it was from a video game called “ Assassin’s creed ‘’ And it took one whole week for that Danish TV channel to recognize its mistake ! Well the head of the news apologized for that mistake and said “ It was a reminder to us all of the importance of verifying the sources of the pictures”

 But this isn’t the first time that there have been mistakes in reporting over Syria. A 2003 photo taken in Iraq by the Italian journalist Marco di Lauro was mistakenly used by the BBC to illustrate a report about the massacre of Houla. The BBC said that that picture had been sent to them by a political activist. That photo was very distinct as it showed a child running through the corpses and it made many headlines back in 2003. Simply inconceivable how the BBC could have mistaken it for one coming out of Syria!

 The BBC has other mistakes though – In a news bulletin on Syria , the newsreader appeared in front of the logo for the fictitious United Nations Space Command from Microsoft’s Halo game. Apparently that was mistaken for the logo of United Nations Security Council.

 Another well known misrepresentation of the truth was carried out by France 24television channel  in the summer of 2011 when they announced on screen that Lamia Chakkour Syria’s ambassadress to France had resigned. This was quickly denied by Lamia Chakkour herself and she threatened France 24 with a law suit for that act of disinformation.

 There are many other such incidents. Incidents that show that there is a campaign of disinformation waged against Syria. Syrians must now make the effort to research every single article and every single photo that is presented to them by Western media.

 The purpose of a photo,in general, is to move its viewer to consider the consequences of his or her action or inaction – but faced with a sea of inaccuracies it is very difficult for the viewer to come to any decision. First the viewer should research the authenticity of that photo.

 Over on the other  side ( By that I mean the west ) this doesn’t happen. In the rare event that a photo or a film or an article makes its way there, it is immediately ridiculed and dismissed as Syrian government propaganda . Images of innocent victims of violence , specifically children that should move its viewers to tears have little effect in the west where a likely reaction is “ they brought this upon themselves ‘’

 This is clear not only from the horrors filtering out of Syria but from those previously filtered out of Palestine. Any photo that shows Palestinians suffering and which gets published say in an American newspaper, gets criticized by Zionist and Jewish organizations as biased. By biased they mean that the American newspaper should have made clear that photo was the result of what the Palestinians made the Israelis do- and not the result of Israeli barbarism!!

 All of this can and did result in a Danish TV channel depicting an image from a video game to describe a scene in Syria, for there is a huge gap between how things are and how the west conceives them to be. It will take a lot of work on both sides to sweep away centuries of distrust and dislike. Maybe then we will get a true picture of what is happening in Syria rather than a picture out of a computer game simply because it fits the imagination of how the west views what is happening in Syria.

Reem Haddad