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    Fraudian propping up the Shite Helmets again Archived Message

    Posted by Raskolnikov on October 27, 2020, 7:06 am

    https://www.dumptheguardian.com/news/2020/oct/27/syria-disinformation-war-white-helmets-mayday-rescue-james-le-mesurier

    This time in a "long read" from Chulov packed full of propaganda. Here's three of the most packed paragraphs; pretty much every sentence slatherd with lies and spin (Strangely this doesn't seem to show up in the @gdnlongread Twitter page...scared of letting people take it apart perhaps?):

    From September 2015, when Russia entered the war to save Assad from defeat, bombing raids on civilian areas reached unprecedented levels. Vivid scenes of men, women and children suffering terrible injuries gave the lie to Russian and Syrian claims that their campaign to recapture Idlib province and the suburbs of Damascus only targeted Islamist terrorists and their sympathisers. Instead, as the videos showed, they were bombing civilian areas indiscriminately.

    The disinformation campaign quickly grew, its aim to sow doubt about the White Helmets and the footage they collected. As the war progressed, north-western Syria became a magnet for extremists bent on using the chaos to launch a global jihad. Propagandists exploited the confusion on the ground. Soon, claims appeared online that the White Helmets had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda, which had supposedly seized on the group as a way to obtain foreign funds. There were also accusations that the group had been created by governments determined to remove Assad from power, and that the White Helmets volunteers were “crisis actors” staging scenes to discredit Russia and Syria.

    Useful idiots promoting such conspiracy theories on YouTube, Twitter and their own fringe websites were given profile and flattering coverage by Russian and Syrian media outlets. Le Mesurier was himself the subject of near-daily state-sponsored attacks on Russian television and social media, calling him a terrorist, spy, paedophile and organ trafficker, among other scripted slurs. He was called an agent of western intelligence, using a rescue organisation as a Trojan horse for regime change. The smears even got an airing at the UN security council, via a panel put together by Moscow.

    The whole article aims at rehabilitating LeMesurier, the White Helmets and the regime change antics of the west, the latter being mostly absent from the discussion of course, as demonstrated by this whopper from the middle of the article:

    All around, Syria was unravelling – a disaster that followed the monumental failings of the joint US-British invasion of Iraq, which hung like a pall over Whitehall and Westminster. For states with no appetite for military intervention, funding the White Helmets seemed like a risk-free way to help. A collaboration between the British government and Mayday Rescue became one of Britain’s few known interventions in the Syrian war.

    "failings", mistakes, ill fortune, not the natural consequences of an illegal war of course.

    "No appetite for military intervention"? Seriously? Also, note the lawyered language in the sentence "...one of Britains few KNOWN interventions in the Syrian war".

    Also the closing paragraphs:

    In Syria, the conflict has stagnated, with Russia and Iran having pushed Assad into a winning position on the battlefields and allowed him to claim a pyrrhic victory. Idlib remains out of the Syrian leader’s control, its people caught in a kill box, bombed by warplanes from above and threatened by competing groups of fighters on the ground. More than half the country’s prewar population remains internally displaced, or in camps across the borders of neighbouring countries.

    “I’ve never seen an event where so many who tried to do good were destroyed,” said the source familiar with the Grant Thornton report. “Everything that this conflict ever touched ended up damaged.”

    Caught between "The Russians" and "competing groups of fighters on the ground". No mention of any western intervention or support or air raids. It's almost like it didn't happen....

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