******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
(These are the lead paragraphs in a Robert Fisk article in the Independent that pretty much epitomize the pro-Assad reporting that we have learned to expect from people like him. I direct your attention to the final paragraph, which ends "Some said they rode in aboard Turkish tanks." A preposterous notion that allows a confronted Fisk to simply say that he is just reporting what someone said. The "some said" allows him to say just about anything, including that it was the Turkish military spearheading the assault. Or maybe it was Martians. His brand of "journalism" is not fact based. It is a highly skillful form of propaganda that is developed over years and years writing for the bourgeois press. People like Fisk, Seymour Hersh, Patrick L. Smith--the turd who writes for Salon, Patrick Cockburn, his brother Andrew, Robert Parry are all highly regarded "investigative journalists" yet their reporting has been deeply flawed over Syria. Shame on them.)
A few days ago, on a hilltop above the Mediterranean city of Latakia, with the sun going down and the whisper of jets – Russian jets, of course – high in the sky, Samah Ismael told the story of her eviction from Raqqa. It is one small tragedy in a million – but it seemed to illustrate much.
This was long before Isis existed, when the Nusra Front – which represented al-Qaeda in those days – was growing in power and when the people living in the little town of al-Sabha on the banks of the Euphrates thought that even then, in 2013, the war which had consumed much of Syria might not touch them. Samah was a 39-year-old government teacher at the Ahmad al-Azawi school and had been happy taking her English classes with 17 and 18 year-olds. Education is free in Syria.
Samah, I should add, is an Alawite, the Shia minority from which Bashar al-Assad comes, although it does not dominate the teaching profession in Syria. She had been living just outside Raqqa for four-and-a-half years. But in March of 2013, she had stayed in the city until 10 at night and noticed that all the government buildings appeared to be empty. There were no police in the streets, no lights in the police station.
Then three days later, just as she was leaving her school after evening class, another teacher, a friend called Ahmad, told her that 8,000 men had come to Raqqa from the east, dressed in black uniforms with guns. Some said they rode in aboard Turkish tanks.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-story-of-a-teacher-evicted-from-raqqa-illustrates-so-much-about-the-conflict-in-syria-a6887631.html _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
