Back in May 25, 2012, the village of Houla in Syria suffered a massacre in which 108 people were killed, including 34 women and 49 children. The initial reaction was to condemn the Shabiha, an Alawite militia fanatically committed to the Baathist cause. But three days later Rainer Hermann, the Middle East correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote an article blaming the rebels. Within hours it seems, every “anti-imperialist” website began crossposting his article or citing it as proof that a false flag operation had been mounted to discredit the progressive and secular government under siege by jihadists.
Eventually Hermann’s article proved false, but a single website issued a correction. All this was swept under the rug. History seems to be repeating itself with the publication of Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh’s article in Mint Press News on August 29, 2013 that alleges something almost akin to involuntary manslaughter. It clears the Baathists of using chemical weapons against the rebel-controlled East Ghouta suburb of Damascus but does not quite amount to a finger-pointing false flag piece like Hermann’s. They claim instead that some rebels were mucking about in a tunnel that was stockpiled with chemical weapons and accidentally knocked one (or more) over. I guess the best analogy would be drunk driving or firing a rifle into the sky on New Year’s Eve and hitting someone leaning out the window of a high-rise. full: http://louisproyect.org/2013/09/01/were-saudis-and-careless-rebels-responsible-for-the-east-ghouta-deaths/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
