The Dead Baby Media

If the text on that one is too small for you, it's a CNN piece headlined, "Why the Syrian regime is killing babies." There's not much to add to that. The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalism. With some help from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the BBC.

Anyone who has spent time in the Middle East knows quite well that parading around dead bodies is part of the Muslim ceremony of rallying for the next attack. These aren't funerals, these are corpse parades and the corpses are often of unknown provenance, accompanied by calls for vengeance. Sometimes the bodies are actually of those killed in an attack. Just as often they died of natural causes or are freshly dug up. Go to any Muslim conflict and you'll find both sides brandishing bodies and sometimes even pieces of them. Assad is quite capable of killing anyone, including babies, and has been doing it, but so have the Syrian rebels with the Muslim Brotherhood. And no matter how many dead baby stories the media runs, the regime and the rebels are equally bloodthirsty cretins willing to kill anyone and anything to stay in power.

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In the Houla massacre, the rebels and the regime are both blaming each other. The rebels are accusing a civilian militia allied with the regime. The regime is accusing the rebels. There's no way to know since one group of militia gunmen is much like another. And there's plenty of Syrian soldiers fighting on both sides. Obama's UN Ambassador Susan Rice says that's a "blatant lie". It may be a lie, but the only blatant lie here is Rice's pretense that she definitely knows one way or another. In regard to the regime version, she has said that, "there is no factual evidence ... that would substantiate that rendition of events". That's true. But neither is there is any serious factual evidence for her view. All we're getting is material from biased insiders and confused outsiders. And both have an agenda. The Friends of Syria group and the rebels want a war. Syria, Iran and Russia want to avert a war. Obama and his media lapdogs are firmly on the side of war, which is why we're getting dead baby stories from the dead baby media. Don't have a massacre pic from Syria now, just reuse an old from Iraq. When the goal is propaganda, then the truth doesn't matter. In Libya, the media told us that there was a monster on one side and angels on the other. After we got done killing the monster, the rebels turned out to be racist murdering monsters. Who knew? While the media is foaming at the mouth over Houla, the Islamic Boko Haram group has killed over a thousand people, mostly Christians, over the last two years, in Nigeria. In Sudan, the war criminal Bashir is continuing a genocidal campaign against South Sudan, and Obama is on the record as refusing to intervene there. Oh the media is "covering the story", and by "covering the story" I mean it's running multiple high profile articles attacking South Sudan for the death of a single teenager. Because we do have the best media that Saudi money can buy. And Saudi money is on the side of Sudan's genocidal regime. Meanwhile in the US a proposal to ban gender based abortions has been shot down. But some dead babies are more important than others. There are no CNN pieces headlined, "Why the Sudanese regime is killing babies" or "Why Nancy Pelosi is killing babies." Dead baby stories are a tactical weapon used for a very specific purpose. Let's get in our time machines and flash back to 1990 and the grandmother of all dead baby stories.

"My sister with my five-day old nephew traveled across the desert to safety. There is no milk available for the baby in Kuwait. They barely escaped when their car was stuck in the desert sand -- and help came from Saudi Arabia. "I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country. The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the Al-Idar Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The other women were from 20 to 30 years old. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew who was born premature and might have died that day as well.

Dead Kuwaiti babies helped create the argument for war. Except the story was made up. The testimony was faked. There was no Great Kuwaiti Baby Massacre of 1990. Just cowardly medical staff.

ABC World News quoted the director of Kuwait's primary health care system, Dr. Mohammed Matar, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the maternity hospital, as saying the 312 babies died because no one stayed to care for them.

Apparently the only way we could have saved those Kuwaiti babies was by marching the doctors and nurses back at gunpoint to the hospital. This isn't about one massacre, but about a media that is selling a very specific kind of stories for reasons that hardly anyone bothers to question. Too many conservatives are actually jeering Obama for not having already gone to war in Syria. Well he's going to. He's just doing it at a slower pace than in Libya. Even the bozos running things now, know that even air bombardment of Syria won't be a complete cakewalk, especially with Russia and Iran supplying and maybe even playing on the other side. Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for a No Fly Zone, which under Obama is slang for gaining air superiority and destroying the enemy military on the ground, while operating under a UN mandate to end the violence. But don't take my word for it. The "Friends of Syria" group is laying plans on how to rebuild Syria.

The Working Group on Economic Recovery and Development of the Group of Friends of the Syrian People began talks in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi on a rescue plan for a post-conflict Syria similar to the Marshall Plan implemented in post-World War II Europe. "It is a good time already to start now for a long-term perspective of the country once change comes in Syria. And we are convinced it will come," the group's German co-chairman, Clemens Von Goetze, said. The international community and Syrians must be "well prepared" and the international community must make its "plans for donor coordination" and prepare "plans together with the Syrian opposition," Goetze told AFP.

When you're planning reconstruction for after a government that has no intention of leaving falls, you must be either very optimistic about the chances of the rebels or optimistic about what three months of bombings can do to Syria's military. This sort of thing is not what people who are helplessly contemplating massacres do with their time.

7. The Co-Chairs declared that they have made preparations to set up a secretariat of the Working Group to support the implementation of the work plans and to facilitate the ongoing activities of the Working Group. The activities of the secretariat shall include in particular, but are not limited to, supporting the Co-Chairs in the preparations of meetings of the Working Group; coordinating the implementation of the work plans developed by the Basket leaders; and facilitating the cooperation between all stakeholders in preparing for the post-conflict economic recovery and development of Syria. The secretariat will shortly be established, and will be funded jointly by Germany and the United Arab Emirates for its first year of operation. Mr Gunnar Waelzholz has been designated to head the secretariat in its initial phase. The Participants welcomed this step. 8. Members of the Syrian opposition led by the representatives of the Syrian National Council introduced their National Economic Vision for the New Syria. They strongly welcomed the establishment of the Working Group and committed themselves to cooperate closely with it and to jointly prepare for the economic reconstruction and development of post-conflict Syria. All Participants welcomed the work on the National Economic Vision for the New Syria as part of developing a credible alternative to policies and practices of the regime.

This is what you do when you know the war is going to go your way. Speaking of dead baby stories, Saddam "Baby Killer" Hussein lost his horns around the time that Bush II decided to go after him. Suddenly we were the "Baby Killers".