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The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalismThe Dead Baby MediaBy Daniel Greenfield Saturday, June 2, 2012
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site. Daniel can be reached at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) |