Nouvelles Syrie-Orient en anglais - 30 juillet 2012

Nouvelles Syrie-Orient en anglais - 30 juillet 2012

Angry Arab sur la propagande de la télévision officielle syrienne:
http://angryarab.blogspot.fr/2012/07/syrian-regime-tv-menu-of-nausea.html

❝I watched the morning news on Syrian regime TV. How easily they lie. They invent think tanks in Washington that don't exist. They claimed that the Pentagon said that most fighters in Syria are Al-Qa`idah. They have become more crude and more vulgar in propaganda than a months or so ago: competing with the crude and vulgar propaganda of the other side.

They still have people who insults Arabs (of the Gulf) as "‘urban" (meant pejoratively). They insult every Arab man and woman who dared to protest by stating that BHL is the man orchestrating the Arab uprisings.

They offend my eyes by airing footage of military exercises by an Army that--like the Lebanese Army--defines bravery by shooting and firing at civilians. The Syrian-on-the-streets seem all depressed and nervous now. It is a different picture from even a months ago.❞

Nidal (@nidal) a posté un nouveau billet
http://seenthis.net/messages/80546

Le New York Times semble ne pas avoir trop de doutes sur l'affiliation des jihadistes du poste frontière:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/world/middleeast/syrias-conflict-intrudes-on-antakya-turkey.html?_r=1

❝a Syrian border post just fell into the hands of a group linked to Al Qaeda❞

Nidal (@nidal) a posté un nouveau billet
http://seenthis.net/messages/80495

Passionnante interview de Noam Chomsky avec Mouin Rabbani: _Reflections on a Lifetime of Engagement with Zionism, the Palestine Question, and American Empire_
http://www.palestine-studies.org/journals.aspx?id=11394&jid=1&href=fulltext

❝1967 changed everything here; it was almost instantaneous. Suddenly the intellectual community has a passion for Israel, it was a love affair. Support for Israeli actions became reflexive: as I mentioned earlier, people like Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, who had been indifferent to Zionism, became almost fanatic Zionists after1967.

This is partly because now the U.S.-Israeli alliance was firmly in place, making it possible to support the U.S. government and look humanitarian at the same time. You could support violence and terror and be noble and humanitarian, defending the Jews from anti-Semitism and genocide, and so on. This is an irresistible combination for liberal intellectuals. You can see the same phenomenon elsewhere, like in Bosnia.

But actually, the love affair wasn’t new. It had existed in American society before. If you go back and read the press of the 1920s, 1930s, you have a similar picture. I didn’t know this at the time, but this country had already been steeped in Zionism, this whole conception of biblical promises being realized. It’s not just Christian evangelicals; a large segment of the population was immersed in the Bible;

Woodrow Wilson read the Bible every day; for Truman it was real. Lawrence Davison has written a good history of the early period with plenty of press quotes. Harold Ickes, one of Roosevelt’s main advisors, described the Jewish return to Palestine, to use his exact words, as “the most remarkable, historical event in history.” I mean, this is a very deep current of British and American thought. It’s a mistake to dismiss it.

There’s also the crusader element. When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem in 1917, he was compared with Richard the Lion-hearted, depicted as having achieved what the crusaders had tried to do and failed:

• drive the infidels out of the holy land. His obituary repeated the same thing twenty years later. It’s kind of like how China talks about its century of humiliation. For the West, there was 1,300 years of humiliation when the pagans took our Holy Land. Now it’s back in our hands, back in the civilized world, and the Jews are returning.
•  And they are modern and European and developing, and the Palestinians were supposed to be gaining enormously from these progressive elements in their midst. It just captured the American mind.❞

• ---

The Fog of Civil War - By Stephen Starr | Foreign Policy
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/23/the_fog_of_civil_war
❝Contrary to reports, the Syrian government is allowing foreign journalists to enter the country. Teams from Fox News and Britain's ITV television were recently granted 10-day visas to cover Syria from the capital.

Many of these journalists are reporting from the bedsides of wounded regime soldiers and have remarked that Syria is, in fact, a divided country and that significant support does exist for the regime. But the limitations on official reporting are manifold. Government minders place restrictions on travel and contact with locals, making it difficult to report anything that does not fit the regime's narrative.

Embedding with the rebels, who are equally eager to present themselves as victims rather than aggressors, invites similar hurdles in accessing the truth. But the rebels are a complicated bunch.

Elizabeth Palmer, a journalist with CBS, recently managed to escape her government minders and go in search of fighters in the Free Syrian Army. When she found them, however, she was promptly told that she would be executed for having Syrian government stamps in her passport.