2 — The propaganda of past wars:

A short documentary on the Nayirah Testimony scandal

Before this article goes onto Syria we first need to examine some examples of war propaganda from history in order to understand how similar the Syrian war really is to past wars. One of the most infamous cases of war propaganda in recent history was the Nayirah Testimony. In 1990 the United States invaded Iraq in a war now known as the Gulf War, not to be confused with the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was known as the Iraq War. The Gulf War started after Iraq invaded one of its neighboring countries which was an ally of the United States called Kuwait. Before the United States invaded Iraq as a response there was a media campaign in to convince the American public to support a war against Iraq. A part of this campaign was the Nayirah testimony which was a claim by a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah. She claims that her and her friends witnessed Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of their incubators to kill them and that Iraqi soldiers were making jokes about the then United States president George H. W. Bush. After the United States invaded Iraq it was revealed that Nayirah had falsified the atrocities and that there was no evidence for the atrocities she claimed to have witnessed. It was also exposed that Nayirah was the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador, she was related to the Kuwaiti royal family and had also been coached by a the public relations company Hill & Knowlton. After she was exposed Amnesty International retracted their support their support for Nayirah’s testimony and she disappeared from public life, however the damage had already been done and the Gulf War had already started. As a consequence of this propaganda tens of thousands of lives perished.

Nayirah testifying for Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The speech can be found by clicking here

3 — Modern Syria: Chemical weapons and Panorama

A case very similar to the Nayirah Testimony happened in Britain in August 2013. The BBC ran a report following a Dr Rola Halla treating civilians injured in Syria at the Atareb hospital in Syria with a Panorama film crew. Dr Rola Halla claims that she witnessed victims who had been attacked by “some sort of napalm”. Just one month later the BBC ran the exact same report but had digitally edited the audio from “napalm” to “chemical weapon”. As she says this Dr Rola Halla is surrounded by people screaming and crying in the most overly dramatic way possible. It was also discovered that her Dr Rola Halla’s father is a man called Mousa al-Kurdi who was a major figure in a pro-rebel organisation called the Syrian National Council

The photograph was actually taken by Marco di Lauro in Iraq in 2003. Link

The BBC responded with an article in the Entertainment & Arts section of the BBC website acknowledging a case against Russia Today for exposing what the BBC had done. This article published by the BBC avoids mentioning whether what Russia Today said was true or not and is cleverly worded in a way in which the subject of whether RT’s accusations were true is avoided. You can find this article by clicking here. The Russia Today report can be seen below or by clicking here. This incident was not the first time the BBC has been in hot water over its Syrian reporting. In 2012 the BBC used a picture of corpses from Iraq and falsely claimed that this picture was from Syria. The source of the photograph was cited as “PHOTO FROM: ACTIVIST”.

BBC News Caught Staging FAKE Chemical Attack In Syria!

4— The Aleppo “final messages”

In late 2016 the Syrian government attempted and succeeded in retaking the Syrian rebel held city of Aleppo. The city was held by a Syrian rebel group called al-Nusra which broke away from al-Qaeda in 2016. This rebel group has previously worked with alongside ISIS and has recently been renamed “Jabhat Fateh al-Sham”. The details of these Islamic rebel groups are very complicated since they often make and break ties and agreements while constantly changing the names of their organisations. This al-Qaeda founded organisation was defeated by the Syrian and Russian militaries and the city was liberated with a rebel defeat a few months ago.

Before the city had been liberated there were “last videos” by rebel supporters inside the city saying goodbye to the world and mourning the defeat of the rebels. In an act of extreme irresponsibility CNN (one of the USA’s biggest news corporations in the USA) gave these religious zealots a voice on prime time news in the USA. The most famous of these last messages came from a man called Bilal Abdul Kareem who after appearing on CNN was seen taking videos of himself with Syrian rebel suicide bombers while praising them and uploading the footage onto his twitter account for everyone to see. You can see his video by clicking here. Another of the most famous last messages came from a woman called Lina Shamy who was allowed to appear on Al Jazeera which is one of the largest Arabic news corporations in the world. On Shamy’s facebook profile she uploaded a cover photo commemorating Islamic extremist Zahran Alloush who belonged to an organisation similar to ISIS called Jaysh al-Islam.