A YouTube channel called the Syrian Interpreter has posted a subtitled recording of the Syrian television station Addounia TV claiming in a Sept. 9 broadcast that the news station Al Jazeera has built enormous “cinematic replicas” of Syrian cities and squares in the Gulf state of Qatar in order to fabricate the uprising in Syria.

These replicas were built “with the help of some French and American directors” and are “exactly like the ones set up of the Green Square for Libya, with which they duped the Libyans and the world that Tripoli fell,” according to the channel’s English translation.

“With those replicas,” the subtitles read, “Al Jazeera will continue media fabrication and cinematic tricks by shooting scenes of big defections from the Arab Syrian Army and shooting scenes of clashes. Those scenes would be done by directors from the U.S., France, and Israel.”

A spokesperson for Al Jazeera said: “This is wackiness of the highest order which no one will be taking seriously. Many other journalists were in Tripoli reporting the same events, so it is telling that such is Al Jazeera’s influence in the region that supporters of these regimes are targeting Al Jazeera specifically for covering the uprisings.”



Reached via e-mail, the Syrian Interpreter said that Addounia’s claims were “nonsense,” and that the station was “a mouthpiece of the government.” The activist who created the channel requested anonymity out of security concerns for family in Syria.

Addounia TV is owned by a group of investors which, analysts say, has included Mohamed Hamsho, a longtime confidant of Maher al Assad, the commander of Syria’s Republican Guard and the brother of President Bashar al Assad of Syria. Mr. Hamsho denied ownership of the company through an attorney.

In August, Addounia TV broadcast dramatized footage of the United States Ambassador Robert Ford being attacked by a group of pro-regime demonstrators wielding a poster. The incident took place just before Mr. Ford’s planned trip to Jasem, in the southern Daraa region, where pro-democracy protests have been violently suppressed. A month earlier, Mr. Ford made a similarly controversial visit to the besieged city of Hama.

A State Department official told Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy magazine that the video was “a weak, banal, laughable attempt by the Syrian thugs to have the international community focus on anything but the real story, which is the government’s continuing campaign of terror on its own people through torture, murder and illegal imprisonment.”