Syria, What is the Truth?

by Editor · January 8, 2017

Christmas decorations hang from a balcony in Aleppo, Syria. Syrian TV says a bomb exploded in western Aleppo, where dozens of people were gathered for a Christmas tree-lighting event. (CNS photo/Khalil Ashawi, Reuters)

Just what is true and what is opinion or agenda-driven lies or vague hearsay?

In the age of fake news on the Internet, the public should be able to trust traditional media to provide fair news coverage, especially those organs that claim to be unbiased.

Of course, all news is subjective; story selection and placement, headlines, and even the order in which information is given is governed by human decisions.

The young liberals whose “Arab Spring” demonstrations preceded the civil war have long been supplanted by the proponents of radical Islam as a form of political leadership.

We can also take it for granted that some media have a bias, declared or not, and that some will get things wrong. But there is no good justification for how the Western media has collectively misled the public about the civil war in Syria, one of the big human catastrophes of our time.

To be sure, there are no good guys in this war. The old idea of wars being waged between one side that merits support and another whose defeat is desirable does not apply in Syria.

The Assad regime was a ruthless dictatorship even before the civil war, and has committed many atrocities against civilians in its attempts to crush the opposition.

The fragmented opposition, meanwhile, is led by terror movements such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, and other Islamist movements. The idea that the rebels are aspiring to a pluralistic democracy does not correspond with the facts.

The young liberals whose “Arab Spring” demonstrations preceded the civil war have long been supplanted by the proponents of radical Islam as a form of political leadership.

Christian leaders in Syria warned of that right at the beginning of the civil war, as The Southern Cross reported at the time.

In October 2011, Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan warned that a civil war in Syria would not just be a struggle between political parties. “It will be confessional [religious] war—and war in the name of God is far worse than a political struggle. And this is what we fear.”

His voice was ignored in the West, which wanted to topple Assad at any price — even if that price was the savagery of Islamic extremism.

Little has changed. The recent bombing of rebel-held East Aleppo by Assad’s army provoked profound anger, especially in the West, of the kind that was absent in 2014 when al-Qaeda rebels destroyed much of the city in its bombardment. “The refusal of the Western media to report objectively, or to seek informed information from the thousands of civilians from East Aleppo who are keen to share their stories, while granting full credibility to terrorists without any on-the-ground verifiable information on their claims, is nothing short of obscene.”

The Western media did little to report the residents’ reaction to Assad’s recapture of East Aleppo. An Anglican priest who made an unannounced visit to a government-run relief centre at Jibrin for internally displaced persons from East Aleppo, which accommodates around 100000 people, recorded widespread relief at the departure of rebel groups, which subjected the civilian population to extreme violence, including murder.

And while the focus was on Aleppo, ISIS fighters who had been expelled from Mosul in Iraq were allowed to quietly move into Syria to retake Palmyra.

The Anglican priest at the Jibrin camp, Rev Andrew Ashdown, observed: “The refusal of the Western media to report objectively, or to seek informed information from the thousands of civilians from East Aleppo who are keen to share their stories, while granting full credibility to terrorists without any on-the-ground verifiable information on their claims, is nothing short of obscene.”

It is justified to revile the Assad regime for its many crimes against humanity, but this cannot come at the cost of indemnifying the rebels who have likewise committed atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons on civilians.

The narrative of the Western media is anti-Assad, bolstered by the exclusion of balancing facts and even falsehoods. It reflects the agenda of Western powers and their allies, and deflects from their culpability in the conflict, from supplying rebels with weapons to actively aiding terrorists.

The Syrian civil war is relentlessly confusing, especially in absence of good guys to root for, and the media — in the West as well as in Russia and many other regions — is deceiving its consumers by withholding or distorting the facts.

Our instinct, therefore, must be to treat every news item on Syria — and, increasingly, other topics — with great caution.

In the search for truth in the news today, take nothing for granted and interrogate everything. Even this editorial.