Phony ‘Houla Massacre’: How Media Manipulates Public Opinion For Regime Change in Syria
Intelligent skeptics should see through the media’s smoke screen in order to work out what is really going on in Syria
Patrick Henningsen
http://www.infowars.com
May 28, 2012
If you are still needing an academic tutorial on exactly how the mainstream media is able to generate a completely phony public consensus to support foreign intervention projects, you need look no further than the dangerous, fictional narrative currently being rolled out regarding Syria.
This past Saturday and Sunday morning, almost every major corporate mainstream newspaper and TV network in North America and in Europe ran with the average headline, “Massacre of the children as Syrian forces hit rebels”, giving hundreds of millions of readers and viewers to artificial impression that it was Syrian government forces – and not western-backed terrorist groups, who carried out a massacre on children and others days ago - even though, the true culprit of these attacks has not yet been determined – a fact which was only briefly mentioned later on in these very same media reports.
One of the UK best-selling weekend papers and most widely read online journals, Guardian media group’s The Observer, ran such a headline – one which shamelessly implied that the Syrian government carried out a massacre in Houla. This was used to shape public opinion in Europe, a reality which is later shaped for the North American market.
Corporate Journalism: The Art of Deception
It shouldn’t take a genius to see through this relentless western effort to takeover Syria, but not having learned their lesson from Libya, so many hard working and well educated westerners are bound to fall for it all over again.
Cui bono? Who benefits… from another civilian massacre? Clearly not the Syrian government. But western-backed terrorist groups who have been working to destabilize the country for over one year now, do clearly benefit.
Who would be the chief suspect for this latest massacre? How about the western-backed terrorists in Syria – the very same terrorist groups admitted to their own bombing campaign that killed many innocent people in Syria only weeks ago.
Important to add here also, that the latest child massacre in Syria has been reported as being “done with knives” – which doesn’t sound like a government attack to any intelligent reader.
Do not underestimate for one second just how pivotal the western corporate media is in advancing an agenda of global destabilization:
As we have seen used before in Syria and Libya, the alleged massacre in question is based entirely on unsubstantiated evidence, in this case its more uploaded ‘Youtube’ footage:
“Videos uploaded to the Internet and purporting to be from Houla show many dead and badly mutilated infants. Residents say some victims were killed with knives, while many more died from 18 hours of relentless shelling that left buildings wrecked and homes destroyed in a large residential area near the centre of town.”
Origins of these ‘Youtube video’ are still unknown, but the media machine and certain UN officials have already cited them as “evidence”. Also note that in the YouTube videos, many of the dead children appear to be shot in the heads with fire arms at close range, but this has not stopped certain ‘UN observers’ from accusing the Syrian government from killing children with tank shelling.
Mainstream Media 101
In order to shape consensus reality, first you need to frame the event. Here the story begins by laying soft blame on the Syrian government…
“Syria‘s fragile peace process is in shreds after what was claimed to be a regime-backed massacre…”
… and then proceeding to carefully cover themselves, so to speak, but retracting the allegations deeper into the article:
“Major General Robert Mood, head of the UN team in Syria, deplored the attack, which began at midday on Friday, as “indiscriminate and unforgivable” but did not say who had been to blame.”
Notice how the article itself states clearly that the persons responsible for the massacre is yet to be known, but The Observer has already framed the conclusion within the headline and in the beginning of the story, in order to fit a pre-determined conclusion. This conclusion happens to be directly in line with Washington and London’s foreign policy objective of regime change in Syria.
Take notes. Because this is how it’s done, time and time again – another clear example how large media outlets can effectively drive reality in the direction of their choosing, and this is why so many millions of public media consumers are left misinformed and dis informed, eventually leading to a marginal public endorsement of Washington, London and Tel Aviv’s interventionist foreign policy objectives.
Hours after this fake story was circulated in the GMT timezone, it made its way to EST, as the New York Times picks up the ball and runs it down the field. Here the story is further refined to streamline it with regime change policy objectives, codifying reality within North American sector, claiming that:
“More than 90 people, including at least 32 children under the age of 10, were killed in a central Syrian village, top United Nations officials said Saturday, accusing the government of perpetrating the “indiscriminate” shelling of civilian neighborhoods.”
No real details are actually given to support this media-generated verdict, only that, “A United Nations statement said the observers confirmed that “artillery and tank shells were fired at a residential neighborhood.”
And finally, the Washington Post weighs in with their attempt to corner Russia and China on the issue, rounding out the artificial verdict today with their headline, “U.N. Security Council blames Syrian government for civilian massacre”, claiming that:
“The U.N. Security Council on Sunday blamed the Syrian government for most of the deaths in a massacre of 116 civilians in the village of Houla, issuing a unanimous statement condemning the killings that was supported by Syria’s staunch allies Russia and China.”
Shortly thereafter, the UN’s Ban Ki Moon and Save the Children charity weigh in with carefully-craft statements, but statements that are obviously framed and directed towards Syria’s Assad government, and not Gulf States, Washington and London-backed terrorist gangs currently operating under an all but official western mandate within Syria and from their NATO-sanctioned base over the border in southern Turkey. Reality is further shaped by the London Guardian’s Observer and others, with an official “international outcry”:
“The international community was united in its condemnation. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said the killings were a “flagrant violation of international law” while the White House called the violence acts of “unspeakable and inhuman brutality.” Arab League head Nabil Elaraby said the killings were a “horrific crime” and urged UN action.
Save the Children’s chief executive, Justin Forsyth, echoed calls for intervention. He said: “This indiscriminate killing must stop now. The world cannot sit back and allow this to happen. Children are suffering terribly in this conflict.”
Even the BBC have gone so far as to run 9 year old photographs from Iraq, and sell them as from this latest massacre of children in Syria. Any other foreign media outlet in the UK would have its broadcasting license pulled for such a propaganda stunt. In the face of such damning manipulation, why then would so many people still believe the mainstream media’s version of reality in countries like Syria?
But what is a more closer version of reality is this:
Western-backed terrorists, many of whom are al-Qaida, mostly hailing from outside of Syria, are fomenting civil war and carrying out a series of attacks on UN observers and civilians, in order to create the preferred western narrative that “Assad must go.”
Western readers should be under no illusion – your government operators are sanctioning civilian killing in places like Syria, and your corporate media are being used to place the blame on the west’s political enemy in the region – and therefore influence western public support for regime change.
After over one year of intervening through their own favored terrorist guerrilla proxy fighters and running arms into Syria – arms that are admittedly for going into the hands of western-backed al-Qaida groups there, the west has not yet succeeded in toppling the Assad government and installing a new puppet regime, as they did by using NATO military force in Libya last autumn. But western project managers like Hillary Clinton and William Hague have not given up, and if their corporate media outlets are allowed to determine their version reality in Syria, they will eventually get their “humanitarian intervention”, and the country will slowly be destroyed from within. Then regime change will happen.
It’s as simple as that.
The Syrian people are the ones who will eventually lose if Washington, London, Tel Aviv and the Gulf States succeed in destroying that country, as they have done in Libya and Iraq.
When this is done, then they will move on to destabilize Lebanon in order to unseat and neutralize Hezbollah.
After that, the door to attack Iran will be wide open.
There’s your World War Three in earnest.