There was absolutely nothing stopping them. But not one single member of Western mainstream media ever visited a bomb site in Lebanon to verify whether Israeli claims it was a Hezbollah base or missile site were true because they knew the answer is negative, as I found across dozens of bomb sites, and that is not the narrative they are paid to promote.
But when a narrative they are paid to promote came to the fore, they flocked to Damascus – driving right past the bombed civilian homes, ambulance centres and schools of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to get there – to promote Syria’s new Israel-, U.S.A- and Turkey-sponsored “democratic” government of entirely “reformed” HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) Wahhabists.
Now in the past I had unfortunate arguments with some who broadly take a similar view of politics to me – Vanessa Beeley comes to mind – because I was never a fan of the Assad regime and its human rights record. Nevertheless, I consistently preferred Assad to the NATO-, Gulf- and Israel-sponsored extremist Wahhabi “rebels” who were fighting him.
But you can acknowledge Assad’s human rights abuses without subscribing to the ludicrous atrocity propaganda that spewed out of the mainstream media – 150,000 prisoners in one jail, 100,000 people in a mass grave, the “body press” whose plywood-pressing surfaces were peculiarly unstained, the suntanned American prisoner who had been “locked in a room for seven months”, the splendidly groomed dissident prisoner “rescued” by CNN.
Atrocity propaganda is as old as warfare. Like the “60 beheaded babies” of Oct. 7, or the 100,000 prisoners in a mass grave, it will doubtless recur indefinitely despite being nonsense. The installation of HTS by the NATO powers and Israel was a propaganda orgy of “joy” and “liberation.”
Hellbound and Down 