printVia Daniel McAdams, at LRC.COM,:
A respected mainstream publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ), has reported that the infamous Houla massacre in Syria, which the US and NATO hoped would be the casus belli for their planned invasion, was in fact carried out by rebel forces.
Highlighted in the National Review, of all places, the FAZ investigation was exhaustive and convincing.
NRO reports on the original FAZ story:
According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.
“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,
“the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.
For weeks, alternative media analysts and even eyewitnesses had been poking enormous holes in the suspiciously convenient Western narrative that Assad’s forces slaughtered the villagers, cutting and killing at close range. No one paid attention, as usual.
The NRO piece continues with a fascinating story from a Christian monastery in the vicinity:
“Already at the beginning of April, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix of the St. James Monastery warned of rebel atrocities’ being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities. She cited the case of a massacre in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. According to an account published in French on the monastery’s website, rebels gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya and blew up the building with dynamite. They then attributed the crime to the regular Syrian army. ‘Even though this act has been attributed to regular army forces . . . the evidence and testimony are irrefutable: It was an operation undertaken by armed groups affiliated with the opposition,’ Mother Agnès-Mariam wrote.”
Either Mother Agnès-Mariam is a liar or Hillary Clinton is a liar. You decide.
Follow the article links. This is a must read.
FAZ can be an obnoxious imperialist mouthpiece, but according to the German libertarian who writes “Moon of Alabama,” the expose was penned not by some hack journalist, but someone who knows what’s the what.
Well, despite all the MSM lies, Isramerica’s attempt to overthrow Syria’s pro-Iran Shia regime continues to go badly. Latest is that the Russians are sending in helicopter gunships to back Assad. Round II of the Greater Mideast War – the actual Israemerican attack on Iran – will likely collapse the entire Globalist debt Ponzi…so I’m actually looking forward to it. Hoping an order of extra M1A mags will arrive beforehand though.
Damage control is already on the way at National Review through a rather contemptible fellow by the name of Aymann Jawad al-Tamimi. The party line must be towed to at all times.
it’s the middle east. Who knows which bunch of camel thieves is killing which other bunch of camel thieves on any given day. But we can sleep soundly knowing that the USA is being led by those stalwart diplimatic veterans Obama and Hillary. Heck, lets invade Turkey as long as we’re over there.I doubt if Obama knows the difference. He thinks as long as he keeps getting us in middle east wars we won’t notice his orchestrated destruction of America.
Most of our wars – the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, World War One, the 2003 Iraq War… – were often built out of carefully culled propaganda campaigns and blatant lies and misrepresentations. The concept of going to war over 100 killed (5 million were killed in the Congo after we stated that overthrowing our previous buddy Mobutu was worth any price) is completely absurd. 4 million died in Indochina to prevent the Stalinist North from killing 100,000 in the South. How many have been killed in Iraq since we liberated it? How many exiled? And what of the hundreds of non-combatants killed by American airplanes (manned or unmanned)?
If 100 lives are so important, where was the US outrage to the blockade of the Central Powers by the “Allies” while we were supposedly “neutral”??
http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww1/sea/w1s-block.html
Any “outrage” over the excesses of the Kosovo Albanians, the ANC, or what occurred in post-WW2 Europe against civilians? Wiping out Christian communities in Iraq, Egypt, and Nigeria?
http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You/132123/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Things are really is a mess when Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao are the men of peace and restraint!