Assad Hires Poor Farmers For Israelis To Shoot On Syrian Border: Truth Hides
BASHAR Assad allows no foreign media inside Syria. He’s not all that keen on domestic media – Syrian blogger, Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, aka Gay Girl In Damascus, has been disappeared. But Assad is banking on those banned journalists being there to film action on the Syria-Israeli border.
A Lebanese man has told The Guardian about those protests on Israeli Indpedence Day.
One demonstrator who was wounded that day told the Guardian the Lebanese militia Hezbollah had given him $50 to turn up at the border and $900 to have his gunshot wounds treated by physicians. He said he had been planning to return to Maroun al-Ras yesterday until the rally was cancelled.
Someone willing to risk their life breaking through a broder between enemies might be willing to be shot to multiply his fee.
It all depends not on the facts, rather on which side you want to believe. One man’s indepdnce is another’s defeat:
On 15 May, tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched on the borders with Israel, in the Palestinian territories, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. They were marking the 63rd anniversary of Nakba, which in Arabic means “catastrophe”.
Healthy journalistic scepticism is replaced by biased filler. Take this in the New York Times:
By nightfall, the Syrian news agency SANA reported that 22 protesters had been killed and more than 350 had been wounded. Israeli officials said that they had no information on casualties but suggested that the Syrian figures were exaggerated.
Facts. you can weight them up. But then the paper delivers this:
Even so, it was the worst bloodshed in the Golan Heights since Israel and Syria fought a war there in 1973.
Well, if brutal Syria is to be believed, yes. But wihout evidence, is it a fact?
Karl Vick, of Time Magazine, took a view:
Television images on Sunday from the Golan Heights village of Majdal Shams showed apparently unarmed Palestinian civilians marching peacefully down a hill toward Israeli soldiers who had assumed firing positions. Then came a crackle of gunshots; bloodied bodies were then carried back up the hill. It went on for hours, with 20 people reported dead according to Syrian state television. The human cost was high but for a Palestinian movement trying to reframe itself, the footage at least set it on a course along on the lines of Birmingham, Soweto and Gandhi’s Salt March — parallels it has been making explicitly.
Gandhi carried a Molotov cocktail? And notie how the Israelis give no warning. But they say they did.
YNet News opined:
Responding to Sunday’s violence, IDF sources said the protesters who ignited minefields on ‘Naksa Day’ did not bring fire extinguishers with them and thus posed a danger to themselves and others by behaving irresponsibly. Others threw firebombs near Quneitra crossing to the same effect, they said.
The sources are also assuming that many protesters were hurt or killed as a result of the Red Cross’s inability to reach them, due to protesters’ refusal to cease violence in order to allow for medical evacuations.
IDF officials say commanders ordered three ceasefires, each of which were taken advantage of by the protesters in order to gain ground.
And what about those Palestinian protesters? This anti-Assadi Syrian group has news:
The Reform Party of Syria has learned today, from intelligence sources close to the Assad regime in Lebanon, that Syrians storming through the Golan Height next to the Quneitra crossing are Syrian farmers who have migrated in recent years from the drought-stricken northeast Syria to the south. Estimates put the number at 250,000 impoverished migrants.
Information received cite the regime has paid hundreds of these farmers $1,000 each to show-up and $10,000 to their families should any of them succumb to Israeli fire. In Syria, an average salary is about $200 a month and to these impoverished farmers, such a one-time sum can keep them economically afloat for six months.
Is this the Palestinian Spring? Is this a sing of the Palestinians standing up to power? Or is this the Palestinians being used by Assad and hi supporters at Hezbollah?
Dominic Waghorn of Sky News reprots:
The buses of protestors only reached the border area because authorities allowed them to. They may well have been organised by the regime or at the very least encouraged….
The tragic events were carried live by Syrian state television in marked contrast to the cover up perpetrated by Syrian government media of the military offensive being waged against its own people inside the country that has killed hundreds.
State ‘journalists’ appeared to have recovered their ability to count bodies stating at least twenty had been killed
While the world watches the pictures from the Golan, it will be distracted from the bigger story, Syria’s slaughter of its own people and the gradual demise of the Assad regime.
Oliver Duggan wrote in the Independent:
It was a calculated abuse of unprecedented world media attention on the region. And it was likely designed to provoke an Israeli response that could mirror the harsh crack-down on revolts by other tyrannical regimes.
The day before the June 6 protests, CBC News wrote:
The Local Coordination Committees, which helps organize and document the protests calling for an end to the Assad regime, estimates more than 1,200 people have died in the military action against anti-government protesters since March.
The BBC looks at the latest fighting:
The protesters defied razor-wire fences and ditches along the Syrian border in Golan to mark the 44th anniversary of the 1967 Middle-East war… Syrian TV said more than 300 protesters had been wounded. An Israeli military spokeswoman told The Jerusalem Post newspaper they were only aware of 12 injuries….
Anyone clear on what the truth is? Or do you just take a position and stick with it..?
Posted: 7th, June 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comments (21) | TrackBack | Permalink
