National Post (National Edition)
Turning a blind eye to butchery
Why people choose not to believe in Assad’s atrocities
With the benefit of several days’ hindsight, one might have thought that the hysteria attending to the largely performative, perfunctory and pinprick 70-minute airstrikes that the United States, Britain and France carried out on Syrian targets last Friday night would have subsided somewhat by now.
For a while there, you’d have thought we were on the cusp of the apocalypse. In the lead-up, so many people were wetting their pants about U.S. President Donald Trump’s falling out with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over the barbaric behaviour of Putin’s proxy in Damascus that there was a huge spike in Google searches for “World War 3.”
But Syria’s agonies go on, and the morally decrepit Euro-American political and cultural order continues to stew in its own toxic juices. Anything that deadens the pangs of conscience is bound to go viral. And so, the latest grasping-at-straws extravagance in a long line of spurious and hysterical excuses — Assad’s air defences are just too sophisticated, any intervention would unavoidably end in a quagmire like Iraq, there are no good guys in Syria — is readily at hand.
Like so many times before, the absolution we seek for our abdication from the duties of human solidarity in the teeth of Arab tyranny comes from that most notorious purveyor of reliably unreliable pseudo-journalism, Robert Fisk, whose most recent version gets you off the hook by means of what purports to be evidence that there was no mass murder by poison gas in Douma on April 7 after all. It was just dust. People were choking on dust. There had been a “dust storm.”
The people of Douma were happy to see him, Fisk reports, and they are happy now that the Islamist rebels have finally surrendered and left.
People are “mostly smiling.” The bit about the dust storm comes from a doctor by the name of Assim Rahaibani. Never mind that Dr. Rahaibani admitted that on the night of April 7, he was nowhere near the hospital where scores of people were rushed, foaming at the mouth, with pinpoint pupils, exhibiting what the World Health Organization says were classic symptoms of asphyxia by poison gas.
Never mind that reporters with The Associated Press, CBS News, Sweden’s TV4 and other reputable news organizations were escorted into Douma by regime officials at the same time as Fisk, and they had no difficulty finding people who were capable of describing consistently and in great detail what happened on April 7: the regime helicopters, the barrel-like canisters they dropped, the stench of gas, the choking, dying people. Never mind that the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), the largest medical aid agency in Syria, reports that the medics who attended to the April 7 victims are being intimidated by Assad’s police and warned not to talk about what happened, and they are being told that if they love their children they better keep their mouths shut.
Never mind that all this was happening while the Assad regime and its Russian military gendarmerie were preventing the United Nations’ Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons from entering Douma. Never mind that Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov was caught in an outright lie when he said it was because the UN’s Department for Safety and Security hadn’t issued the proper papers. UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said the OPCW was in possession of all the requisite clearances. “We have not denied the team any request for it to go to Douma.”
Never mind all that. It is Fisk’s account — indistinguishable from a report by the far-right One America news site — that was picked up by the Kremlin propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik, and by leftish pseudo-journalism sites like Common Dreams, and the neo-Marxist Morning Star newspaper, and the extreme-right “news” organization South Front.
For whatever little good the U.S./U.K./French airstrikes might have accomplished in putting a dent in Assad’s capacity to commit mass murder by chemical weapons — and again, never mind his mass murder of civilians by other means, including napalm and starvation sieges — the action was supported by the European Union’s 28 foreign ministers, Canada, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar, Japan, Australia, Bahrain, and of course the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces.
If you opposed the strikes, you would be happy to believe Fisk, because you’ve already taken the side of the Kremlin, Khomeinist Iran, the Chinese Communist Party, Hamas, Hezbollah, Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro, and of course the Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad. On your side: American extreme-right crackpot Alex Jones, British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, uber-conservative Breitbart news, the venerable and ostensibly left-wing magazine The Nation, Canada’s stylish NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and British celebrity fascist Nick Griffin.
You will take your cues from Robert Fisk, not in spite of, but precisely because to do so allows you an alibi for your indifference to Arab suffering, a habit of mind you will predictably conceal behind a pretended allegiance to the cause of Palestinian freedom. Because that is how it’s done. Always. Because the “head of the snake” in the Middle East, as Fisk puts it, is Israel. Believe Robert Fisk and your conscience will not trouble you, and you won’t have to believe the World Health Organization, the Syria Violations Documentation Centre or the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations. This is what they say: Bombs were dropped at two locations in Douma. Within hours, more than 500 people were exhibiting symptoms consistent with suffocation by poison gas. At least 42 people died.
During the past six weeks of Assad’s final assault on the rebel redoubt of Douma, before the April 7 incident, at least 1,000 civilians were killed, almost all of them by bombs dropped by Assad’s helicopters and by Russian fighter bombers. In the month leading up to the April 7 event, the Syrian Network for Human Rights counted 54 massacres in Syria, almost all by Assad and his allies, and almost all in the vicinity of Douma. But this isn’t just about Douma. From the outset of the Syrian uprising against Assad, Fisk has been telling the fashionably “antiwar” constituencies of the NATO capitals, on the right and on the left, exactly what they want to hear. In the uproars following Assad’s 2013 sarin-gas slaughter of more than 1,000 civilians in Ghouta — the chemical weapons “red line” president Barack Obama ended up allowing Assad to cross — Fisk was already the go-to journalist for “false-flag” conspiracy theories. If Obama were to retaliate against Assad as he’d vowed, he’d have been “on the same side as alQaida,” Fisk wrote back then.
Writing in the New Arab in December 2016, columnist Idrees Ahmad damned Fisk for consistently ventriloquizing Baathist propaganda during his assignments in Syria, which are always undertaken under the protective care and the watchful eye of regime security forces. “Fisk appears to yield to the controlling arms of his handlers with the somnambulant innocence of a debutante,” Ahmad wrote.
And it isn’t just about Robert Fisk, either. There is a ravenous appetite for his kind of journalism in the “West” these days. It offers absolution for the crime of indifference to the Syrian catastrophe. It offers a “narrative” that justifies a kind of righteous uselessness in the face of human suffering, and a respite from the certainty that crimes of indifference do not long remain unpunished.
And punishment will come from it, one way or another, one day.