The Press: Rigging the Coverage
 - what you see is not what you get

Coverage about the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria illustrated the main way corporate news media distort public understanding of a major foreign policy story. The problem is not that the key events in the story are entirely unreported, but that they were downplayed and quickly forgotten in the media’s embrace of themes with which they were more comfortable.

In this case, the one key event was the major offensive launched in early April by Al Nusra Front — the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria — alongside U.S.-backed armed opposition groups. This offensive was mentioned in at least two “quality” U.S. newspapers. Their readers, however, would not have read that it was that offensive that broke the back of the partial ceasefire.

On the contrary, they would have gotten the clear impression from following the major newspapers’ coverage that systematic violations by the Assad government doomed the ceasefire from the beginning.

Corporate media heralded the ceasefire agreement when it was negotiated by the United States and Russia in February, with the Los Angeles Times (2/3/16) calling it “the most determined diplomatic push to date aimed at ending the nation’s almost five-year conflict.” The “partial cessation of hostilities” was to apply between the Syrian regime and the non-jihadist forces, but not to the regime’s war with Nusra and with ISIS.

The clear implication was that the U.S.-supported non-jihadist opposition forces would have to separate themselves from Nusra, or else they would be legitimate targets for airstrikes.
But the relationship between the CIA-backed armed opposition to Assad and the jihadist Nusra Front was an issue that major U.S. newspapers had already found very difficult to cover (FAIR.org, 3/21/16).
U.S. Syria policy has been dependent on the military potential of the Nusra Front (and its close ally, Ahrar al Sham) for leverage on the Syrian regime, since the “moderate” opposition was unable to operate in northwest Syria without jihadist support.

This central element in U.S. Syria policy, which both the government and the media were unwilling to acknowledge, was a central obstacle to accurate coverage of what happened to the Syrian ceasefire.

This problem began shaping the story as soon as the ceasefire agreement was announced. On Feb. 23, New York Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar wrote a news analysis on the wider tensions between the Obama administration and Russia that pointed to “a gaping loophole” in the Syria ceasefire agreement: the fact that “it permits attacks against the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, to continue.”

MacFarquhar asserted that exempting Nusra from the ceasefire “could work in Moscow’s favor, since many of the anti-Assad groups aligned with the United States fight alongside the Nusra Front.” That meant that Russia could “continue to strike United States-backed rebel groups without fear … of Washington’s doing anything to stop them,” he wrote.

On the same day, Adam Entous of the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama’s “top military and intelligence advisers don’t believe Russia will abide by a just-announced ceasefire in Syria and want to ready plans to increase pressure on Moscow by expanding covert support to rebels fighting the Russia-backed Assad regime.”

For two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, it was thus clear that the primary context of the Syria ceasefire was not its impact on Syria’s population, but how it affected the rivalry between powerful national security officials and Russia.

Note Almere-Digest: not only the Syria news is rigged by the media, but also most of the news, depending on who pays the salaries of the journalists writing the story, and the policies of the corporate media conglomerate they work for . 

Read more: Rigging the Coverage of Syria – Consortium

Europe's Refugee And Political Crises: Will the US Own Up to Its Role In the Destabilization Of The World?

EU  relationship with USA

Until last summer, the refugee crisis in Europe was quietly and intentionally hidden from most Americans' view.

It took 3,771 deaths in the Mediterranean last year - and a photograph of a lifeless, drowned Kurdish child named Aylan Kurdi - for coverage to hit the American press.

By that time, 3,000 people were arriving every day to Lesbos, and many thousands more to the other Greek islands.

The irony of this ignorance should be obvious: the United States stands at the center of this disastrous situations given their military involvement in the Middle East and around the world, which has resulted in refugees being out of their homes, over mountains, around border crossings, through Turkish prison cells and onto crowded, dangerous boats.

From Libya to southern Afghanistan, US interventions and occupations have led to further destabilization, violence and, in almost all cases, civil wars.

A longer trail of complicity that stretches back to the four decades of economic and military support that the United States has given to the Arab dictatorships challenged in the 2011 Arab Spring, and to similar support given in that same time period to a number of insurgencies that dovetailed with US foreign policy objectives.

 One such group, the insurgency of the Afghan Mujahideen, fought a decade-long guerrilla war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

Those who came to fight in Afghanistan from abroad, many of whom received US military and economic support either from Congress or the CIA, hatched a postwar strategy of insurgency across the Arab and Muslim world, which resulted in a civil war in Algeria that took 120,000 lives. Meanwhile, other smaller rebellions caused significant fighting across the Maghreb, in northern Pakistan, Yemen, Chechnya, Albania and beyond.

The group now known to the world as ISIS was created in this period by a Jordanian Mujahideen veteran named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Originally launched in Jordan, the all-but-failed organization was given a second lease on life in post-invasion Iraq, where a destabilized and fractured society made fertile soil for the hyper-sectarian ideology of Zarqawi, who helped turn anger at the US occupation into a civil war against Shiites.

The sectarian state originally put in power in Iraq by the United States escalated divisions in the country, helping fuel the other side of the 2005-2006 civil war while pushing a large, disenfranchised Sunni population further toward the open arms of groups like ISIS.

A focus of the US "surge" in 2007 was working with Sunni militias to turn against this tide, but that strategy only lasted until the Iraqi state took control of the Sahwa program (Awakening Councils, or Sons of Iraq) as US troops withdrew and quickly dismantled them.

Against a backdrop of electricity shortages, water contamination and continued political destabilization, ISIS, which had by then entered into the north of Syria to take advantage of the civil war there, re-entered the picture with its dramatic capturing of Fallujah, Ramadi and other key points in Iraq's Anbar Province.

ISIS may be the most menacing face of Syria's civil war, but the multifaceted war includes a range of other groups, most notable the Assad regime itself, but also groups like the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army, a "moderate" group originally formed by deserters from the regime's military. And while a civil society-based revolutionary movement continues to defend the small spaces it has been able to hold, a pipeline of US, Gulf and European money providing various factions with weapons that have helped prolong the bloodshed has helped shatter the hopes and dreams of those who first took to the streets in 2011. Though the US Congress recently canceled the public program backing such rebels, the much larger CIA program remains in operation.

Alongside the US funding, US allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pumped weapons, logistical equipment and soldiers into Syria to support various factions fighting in the civil war, mainly those linked with the Supreme Military Council of Syria, which includes the Free Syrian Army and other anti-ISIS, anti-Assad groups. These groups, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga (from Iraq but often fighting in Syrian Kurdistan) and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), are often supported by bombings of the US, EU (NATO) countries, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Canada and Turkey.

On the other side of that war, Russia and Iran have sustained financial and political support to the four-decade-old Assad regime, helping defend its authoritarian police state from an array of forces fighting against it. In October 2015, Russian air support joined in the fight to secure Russia a seat at the negotiation table and to bolster Assad's position in power. Though Russia announced in mid-March that it would begin withdrawing forces as a long-needed cease-fire takes effect, fighting targeting Islamist groups unaffected by the cease-fire continues in Aleppo, Syria's largest city and its financial center.

Popular protests have exploded in almost every corner of the world, drawing comparisons to the revolutionary period of 1968. It's hard to analyze this wave of uprisings and protest without crediting the revolutions in the Arab world as the first spark that caught.

Those who inspired the world now face a severe wave of repression, with Syria as one of the most shocking examples. Over 11 percent of the population has been killed or injured since the start of the revolt, and over 20 percent have fled the country. Syria has become the single largest source of refugees in the world. The second largest? Afghanistan.

The Arab allies of the United States, fully involved in the war, have taken in an astoundingly small number of refugees from Syria, with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in last place, with zero. 

The United States, with its massive economy and "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" rhetoric, pledged last year to take in a mere 10,000 refugees for fiscal year 2016 - that's .015 percent. So far, that number has only reached a little over 1000.

Considering the extent to which US money has been spent killing people and destroying infrastructure in these countries -- for each of the 1,700 Syrian refugees accepted into the country last year, the United States spent an estimated $375,000 financing and arming various factions in the civil war -- it's far beyond an oversight that the United States' borders are almost impossible for refugees from the region to enter. Even those who worked as interpreters for US soldiers in Iraq regularly make the dangerous crossing to Greece, unsupported by the governments they risked their lives to assist.

The reality is that the United States is politically unwilling to help. Its wars of political and economic self-interest have always centered on a US perception of success and have always utilized a rhetoric of liberation to achieve long-sought foreign policy objectives. It has left those whose lives have been turned upside down across the Middle East -- the people it claimed to be liberating when it invaded their homes -- to fend for themselves in Europe or drown in the picturesque waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

The message of the US is now crystal clear: "Your liberation only matters when we need to justify our wars."

Unfortunately the EU will pay, as it already is experiencing, a heavy price for blindly following, agreeing and participating in these disastrous US adventures in the Middle East and other places around the world.

This is not anti-Americanism, it is a statement of fact, ehich most cowardly corrupt politicians  and the corporate controlled press don't dare to mention.

Where are the European politicians who dare to speak out? It is high time for a EUXIT out of this destructive US embrace,  before this fragile European Union completely falls apart.

EU-Digest

Terrorism and the Press: Politicians duck the blame for terrorism and Press lets them get away with it - never asking any real questions

The Press: Say not, See Not, Hear Not

It is amazing listening to news stations during any terrorist attack. They report "blow by blow" all the gruesome and horrific details endlessly.

CNN in particular, turns these sad events into an endless nauseating soap opera with infinite and at times totally insignificant detail.

Questions are asked about why the most wanted man in Europe was able to elude the police for so long, even though he was living in his home district of Molenbeek in Brussels.

Television and newspapers ask nervously about the chances of Isis carrying out another atrocity aimed at dominating the news agenda and showing that it is still in business.

The reporting of the events in Brussels is in keeping with that after the January (Charlie Hebdo) and November Paris attacks and the Tunisian beach killings by Isis last year, or the killings in Ankara and Istanbul 

For several days there is blanket coverage by the media as it allocates time and space far beyond what is needed to relate developments. But then the focus shifts abruptly elsewhere and Isis becomes yesterday’s story, treated as if the movement has ceased to exist or at least lost its capacity to affect our lives.

The outpouring of official grief that commonly follows any atrocity, such as the march of 40 world leaders through the streets of Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings last year, is used to help neuter any idea that the political failures of these same leaders might be to a degree responsible for the slaughter.

After all, such marches are usually held by the powerless to protest and show defiance, but in this case the march simply serves as a publicity stunt to divert attention from these leaders’ inability to act effectively and stop the wars in the Middle East which they had done much to provoke.

But it its not only the US which deserves the blame. By taking up the cause of the Syrian and Libyan opposition and destroying the Syrian and Libyan states, France and Britain opened the door to Isis and should share in the blame for the rise of Isis, terrorism and creating the refugee crises in Europe.

By refusing to admit to or learn from past mistakes, the West Europeans did little to lay the basis for the current, surprisingly successful “cessation of hostilities” in Syria, which is now considered by the public at large almost entirely as a Russian achievement. 

Once again the question can be asked - which major News Agency has shown the courage to sit down with any important political leader and ask them some serious investigative questions, like: "why have you made such a mess in the Middle East , or, "what is being done to stop weapon dealers from selling their weapons and munition around the world at will ", or, "how come the former US Bush Administration  is not taken into a criminal court  for war crimes ", or, "why is the West propping up the Egyptian military dictatorship, or, "why is the military industrial complex industry selling  weapons and aircraft to despotic and undemocratic nations like Saudi-Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and Somalia", or, "why can't the UN declare the Middle East region a nuclear free zone", or, "what are the requirements to be a member of NATO, when we see that one of their member states (TURKEY) does not respect freedom of the Press, throws investigative reporters in jail or takes over newspapers when they don't follow the party line" - and the list goes on and on.

Barton Gellman of the Washington Post says that for journalists just getting basic information from any governmen tagency has become very difficult: “Besides the actual risk of prosecution . . . there’s an investigative issue that very much relates to the ability to do national security journalism now. Almost everything you want to write about these days, if you are writing about diplomacy, or intelligence, or defense, is classified; everything indeed, except the boiler plate press release and the tightly controlled  news conference, is classified."

Unfortunately, that is just the way how most governments operate these days.  Today there is more classified information which can not be accessed than there is open-source information on the planet.”

Bottom-line, political clarity and honesty is a "Fata Morgana" when it comes to getting it from Governments. Consequently distinguishing  "fiction"    today is the new reality.

 Almere-Digest

The Media: Stop giving PR lip service to ISIS/ IS - They Are Enemies of Humanity - Not A Marketable Product - by RM

ISIS Psychopathic Derelicts Execute Innocent Civilians

It is amazing and questionable why the Media in general goes to such great length in providing ISIS or IS with all this free publicity and PR.

The Islamic State is a Fata Morgana, and all the stories about its legality are bogus. Unfortunately the cruel crimes committed by these psychopathic derelicts are a reality.

But sadly, not much has been done to curb the ability of these fanatic criminals to project a (deluted) image which continues to attract numerous individuals to their cause.  An image which indirectly is reinforced by the publicity the media provides them.

Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, who all have the means to track our whereabouts and activities should at least also be able to use those same capabilities to track these Enemies of Humanity and bar them from using their services to recruit followers and spout their nonsense.

As to the general corporate controlled press, they should, in this particular case at least, forget their profit motives for once. Stop giving these Enemies of Humanity the time of day in your news reports.

EU-Digest

The Netherlands: Dutch jihadi bride: 'Is she a victim or a suspect?' - by Harriet Alexander, and Anna Mees

She was a blonde-haired, blue eyed Catholic girl whose family was a pillar of the Dutch town of Maastricht. He was a smiling, bicycle-riding Dutch former soldier - a man considered such an asset to his country he was encouraged to try out for their elite special forces.

And yet the marriage of Sterlina Petalo and Omar Yilmaz was, for their families, anything but a cause for celebration.

Yilmaz, 26, was one of the most high-profile Europeans to become a jihadi, travelling to Syria to live in the Islamic State and fight on behalf of the extremists. He gloried in the teenage fantasy of war - posting a series of Instagram photos of himself pouting at the camera on a motorbike, amid bombed-out buildings in his combat fatigues, AK47 slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. Miss Petalo was a recent convert to Islam, who fell in love with Yilmaz after seeing him on television, picturing him as a Robin Hood figure.

Last week their story took a remarkable twist when it was revealed that Miss Petalo had in fact returned to her hometown - after her mother travelled to the Turkish-Syrian border to bring the 19-year-old home from the jihadist-held city of Raqqa.

“Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” said her mother, Monique Verbert. “She rang me and said 'Take me home.’ But she could not leave Raqqa without help.”

The pair arrived back in the Netherlands on Wednesday, said Annemarie Kemp, a spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office. Clad in a niqqab, with only her eyes showing, the teenager - who has changed her name to Aicha - was photographed being driven through the town on her way to custody.

“Upon her arrival, Aicha was detained at once on suspicion of crimes threatening state security,” said Ms Kemp.

Miss Petalo is being held in a police cell - the prosecutor, Roger Bos, ruled on Friday that she should be detained for questioning for three more days. Mrs Verbert, 49, an administrator for BP, argued that her daughter’s flight to Syria was little more than teenage infatuation. Today Monday November 24 the court will decide whether to press charges.

Note EU-Digest: Every civilized human being should condemn the violence and terror IS is using to instill fear and terror in the areas where they operate. In that same breath one should also condemn social media and the International Press for publicizing these horrific scenes of barbarism, including the decapitation of body parts. This is pure commercially based sensationalism, which can only lead to popularizing these horrific acts in the minds of susceptible young people - case in point Ms Petalo who acted upon her teenage fantasy of a "glorified" war and followed this "insanely obsessed man" into certain disaster. 

Kudos to her mother for taking the proper action to bring her daughter back to reality and safety.   
 Read more: Dutch jihadi bride: 'Is she a victim or a suspect?' - Telegraph