JOHN CHUCKMAN

COMMENT WRITTEN TO CBC NEWS

CBC radio news has been in serious decline for years, but in your recent coverage of events in Syria, you have touched bottom.

In every newscast and every news-oriented show, the subject dominates. Even on fluff shows like Mary Ito or Bret Banbury we hear about Syria from people who know nothing about it. The problem all this “coverage” is that you investigate nothing and simply repeat the official American view, endlessly.

You have not one qualified reporter on site. No one interviews Syrian officials. No one interviews Russian officials who include many experts on the region. No one talks to good independent reporters or observers, people such as Robert Fisk.

Your broadcasts would not differ in substance if you simply read press releases from the White House and Pentagon.

Even when you report facts upon which people might agree – as for example the number of refugees from Syria, recently cited at one million – you offer no vitally-important perspective, so the end result is effectively CBC joining the tireless American drumbeat to war.

You should well know that when America invaded Iraq, breaking all international law and humanitarian agreements, it killed at least half a million people and created four million refugees. It then refused to take almost any of the refugees, while Syria took a massive two million. Very heartless of Assad, don’t you think?

You keep repeating the American accusations about Assad using sarin gas. In fact, the only certain use of that horrible stuff has been by the violent rabble called the Free Syrian Army. They used small quantities more than once, material either captured from overrun military posts or supplied by American intermediaries such as Israel, which is known to have stockpiles.

And what is the “evidence” you blindly refer to over and over? I can tell you. It is a supposed recording of Syrian officials supplied by Mossad.

Yes, Mossad, the very people who pride themselves at deception and who have a long track record of expertly using it, even in several cases successfully against the United States.

And the recording, even if it could be proved authentic, is ambiguous as to meaning.

You do not kill thousands of people and destroy a country’s infrastructure citing rubbish like that.

The truth is that the entire Syrian “civil war,” as I cannot but believe some of your better journalists must know, is an American black-operation, part of a long series of violent efforts to create a huge cordon sanitaire around Israel. And this particular induced-civil war employs many of the same unsavoury characters typically grouped under the rubric “al Qaeda.”

Recently, this massive covert effort has been failing, despite even more American and Israeli weapons being smuggled to the murderous opposition through Turkey, owing to the successes of Assad’s army. So, now a new casus belli is needed to allow American bombing of Assad’s forces.

The “formula” for this kind of operation was worked out in the invasion of Afghanistan where Americans used everything from Tomahawk missiles to B-52s (with hideous cluster bombs as well as “block-busters”) while locals – the Northern Alliance in that case, including such blood-thirsty creatures as General Dostum – did most of the fighting on the ground. The formula was successfully and cynically repeated in Libya.

The cynics running the induced-horror in Syria for America have gone to the extent now of supplying the rabble with small quantities of sarin to generate a tipping point so Libya can be repeated. It is brutal cynicism with absolutely no regard for Syria’s people.

And remember, if you associate America’s impulses in Syria with either the rule of law or humanitarianism, it was Americans who employed white phosphorus, flame throwers, depleted-uranium (cancer-inducing) ammunition, and cluster bombs in Iraq. Some great defenders of humanitarian principles to be judging what anyone else does.

I realize you cannot present all these underlying realities (after all, your president would be called into Stephen Harper’s office immediately for a chair-throwing meeting), but you do not need to sink to the contemptible level of just repeating every American fabrications with no authority of on-site journalism and no expert opinion.

Shabby, simply shabby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Israel plays this prisoner-release game every time the U.S. manages to push it, once again, into negotiations. I’m amazed people don’t yawn en masse at the announcements.

Each time they play the game, mainline news media give Israel endless positive coverage, as though something significant or hopeful were happening.

But Israel holds many thousands of Palestinians in prisons, including some very young people and people guilty of no crime, so the release of a couple of dozen is virtually meaningless.

And since these particular prisoners are ones convicted of crimes but nearing the end of long sentences, a slightly early release is truly meaningless: it is what happens in the prison system of every Western nation.

The amount of publicity garnered by this paltry act – day after day in all the big-name papers – couldn’t be bought for a billion dollars.

So why do we hear endlessly about nothing as though it were something?

It is only one more stark proof of the inordinate influence of Israel and its apologists have over our sources of information.

These “peace talks” will go nowhere, just as countless others in the past have gone nowhere.

Why is that?

The obvious harsh truth is that Israel does not want, and never has wanted, peace as anyone outside Israel understands it.

Israel wants more land, minus its undesirable Arabic people, and it has had a long, slow process of ethnic-cleansing going on for decades. Just look at the announcement of still more settlements in the West Bank and the ugly manipulations underway in East Jerusalem to separate people from property they’ve owned for centuries. None of it anything less than legalized theft of the property of others who are forced to live under Israeli rule with absolutely no rights.

There is a fundamental truth to human history, and that is that tyranny and abuse ultimately fail. They succeed for a while – the Soviet Union had a run of ninety years – but it is impossible to maintain such a repressive regime indefinitely.

Here is Israel going through the motions yet again of negotiating, only this time it negotiates with an unelected Palestinian, Abbas, the U.S. has propped up in office because of his compliant nature, one moreover who does not even pretend to rule the Palestinians of Gaza.

Peace will come only when the U.S. gets tough with Israel and stops subsidizing and protecting its brutality, and I suspect that will never happen.

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Note that a new law has been proposed in Israel. This law would allow Israel to seize the property of all “non-resident” Palestinians who own land in East Jerusalem (Arabic in population for centuries), Palestinians who happen to have their primary residence in the West Bank or Gaza.

It is the equivalent of the state of Florida proposing a law to seize all the condos and vacation properties of people who live in the other forty-nine states. It is actually worse than that because Israel as illegal occupier has no right in international law to legislate such matters over the heads of Palestinians.

Apart from the bitter irony of such a law – after all, Jews are supposed to have left what was Israel two thousand years ago, and you cannot get more “absentee” than that – it is extremely difficult to understand how property-worshipping Americans can stomach such rigged legislation.

Of course, the American mainline press carries virtually no mention of the proposal.