The media supporters of the terrorists and insurgents in Syria have spread an immense amount of stories that were later proven to be false. Two days ago another obviously false story, based solely on opposition accounts, was reported on in the New York Times. The NYT report showed some, though not nearly enough, skepticism towards the story. But it was the Financial Times correspondent Borzou Daragahi who, in spreading the story, really exposed himself as gullible simpleton.
Two days ago the NY Times reported:
Scores of Syrian civilians belonging to President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect were killed Tuesday in the first known Alawite massacre since the Syrian conflict began. But the killings, in the village of Aqrab, happened under circumstances that remain unclear.
Rights organizations researching the massacre said Wednesday that members of the shabiha, a pro-government Alawite militia, were the killers. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad group based in Britain with a network of contacts inside Syria, said 125 to 150 civilians died.
The accusation, if confirmed, would be a shocking episode of Alawite-on-Alawite violence in a conflict punctuated by violence between sects.
That story smelled and was full of holes. There was no plausible motive for the alleged massacre in it. It solely dependent on known biased outlets like the Syrian Observatory and "activists" which spread propaganda for Syrian insurgents and acknowledged terrorist groups like the Nusra front.
So when the Financial Times Middle East correspondent Borzou Daragahi tweeted it as this:
Shabiha now massacring Allawites,. rights groups say, via @nytimes http://nyti.ms/UVgDuX
I responded:
"Rights groups" = Terrorist Propaganda > @borzou: Shabiha now massacring Allawites,. rights groups say, via @nytimes http://nyti.ms/UVgDuX
Mr. Daragahi did not like that. He accused me of being a "Shabiha supporter":
Shabiha's western supporters defame Syrian civilian rights monitors as terrorists RT @moonofa: "Rights groups" = Terrorist Propaganda
Does anyone find the line where I defame the "Syrian civilian rights monitors as terrorists"? For the record, I do not. I accuse the Syrian Observatory of spreading propaganda and lies about terrorism committed by certain anti-government groups in Syria. Even the NYT, in its very biased report, identified the Syrian Observatory as "an anti-Assad group".
Meanwhile the judgement about the truth of the story the Syrian Observatory and Borzou Daragahi spread is in. Alex Thomson of the British Channel 4 visited Aqrab, talked to and filmed various witnesses of the event. Here is what he found:
We interviewed three key eye-witnesses in three separate locations. They could not have known either of our sudden arrival, nor did they know the identities of the other two eye-witnesses.
What is striking is that their accounts entirely corroborate each other, to the last detail. And their accounts are further backed up by at least a dozen conversations with other Alawites who had fled from Aqrab.
…
All three agree – as do the rebels – that rebels attacked Aqrab on Sunday 2 December. Madlyan says: “They had long beards. It was hard to understand what they said. They weren’t dressed like normal Syrians.”I press her and she is adamant that their Arabic was not from Syria.
The youth Ali told us: “They all had big beards and came in four or five cars, from the direction of al-Houla.”
They all insist, as did everybody else we met, that the rebels from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) corralled around 500 Alawite civilians in a large red-coloured two-storey house belonging to a prominent businessman called Abu Ismail.
They then say they were held – around 500 men, women and children – in this building until the early hours of Tuesday 11 December. Nine days.
In that time they say almost no food was delivered, and women were hitting their own children to try and stop them crying. When it rained, they were holding rags out of the window to soak up and drink the moisture.
…
They say the rebels wanted to take the women and children to al-Houla to use them as human shields against bombardment from government forces, and they believed they would kill the remaining men.
…
It appears negotiations ran between these elders and the rebels for around four hours, ending in deadlock at around eight o’clock on Monday night.At that point, shooting broke out, the rebels firing through the windows and shouting that they had booby-trapped the building. The eye-witnesses say that the shooting died down at about midnight, after which a deal was done. In screaming night-time chaos and intermittent shooting, three vehicles took around 70 of the prisoners to safety in the nearest village a mile away.
However, it seems a fourth vehicle took a number of prisoners to al-Houla, where two – an unidentified woman and a boy – were treated for injuries in a rebel field hospital.
The woman and boy blamed pro-government militia for taking the prisoners, according to rebel websites, and that is the version of events which has gone around the world.
…
Curiously, rebel websites say the building containing the prisoners who remained, was completely destroyed by government artillery and air strikes on Tuesday. However, we saw and filmed the building in which eye-witnesses said they were imprisoned, and it appears intact – as does the rest of the village.
The story as told by the Syrian Observatory is obviously false. There was no bombing by the government and the aggressive acts were done by foreign terrorists.
It is Borzou Daragahi who fell for the story from rebel websites and "rights groups". It was me who correctly identified those "rights groups" as terrorist propaganda outlets. Is taking women and children as human shields, on a sectarian base, holding them for days without food and water and killing likely many of them not terrorism? Is spreading false stories about these, as the "rights group" Syrian Observatory does, not propaganda? And allowing for scrutiny and objecting to obvious falsehoods somehow makes me a "Shabiha supporter"? Please.
It is obviously that Mr. Daragahi has not much sense for the neutrality and careful evaluation of facts that a good journalist should have. Instead he has preconceived black and white mindset – four legs good, two legs better. Under that mindset he believes everything the rebel websites tell him even when such stories, like a Syrian government massacre of (Alawite) civilians, seem without motive and thereby implausible.
One wonders if the Financial Times and/or its readers are really well served when its correspondents, especially in the complex Middle East, show no skepticism towards the fairytales of murky "rights groups" or this or that "rebel" outlet.