parlement
© parlement.ukBritish parliament was recalled early from summer recess Thursday to vote on - and reject - a military attack on Syria/Photo: parliament.uk
Syria is a tragedy: tens of thousands of innocent victims are murdered and a country that was the heart of Arab civilisation is being destroyed. Our heart is bleeding for the suffering of the Syrian people. Rage and sadness, however, should not be incompatible with a critical reading of the information we are fed with from the mainstream media.

These media are accusing the regime of all the crimes committed during the last year, especially the alleged use of chemical weapons.

Even before the UN inquiry commission landed in Damascus, it was seemingly acceptable to state that chemical weapons had been used, and that it was the Syrian army which used them against the Syrian people. A bloody or even crazy dictatorship against a liberation movement comprised of angels?

Let's start with the so-call Syrian Liberation Army (SLA): it is not a united body - in fact, they are fighting each other - and though it originally contained true Syrian democrats, most of them have left the movement that is increasingly led by Muslim fundamentalists, criminal gangs and foreign agents. The international powers supporting the SLA may quickly regret their choice of partners, as happened with Al Qaida in Afghanistan...

Then, the question of numbers. Hundreds or even thousands of victims, report the media. Who counted? Where? Killed by what weapons and by whom? And the chemical weapon: according to a recent report in the Washington Post, on at least one occasion, chemical weapons were used by rebel units, not by the regime.

In fact, we don't know anything for certain at this time except that once again, we are the target of a major disinformation campaign.

We must all have a critical reading of the information being fed to us, certainly as the "weapons of mass destruction" that served as a pretext for American aggression against Iraq never existed: tens of millions of people throughout the planet were fooled by George W Bush and his cynical team of liars who acted to break the huge anti-war movement, including that in the US.

The ability to lie en masse was in fact tested by the US propaganda machine at the end of the 1980s, against the Ceausescu regime in Romania. An alleged massacre was committed by the regime in the city of Timisoara, and the whole world was flooded by "images" of the massacre. This universal outrage was the beginning of the end of the Ceausescu dictatorship.

The Timisoara massacre, however, never occurred, and the mass graves were a fake: Timisuara was a mere invention of the CIA and the Romanian opposition.

Since then I have learned to be extremely skeptical about dramatic news, especially when it is well known that the US and its allies are searching for pretexts to launch military aggression.