A Place to Stand

   President Assad's father was a nasty piece of work. He was responsible for the Hama Massacre where 10-20,000 people were killed but which wasn't newsworthy at the time.

   Since the current President started out as London doctor, married to a British wife it is clear that this is not the job he wanted. He inherited it.

   Shakespeare who uses the theme of the inheritance of power, legitimatley and otherwise, in almost every play, would have understood this  We live in a nominally more democtratic age, where democracy is defined as the people being allowed to choose whatever rulers the western powers support at this moment.
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The Houla Massacre - This was the killing of about 100 people. The BBC, which entirely censored any mention of the Dragodan Massacre, where British police murdered 210 people in cold blood iin Kosovo (a matter many times more important to Britain)  gave massive initial coverage to this event saying, repeatedly, how dreadful it was. However

Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and the bulk of the victims were member of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad

  A fact which remains entirely censored by the BBC state broadcasters. Obviously if the victims are Assad's allies it is im[possible for them to have ben the perptrators.

   Of course nobody denues that their censoprship of the Dragodan Massacre is inconsistent with the BBC beingt anything other than a wholly corrupt, racist, fascist propaganda organisation for which no human who was not themselves more racist and Nazi than the guards at Auschwitz could ever work. Still confirmation is worthwhile.

   Another point airbrushed out the by our Nazi broadcaster is the role of al Quaeda as, at least, the dominant military part of this genocidal war.

neil craig said...

Current reporting seems to fit with it not being a suicide bomb but a preplaced one as Brian says. Closer to the IRA Brighton bomb than a typical arabic terrorist.
I have seen it said that the Gulf emirates are "buying" Syrian officials. If so for a bit more they could buy one willing to leave a bomb before departing.
This, however, would require good intel on where and when such "high value targets" would be present. This might come from the turncoat but I think a more certain source would be the sort of electronic intel GCHQ & Langley are undeniably good at.
Overall this seems more consistent with a well planned western operation, based on western intel, using an arab recruited with Gulf oil money and contacts than the sort of bloody but incoherent terrorism our al Quaeda allies in Syria, Libya and elsewhere, have recently achieved.

  And others from Neil Clark's site.
The FSA: NOT Free NOT Syrian and NOT an Army:

'We arrived to Midan, to the Police center; they sent us in a tanked vehicle with some soldiers to accompany us. We got down in the heart of a popular area where streets are narrow and houses are traditional (irregular houses). The quarter was empty of inhabitants. Soldiers told us that Syrian army helped them to evacuate the quarter before starting its operation. We saw traces of fights everywhere. Bullets’ caps everywhere. We wanted to see bodies of fighters of the so-called FSA (I said “the SO-CALLED” because the bodies belonged to NON-Syrian nationalities!) Answering a question of the journalist, soldiers said that most of the foreign fighters are Libyan, Afghan, Pakistani and other Arabic nationalities.'

http://nsnbc.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/syriaonline%C2%B4s-iyad-khuder-reports-from-damascus/
..............
on the turkish jet:
http://newsaboutsyria.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/us-tricked-erdogan-fact-behind-downing.html

and
Syrian refugees are fearing rebels, not Assad!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH7ilDsHQQ8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
......
'Two foreign journalists captured by Islamic extremists in Syria and held for a week were rescued by Syrian opposition fighters, one of them said on Friday...Mr. Oerlemans said their captors apparently included no Syrian fighters, but instead jihadists from Bangladesh, Britain, Chechnya and Pakistan...“They were only foreign jihadis; I don’t think there was one Syrian among them,” Mr. Oerlemans said...“They were definitely quite extreme in their religious beliefs,” he said. “All day we were spoken to about the Koran and how they would bring Shariah law to Syria. I don’t think they were Al Qaeda; they seemed too amateurish for that. They said, ‘We’re not Al Qaeda, but Al Qaeda is down the road.’”...'
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/world/middleeast/jeroen-oerlemans-john-cantile-two-journalists-freed-by-islamic-fighters-in-syria-after-weeklong-ordeal.html?_r=1
so UK is now harboring islamic terrorists...some are also Chechnya.
.......
  Stuff we will not be seeing on the BBC. Of course i can't guaratee that all of these are entirely accurate but I can guarantee that they average far more trustworthy than what we do see.

Neil Clark's blog is recommended for getting the censored news about Syria.

 And from the other end of the political spectrum comes this perceptive and not entirely critical assessment of the conspiratorial relationship between Saudi and America (& by extension Britain) which may have a lot of bearing on the NATO role in helping Islamic terrorists inYugoslavia and certainly has some in the inability, after over a decade of "war on terror" to stop the flow of Saudi and Gulf money to our al Quaeda allies.

The Fourth Rail of Washington imperial politics is the Saudi Lobby (the Third Rail is the Israeli Lobby).

The Saudis have more money than God, but, like the Kuwaitis in 1990, they are too lazy and cowardly too defend their unearned oil wealth. But, unlike the Kuwaitis, who were too arrogant to even pretend to like America before Saddam's invasion, the Saudis have long been using their oil money prudently to buy themselves friends in Washington.

One way they do it is by doing actual favors for the United States of America. Most notably, at the Reagan Administration's request, the Saudis pumped so much oil in 1986 that it drove oil prices low enough to pound the last nail in the Soviet Union's economic coffin. That was a big one, and I am grateful.

Currently, the Saudis appear to be funding the Sunni uprising in Syria. Is that at the request of the Obama Administration? (I haven't been following the news out of Syria.) Obviously, this is wildly hypocritical after the Saudis sent tanks in to Bahrain to crush democracy protests there last year, but such is the way of the world.

Unfortunately, the Saudi rulers aso have interests not at all aligned with America's. Most notably, the Royal Family buys off local hotheads by subsidizing them to stir up Muslim hotheads abroad.

On the other hand, while occasionally the Saudis will do a genuine expensive favor for the U.S. like cutting the price of oil to hurt a mutual foe, most of the time they find it more cost effective just to do favors for members of the American ruling class.

  So are the Suadi's funding terrorism against Iran's enemy Syria as a favour to us or are we supporting their terrorist war as a favour to them. Whe knows, possibly not even all of the American and Saudi government.

  2 things we can be sure of - that if Saudi us unviolved it is nothing to do with promoting democracy & - the people getting killed are mainly harmless local civilians not our al Quaeda/"free Army" let alone their paymasters or organisers.