I was delighted to see the loathsome Daily Mail cough up for its disgraceful slurs on the charming Mrs Trump. I suspect many on the left will have had their loyalties divided in that battle, irrespective of the fact that it was the Mail that libelled Melania, but what about the Mail's mega lie today, on Syria. It boasts the headline "At least 100 people dead as a suicide car bomb hits convoy of busses evacuating residents from the clutches of ISIS to safe havens in Syria". This is quite simply a lie. It is fake news. It is a lie born of the insane and confused policy of the West in this godforsaken country.
Let's rewind a couple of weeks to when dozens of folks died after chemical weapons were detonated in an area controlled by the coalition of forces known loosely as the Free Syrian Army. The West instantly blamed the regime of President Assad although he pointed out that the UN itself had said he had no chemical weapons left but that it could not be sure that the FSA did not. Might conventional weapons have set off a chemical attack by landing on a store run by the FSA? We don't know for sure.
I suspect Assad was somehow responsible but there was no concrete proof when President Trump ordered a retaliatory bombing raid on an Assad air base, an attack which caused material collateral damage (i.e. the deaths of women and kids). Trump had said that he would not bomb Syria ( as Obama had done) without Congressional approval but I guess he had changed his mind. The mainstream liberal press suddenly applauded him for his Damascene conversion to the warmongering policies of the Clinton Obama regime.
We in the West stood firm against Assad once more. Hooray! Since we clearly don't back ISIS that leaves us supporting the FSA which last week apologised for beheading a 12 year old boy. It was not the beheading for which they expressed regret just that they got the wrong boy. For the FSA are largely Islamofascists, many of them are Al Qaeda followers and decapitation, and chucking folks off buildings are the sort of acts they deem acceptable.
Wind forward to this attack on a convoy of folks who were leaving two villages which had been besieged not by ISIS but by FSA forces. They were being evacuated as part of a deal that saw civilians from FSA outposts besieged by Assad also to seek safety. The Syrians who died in this outrage, mainly women and kids, were Assad supporters. They were killed,almost certainly by FSA/Al Qaeda backers. One thing we know is that they were not being evacuated from the clutches of ISIS but from the clutches of the maniacs we in the West are supporting.
The mainstream liberal press denounced the chemical attack as a war crime. It was. But so too was this suicide bombing.. So who will Trump and his poodles May and the EU leadership bomb now? Presumably Assad again. Meanwhile a pliant media lies to us and muddies the waters by blaming ISIS who, we can all agree, are really bad guys.
In Aleppo today for the first time in several years St Elijah's cathedral sees the celebration of a full Easter Mass. That is because the folks we are supporting banned Christains from celebrating their faith and St Elijah's was in the smaller part of Aleppo (the East) controlled by "our guys". President Assad has always allowed Christians full freedoms which is why that persecuted minority support him unswervingly. The liberation of Eastern Aleppo allows them to celebrate Easter without the risk of execution. Is that not a rather good thing?
I do not argue that Assad is an angel. But to say that he is a devil, like the ISIS devils, and that we must thus back the other team as being relatively good guys is just to deny the truth of what is happening on the ground. In this post fact era, organs like the Mail are printing fake news to justify an intervention that is unjustifiable. The world would be a better place if the West recognised that President Putin had been, rightly, backing the least worst side all along and fell in line with him to allow Assad to cleanse his land of both ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that is not going to happen is it?
So who do Trump and the Mail propose bombing in response to this latest war crime?