{"id":88933,"date":"2014-01-22T08:34:21","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T08:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=88933"},"modified":"2014-01-24T09:38:09","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T09:38:09","slug":"syria-report-one-is-reminded-of-nazi-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=88933","title":{"rendered":"Syria report: One is reminded of Nazi Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Robert Fisk — The Independent Jan 21, 2014<\/h1>\n

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A photo of one of the alleged victims of the Syrian government's program of "systematic killing". Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

The pictures are horrific, the torture details revolting, the numbers terrifying. And the integrity of the three former prosecutors who have effectively accused the Syrian government of war crimes with their report published this week, is without blemish. Shrivelled, blood-spattered corpses provide unstoppable evidence of regime cruelty \u2013 just as the videotapes of Syrian rebel executions tell us what kind of Syria may soon exist if the insurrection against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad succeeds.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Everyone knows that the Assad regime \u2013 from father Hafez onwards \u2013 has employed torture and executions to preserve the doubtful purity of the Baath party. So why not, indeed, talk of war crimes? Well, let\u2019s just remember that the 11,000 prisoners reportedly done to death by the Syrian regime is only just over half the total number of Syrians \u2013 20,000 \u2013 reportedly killed by Hafez\u2019s brother\u2019s troops in the besieged Syrian city of Hama in 1982.<\/span><\/p>\n

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So how come we are not demanding war crimes trials for those responsible for that even greater massacre? Could it be that we have just forgotten this even more terrible massacre? Or could it be that we don\u2019t have the inclination to pursue that particular bloodbath?<\/span><\/p>\n

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No, that\u2019s not to say that the evidence from the Qatar-funded report \u2013 and we shall come to the matter of Qatar shortly \u2013 is not true. But we should be asking a lot more questions than we have been asking about this portrait gallery of pain, unleashed only hours before an the international conference in Switzerland which begins Wednesday in which we in the West \u2013 but perhaps not Qatar \u2013 hope to end the civil war in Syria.<\/span><\/p>\n

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How long, for example, have the Qatari authorities been in possession of this terrible eye-witness material? A couple of weeks, just enough time to rustle up the lawyers for the prosecution? Or a couple of months? Or six months? And, more to the point, why now? For it would be difficult to imagine a better way for Qatar \u2013 whose royal family viscerally hates Bashar al-Assad \u2013 to destroy his hopes of a future role in Syria, even in a \u2018transitional\u2019 Syrian government, than by releasing these snapshots of terror just before the Swiss talks.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Indeed, one is reminded \u2013 in terms of political purpose rather than historical parallel, of course \u2013 of Nazi Germany\u2019s disclosure of the mass graves of 22,000 Polish officers and civilians murdered by the Soviet secret police in 1940 at Katyn, in that part of Russia newly occupied by German troops. The Nazis claimed the Soviets were responsible \u2013 in the hope that this would divide Stalin\u2019s alliance with America and Britain. The Allies denounced the Nazis for the massacre \u2013 although it was indeed committed by the Soviets. Does Qatar now hope to divide Syria\u2019s alliance with Russia and Iran with similar evidence of Syrian government mass murder.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a>
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The headline conveys an entirely different message to the article. We don’t think Fisk wrote the headline, his editors did. That tells us they want to persuade the public that something ‘must be done’ about Syria: i.e. military intervention<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-syria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88933"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89119,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88933\/revisions\/89119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}