In late June, Syrians experienced the worst attack on a Christian church since 1860 On June 29, 2025, I attended a church service at St. Moses the Black Orthodox Church in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. St. Moses is an Antiochian church, also known as the Church of St. Peter, and harkens...
U.S. media accounts of the fall of the Assad dynasty in Syria failed to disclose that the U.S. had engaged in a thirteen-year-long operation that started with the Arab Spring and continued with the launching of Operation Timber Sycamore by the Obama administration, the largest covert operation...
On Friday July 9 the UN Security Council unanimously agreed to a conditional one-year extension of the Turkey/Syria border crossing at Bab al Hawa. As part of the agreement, the UN Secretary General needs to report regularly on what is happening with the aid going into the Al Qaeda dominated...
How do you sell the idea of a moderate rebellion without alienating the extremists who will do the actual fighting? When foreign powers started supporting armed groups to overthrow the Ba’athist government in Syria after 2011, they were unsure about who could, or should, take...
Public relations machine transformed hard-line jihadists—whom Hillary Clinton famously called “hard men with guns”—into valiant freedom fighters in the eyes of the U.S.-UK public Imagine if an armed rebellion took place in the United States against the federal, state and local governments. Given 21st century...
As It Did with Castro in Cuba and Noriega in Panama, the “Mighty Wurlitzer” of U.S. Propaganda Defused Antiwar Sentiment by Painting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a Brutal Animal Who Had to Be Removed. In 1991, famed MIT linguist Noam Chomsky published a political pamphlet called Media Control: The...
Will Congress ever hold the CIA to account for this and other crimes by ordering a Church Committee-type investigation? In August 2017, The New York Times reported on the Trump administration’s shutting down what it termed “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA”—the $1...
How Her Visit to War-Torn Syria Led a Dutch Socialist Reporter to Lose Her Faith in the West The picture below is a frame from a smug Western documentary on the Syrian War. I wrote the caption in 2020, after viewing the documentary, which was a piece of propaganda filled...
Alawites to the grave; Christians to Beirut.-- War slogan of anti-Assad militants As this article was written, Syria experienced the worst days of violence since Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—formerly the al-Nusra Front of al-Qaeda—took power from President Bashar al-Assad. Friday, March 7, 2025, is the date it may be said a...
United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Take the case of Syria. The people and groups one would normally...