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...
Dirty war in Syria continues as media attention focuses elsewhere The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Israel secretly coordinates with the U.S, on many of the airstrikes it carries out in eastern Syria near the al-Tanf military base, a U.S. outpost near the Syria-Jordan border. Since 2017, the Israeli Air...
Americans want to feel good about themselves by giving money to charities that claim to be helping the Syrian people. But they are being duped into supporting terrorist forces that have brought misery and violence to the country—while crippling U.S. sanctions accentuate the humanitarian crisis. Are major charitable organizations supporting...
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...
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...
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...
Framed as sectarian war, the Syrian genocide and assaults on Gaza and Yemen are part of a long-standing UK-U.S.-Israeli-Western strategy to dominate the region via the erasure of the Axis of Resistance. Syria’s massacres can be defined by nothing less than genocide, having exceeded the slaughter of more than 10,000 dead...
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...
At the end of November, groups aligned with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or the “Levant Liberation Committee” and previously known as the Al-Nusra Front, launched significant attacks on the Syrian government in the Idlib and Aleppo regions, taking part of the city of Aleppo. The Syrian Arab Army has mobilized to push back against HTS...
Part of a pattern of media omissions and deception in its coverage of Syria On December 8, 2024, Syria’s long-standing ruler Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia after being deposed by Sunni militia forces in what New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman called the “biggest…most game-changing event in the Middle...