Renewable Revolution

Thursday, 05 January 2017 11:05

SNIPPET:

I’m still haunted by what I saw at Al-Razi Hospital in what was then government-held West Aleppo. I watched as one ambulance after another dropped off civilians wounded by rebel mortars fired into residential neighborhoods around the clock. Medical staff quickly went to work on a man whose chest was pierced by a piece of twisted metal. A frantic woman lingered close by, shouting, “He’s the only son I have left!” The man was soon pronounced dead and the woman collapsed in agony.


Down a crowded hall, 10-year-old Fateh stood on a blood-smeared floor, crying beside a gurney where his 15-year-old brother, Mohammad, was lying. Blood had soaked through the bandage on his leg, but the medical staff was too busy with more life-threatening injuries to take notice. The boys were lucky to be alive. They had been moving furniture out of the house with their younger cousins earlier in the day when they were struck by rebel mortars. Their 6-year-old cousin, a girl, was in the ICU. Their 4-year-old cousin, a boy, had been killed.

Across the street, grieving families waited outside the morgue to identify the bodies of their recently deceased loved ones. A group of sobbing children explained to me how they had watched their father die that morning from the balcony of their apartment. A rebel mortar struck him as he was parking his car. Meanwhile, a shell-shocked father told me his 10-year-old son was shot and killed by a sniper while fetching water on the roof.

A grief-stricken woman, mourning the loss of her husband, cursed the government for not hitting the rebels—or “terrorists,” in her words—hard enough. Her family members agreed, complaining that the Syrian government was being too soft on the armed groups that they blamed for destroying their city.

Underneath all the grief and calls for revenge was exhaustion. After five years of war, these people were tired. I didn’t meet a single Syrian in the government areas I visited who hadn’t lost friends and family since the war started. But their suffering, with a few minor exceptions, has been largely disappeared from Western media, probably because the people most responsible for it are supported by the West.

Even those who expressed disapproval of Russia’s involvement in their country told me they hold the US and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—most responsible for the disintegration of their country.


These sentiments totally contradict one of US media’s most pernicious lies—that US inaction allowed the bloodshed in Syria to continue with impunity.

“Many thousands of people have been killed in Aleppo…but Washington shrugs,” lamented the New York Times (12/14/16). “The United States’ inaction in Syria has transformed our country into nothing other than a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” complained Leon Wieseltier in the Washington Post (12/15/16).

But Washington has intervened (FAIR.org, 10/1/15)—and by doing so, it prolonged the bloodshed and empowered Al Qaeda.

Full DETAILED article:


http://www.therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/3011