Middle East

An article by Charlie Skelton

The media have been too passive when it comes to Syrian opposition sources, without scrutinising their backgrounds and their political connections.

Although the elections and the political reforms are needed in the wake of the Arab Spring, premature elections could usher in a period of continued political instability punctuated by violence, or introduce new totalitarian regimes that would assume power under the pretext of maintaining order and also keeping stability.

The online whistleblower WikiLeaks continues to release documents from the Syria Files, more than 2 million emails said to be from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies over a 6 year period ending earlier this year. WikiLeaks spokesperson Sarah Harrison said the files would embarrass not only the Syrian government but many of its political foes.

Revolution, Uprising, Protest Movement, Crisis, Armed Insurgency, Civil War, and many other variations of titles have been used over the past 15 months to describe events in Syria. There have been many disagreements on Syria over this span of time, but there is no disagreement over the fact that Syria has been the central event on the global political scene.

Cairo, 20 June, 2012 – Hundreds of thousands of activists returned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Monday night to protest supplementary constitutional amendments issued by the ruling military council in recent days.

In recent days a series of controversial public service announcements aired on state-owned TV channels in Egypt, angering Egyptians and foreigners alike. The advertisements, which warn Egyptians against talking to foreigners “because they might be spies”, have been slammed for being “shallow” and inflammatory.

Pressenza, in communication with writers detailing points of view unaligned with the ‘taken’ media, republishes here two opinion pieces on the issue of the Houla Massacre. The standard media reports are otherwise following the line that it is the Syrian regime that was responsible and is not bothering to correct that view.

In a June 9, 2012 article John Rosenthal drew attention to the words of U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, about a “tipping point” in the Syria conflict: the savage massacre of over 90 people, predominantly women and children, for which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was immediately blamed by virtually the entirety of the Western media.

I wrote an article that I helped reconstruct demolished Palestinian homes out of civil disobedience. After the article by Melanie Lidman in The Jerusalem Post on April 30, stating that the Interior Ministry was accusing me of illegally constructing Palestinian homes demolished by the municipality, I wrote an op-ed that appeared on May 8.

In April of this year, I wrote that the upheaval in Syria (the Sunni majority revolt against the Alawite-dominated regime) has turned into a battleground between the Sunni axis led by Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the Shiite axis led by Iran. As events continue to unfold in the region, particularly the Sunni Islamists’ monopolization of the political processes in … (read more)