By Finian Cunningham
15 December, 2012
@ PressTV
Barack Obama, America’s Conjurer-in-Chief, is trying to entertain the world with a new smoke-and-mirrors trick, with the announcement that his government is recognizing the Syrian National Coalition as “the sole representative of the Syrian people”.
The chemical weapons trick seems to have fizzled like a damp squib. So, now it’s time for another illusion – the “worthy Syrian opposition”.
This motley crew of treasonous exiles – who mysteriously somehow have bags of money to trot all over the globe from Doha to Cairo, Tokyo to Marrakech – are all of sudden anointed by the American President as the next government of Syria.
Anyone who has read the Doha Protocol that the SNC willingly signed up to while seduced in a luxury hotel last month by their Qatari sponsors should be under no misapprehension. This group of self-serving opportunists has been cobbled together with the sole purpose of selling Syria’s sovereignty to the highest, or even lowest, bidder. The people of Syria have been spared no treachery low enough in the imperialists’ manifesto of regime change, including surrender of wealth, natural resources and all of Syria’s independent foreign policy principles.
Under the regime of the SNC, if it ever gets into power, Syria will become a shell of a once-proud nation, in hock to Western and Persian Gulf investors and schemers, betraying its people and its regional neighbours.
Yet, hey presto, with the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, Obama declares: “We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population, that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime.”
Cue the arms sales and military logistics floodgates – as already worked out by British General Sir David Richards in secret talks last month in London with his American, French, Turk and Qatari counterparts.
The latest Obama stunt follows the dress rehearsals in previous weeks by Britain, France, Turkey and the Persian Gulf Arab dictators who had already appointed the SNC as the de facto government-in-waiting on behalf of the 25 million Syrians.
The White House joker tried to give his “recognition” wheeze some credibility by demarcating an illusory line between “legitimate” and “renegade” Syrian opposition, by proscribing certain militant groups within Syria as “terrorists”. The Jabhat Al Nusra front, which is said to be linked to Al Qaeda, is henceforth ostracized, at least officially, by Washington.
Of course, Washington had to crank out some rhetorical fog to cover up the glaring contradiction between its decade-long “war on terror” mantra and the fact that Islamic extremists are central to the Western-backed campaign of subversion in Syria.
But this chicanery is fooling no-one who has been accurately following the state terrorist war of aggression in Syria over the past 22 months. No-one, that is, except those perhaps who have been brainwashed by the Western mainstream media echo chambers, which call this campaign of terror afflicting Syria a “pro-democracy uprising”.
Obama’s cynical charade of isolating extremists from supposed worthy opposition belies the fact that Syrian society is being assailed by a gargantuan criminal conspiracy authored, fomented and fuelled by Western governments and their regional proxies. The so-called Syrian rebels are terrorist foot-soldiers of foreign masters.
Think about it. What group claiming to liberate Syria would murder their own compatriots – men, women and children – with such fiendish, unrelenting barbarity?
For Obama to try to make out that the opposition has now been cleansed from extremists – on the basis of his say-so – is transparent nonsense.
Are we expected to believe that the litany of atrocities perpetrated against the Syrian people are all down to “rogue Jihadists”?
Let’s review just some of the low-lights of the putative Syrian liberators:
1. Massacres of whole villages. Just as Obama was sanitizing the opposition, news was coming in of yet another massacre this week in the village of Aqrab. Reports put the number of killed at over 125. Typically, the Western media lie machine was vague in ascribing blame, but past record shows that such atrocities are stock-in-trade of the anti-government foreign militants. On 25 May, the village of Houla, also in Hama Province, was massacred, including 49 children. After initial media misinformation, it turned out that the mass murders were carried out by the Western and Arab-backed mercenaries.
2. No-warning car bombs across Syria in urban areas of Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib, Daraa, Homs. The newly American-sanctioned Al Nusra front is said to be based in Aleppo. Are we to believe its operatives can whisk around the entire country of Syria carrying out suicide bombings? Again, as Obama was pronouncing the validity of Syrian opposition, the suburb of Jaramana outside Damascus was attacked with no-warning bombs, killing two and injuring several. Last month, the mainly Christian and Druze community of Jaramana was targeted for the fourth time in as many months with multiple explosions that claimed over 34 lives.
3. Video evidence emerges this week showing Saudi mercenaries recruiting a child to behead what appears to be a captured Syrian soldier as he lay on the street, his neck propped on a concrete block and his hands tied behind his back.
4. Other footage shows foreign militants taking unarmed men out on to a street and executing them one-by-one. In other horrific scenes, Syrian soldiers lying on the ground are seen begging for mercy as gun-toting captors spray them with bullets.
5. Victims of cold-blooded executions are thrown off multi-storey buildings on to the pavement below, their mangled corpses lined up in the gutter for gruesome public display.
6. Mosques and churches are desecrated by being turned into sniper posts by Western-backed mercenaries, from where they shoot randomly at civilians in the streets.
7. Family members are kidnapped for ransom only to find that their loved ones have been slain in the most heinous way.
8. Mortar shells are fired deliberately at civilian apartment blocks by mercenaries who then film the aftermath fabricating that the crimes were committed by the Syrian Army, fabrications which the Western mainstream media peddle in line with their governments’ propaganda.
9. Journalists who are trying to give an accurate account of all of the above and more are targeted and assassinated, including Press TV’s Maya Naser and at least 15 other Syrian media workers.
10. In yet another crime against humanity, it is revealed this week that Saudi Arabia has forced inmates from its seething jails to go and wage “holy war” on the Syrian people.
This is the kind of replete, systematic terrorism that Western, Arab and Turk-backed militants have been engaging in to destroy Syria and to impose a regime that will have nothing to offer the Syrian people except more internecine killing.
This is the kind of mayhem that America’s Conjurer-in-Chief and his band of Western terrorist allies are now trying to dissimulate as being the work of rogue extremists, whom they allegedly do not support.
The deception being engineered here is to create an illusion under the cover of which the Western governments can now proceed “legitimately” with direct military supply to Syrian terrorist “freedom fighters” – as opposed to their erstwhile covert supply of weapons which has so far not succeeded in their criminal plan for regime change.
In the Season of Goodwill, that’s like expecting us to believe that Obama is Santa Claus and Cameron and Hollande are his angelic little helpers.
Finian Cunningham is a frequent contributor to PressTV where this article appeared. Read other articles by Finian.