Implosion of The Houla Massacre Story — Is Anyone Paying Attention?

Daniel McAdams
Lew Rockwell Blog
Monday, June 11, 2012

A respected mainstream publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ), has reported that the infamous Houla massacre in Syria, which the US and NATO hoped would be the casus belli for their planned invasion, was in fact carried out by rebel forces.

Highlighted in the National Review, of all places, the FAZ investigation was exhaustive and convincing.

NRO reports on the original FAZ story:

According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.

“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,

“the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

For weeks, alternative media analysts and even eyewitnesses had been poking enormous holes in the suspiciously convenient Western narrative that Assad’s forces slaughtered the villagers, cutting and killing at close range. No one paid attention, as usual.

The NRO piece continues with a fascinating story from a Christian monastery in the vicinity:

“Already at the beginning of April, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix of the St. James Monastery warned of rebel atrocities’ being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities. She cited the case of a massacre in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. According to an account published in French on the monastery’s website, rebels gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya and blew up the building with dynamite. They then attributed the crime to the regular Syrian army. ‘Even though this act has been attributed to regular army forces . . . the evidence and testimony are irrefutable: It was an operation undertaken by armed groups affiliated with the opposition,’ Mother Agnès-Mariam wrote.”

Either Mother Agnès-Mariam is a liar or Hillary Clinton is a liar. You decide.

A few things to consider in light of these dramatic developments:

1) Western governments and media blamed the Assad government immediately and without evidence, pushing condemnation through the UN Security Council without delay to take advantage of the horror and outrage.

As astute observer James Jatras predicted a month before the Houla deception:

Watch for staged “atrocity” to trigger ‪#NATO‬ action in ‪#Syria‬: “From ‪#Srebrenica‬ and ‪#Racak‬ to ‪#Benghazi‬ and ‪#Homs‬” http://t.co/JfyUvKMq

2) The Assad government was telling the truth when it said that Syrian forces did not commit the massacre. According to the “regime change” narrative, the regime to be changed must be immediately and totally discredited so that nothing it claims is to be believed. Even some alternative and antiwar sites painstakingly repeated regime change propaganda about the horrors of the Assad regime — repeated with particular venom by those who six months earlier could scarcely find Syria on the map. The question is now, if they were telling the truth about Houla, what else have they been telling the truth about all along?

Could it be that the “democratic” Gulf States of Saudi Arabia and Qatar are indeed playing a dirty and destabilizing game? How about Israel, which stands to benefit enormously from the downfall of Iran’s closest ally in the region? Today a senior Israeli minister accused the Assad government of genocideand urged international intervention to overthrow the regime. Not to be outdone, Netanyahu added that it is not only the Syrian regime undertaking genocide: also Iran through its proxy Hezbollah is guilty. Some might mention a slow-motion genocide resulting from Israel’s policies in the occupied territories, but that would not be polite.

3) UN Secretary General is, as was his predecessor, a mere tool of the US and Western governments who pay his salary. Though he is supposed to be a neutral party he is clearly and unreservedly repeating Western regime-change propaganda.

4) U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, is a psychotic, bloodthirsty monster who deserves to be jailed as a war criminal. When the Syrian government denied responsibility for the Houla massacre, Rice with no evidence immediately dismissed the denial as a “blatant lie.” Rice and her evil partners Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton are hell-bent on ensuring that left-wing interventionism is as bloody and destructive as its right-wing counterpart, even if they call it “humanitarian.” Alawi and Shia minorities do not count as human to the likes of Rice, Hillary, and Power, so they are not entitled to the same human rights protections. They are standing in the way of progress by continuing to live, so their destruction is all for the greater good.

Syrian government responsibility for Houla was a lie; it was in fact a provocation by the rebels to get the Libya-style foreign intervention they need to overthrow the government. Will anyone listen now that a major mainstream outlet has reported it?

 

This article was posted: Monday, June 11, 2012 at 4:14 am

Tags: war

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