This is becoming supremely annoying. Every time when faced with something you don't like, you play the "source" card. I am very careful in using sources. I go to great lengths to provide a different point of view, alternative opinions and, yes, alternative facts. You can't get a different angle if your only source is MSNBC. How on Earth you are going to get a different view from the mainstream media if you do not use sources outside mainstream media!?
So, Eva Bartlett definitely is a source outside "
mainstream media!" but I'm pretty sure she has an anti-Canada and anti-Semitic agenda and is
NOT unbiased. A quick read of her blog
ingaza shows she has an anti-western and anti-mainstream media bias and questionable anti-Zionist perspectives. She claims that it is not Assad who commits the heinous acts against his people but the western backed rebel terrorists that are to blame.
From her interview on her web site:
With regard to Canada’s role in the war on Syria, it includes imposing criminal and crippling sanctions on Syria; supporting and funding (millions of dollars) the so-called armed ‘opposition’ in Syria and their propagandists; closing Syrian embassies in Canada; demonizing the legitimate Syrian government and Syrian army; and legitimizing the illegitimate, Saudi-backed, so-called ‘Syrian National Council’.
So, she's all for the "
legitimate Syrian government" of Bashar al-Assad. Hum, that same Assad that has been accused of war crimes?
THE ASSAD FILES – Capturing the top-secret documents that tie the Syrian regime to mass torture and killings.The commission’s work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coördinated among his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime operatives, who reported the successes of their campaign to their superiors in Damascus. The brief narrates daily events in Syria through the eyes of Assad and his associates and their victims, and offers a record of state-sponsored torture that is almost unimaginable in its scope and its cruelty. Such acts had been reported by survivors in Syria before, but they had never been traced back to signed orders. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone before serving for six years as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, told me that the cija’s documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve prosecuted in this area.”
The commission mentioned above is the regime-crimes unit of the
Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.
Now, let's move to RT (formerly Russian Television), here's an interview with Putin that might shed some light
Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, drones in RT interview (note the video is missing)
Margarita Simonyan: My first question is a bit immodest – about our channel. What are your impressions of it?
Vladimir Putin: I have good impressions.
When we designed this project back in 2005 we intended introducing another strong player on the world’s scene, a player that wouldn’t just provide an unbiased coverage of the events in Russia but also try, let me stress, I mean – try to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams. And it seems to me that you’re succeeding in this job.
I’d like to emphasize something of the key importance. We never expected this to be a news agency or a channel which would defend the position of the Russian political line. We wanted to bring an absolutely independent news channel to the news arena.
Certainly the channel is funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government’s official position on the events in our country and in the rest of the world one way or another. But I’d like to underline again that we never intended this channel, RT, as any kind of apologetics for the Russian political line, whether domestic or foreign.
Hum..."
Certainly the channel is funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government’s official position on the events in our country and in the rest of the world one way or another." kinda tells it all right? You lived in Russia Slobodan, do you think RT would last long if it somehow stepped out of Putin's favor?
Julia Ioffe, then a Moscow-based journalist, wrote in 2008 for the
Columbia Journalism Review that RT "was conceived as a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter the anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media." Ioffe explained, "Russia is still desperately trying to fend off stereotypes of itself—the endemic corruption, the whimsical autocracy of the state—that have kept much foreign capital, and many Russian émigrés, from returning."
Seems to me the term "
soft-power tool" kinda goes hand in hand with the term
Active measures. You know:
Active measures (Russian: активные мероприятия) is a Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it. Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration into churches, and persecution of political dissidents.
Active measures included the establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g. the World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties; wars of national liberation in the Third World; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups. The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc states also contributed to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations.
Retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin described active measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence": "Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs."
Sorry, I know how much you hate
Wikipedia Slobodan, but it offered a concise description of
active measures.
I'm sorry if you find my posts
"supremely annoying", that is not my intent...not really. The reason I questioned your sources is, well, they were very questionable you know?
Truth be told, I STILL don't know what you were going on about...do you agree that Assad is killing his people and guilty of war crimes or is it the western governments that are guilty of funding terrorists and helping ISIL and Al-Qaeda in Syria? Do you honestly think RT and Global Research are viable news sources or are they propaganda arms of Putin's world view?
