Catherine Shakdam

A Syrian refugee woman walks with her two children under her
arms in the Altýnözü refugee camp in Hatay, Turkey. (PressTV)

With William Hague – UK First Secretary of State - already comparing the siege of Homs with the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, when over 8,000 Muslims men and children - all boys - were massacred in Bosnia by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladiæ, it is easy to understand the role media have played in perpetuating Western nations’ narrative of war in Syria, whereby the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has been systematically made to appear ever more Barbaric in its alleged atrocities and human rights violations, as to directly endow the West with a moral duty of intervention.

From the onset of the Syrian war, Western powers, with the back-up of the United Nations, have played the liberation and humanitarian card, arguing that their desire to intervene in the crisis was solely motivated by a democratic ambition to see the Syrian people freed from oppression and tyranny, in accordance with their humanist values as well as empathy toward human suffering.

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Wayne Madsen

A Ukrainian-American English language newspaper that has been in publication since 1933 and which is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey has been at the vanguard of pumping out neo-conservative propaganda calling for direct U.S. intervention into the affairs of Ukraine and full support for the Euro-Maidan protests in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Weekly, published by the Ukrainian National Association (UNA), bills itself as a «fraternal non-profit association». However, its non-profit status in no way connotes a non-partisan political stance.

The Ukrainian Weekly’s February 2 issue was replete with politically-loaded headlines, including : «Russia props up Yanukovych [the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych] as his support base erodes», «The real extremists are the country’s leaders», and «Yulia [former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, jailed for abuse of power and embezzlement] to protesters: Press on».

The parent organization of the Ukrainian Weekly, the UNA, headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey and founded in 1894 in Shamokin, Pennsylvania largely by Ukrainian immigrants working in the coal industry, now has some 50,000 members in the United States and Canada. Although the association has long advocated for Ukrainian independence and had links with pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, upon the onset of the Cold War it became a propaganda cipher for the Central Intelligence Agency and its clandestine influence operations inside the Soviet Union.

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