by Claire Bernish, The Free Thought Project:
Gazing hauntingly from the back of an ambulance in Aleppo in August 2016, Omran’s image snared the heartstrings of the world — even those previously hardened to the hopelessly tangled morass in Syria — transmogrifying into a single human form the suffering of innocent Syrians at the whims of entire nation-states embroiled in proxy war upon war in the name of political squabbles.
But, while the West took up Omran’s cause, Westerners did so under the pretense the child had been bloodied by an airstrike or missile launched by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or their allies from Russia — his image rekindling the fire of contention propaganda designed to support the United States’ goal of regime change.
But it was a lie — from mass media’s parroted claims the boy had escaped an airstrike within an inch of his life, to bandages eventually wrapped around Omran’s head — virtually none of the narrative stemming from the starkly persistent image bore the weight of truth.
“We did not find out how the incident happened,” Mohamad Kheir Daqneesh, Omran’s father, told reporter Kinana Alloush and others in interviews this week. “I pulled my family members out of debris. Omran was with me, while White Helmets took him away and started taking photo of him.”
Daqneesh, noting the sound of fighter jets or missiles did not precede the blast which ultimately killed Omran’s 10-year-old brother, explained he had to shave the boy’s head and ferret him away from overwhelming media attention — and from rebel fighters and sympathizers who sought perhaps to wrest the symbolic child from the relative safety of his family.
Journalists allied with al-Nusra Front — variously, Fatah al-Sham or Levant Liberation, an offshoot of al-Qaeda — demanded the father adhere to the narrative Assad was responsible for Russians bombing the neighborhood, and, thus, their suffering and tragic predicament. They even offered sizable sums to sweeten the pot.
He refused — on principle, as well as on the basis of knowledge likely some contrary was true.
In fact, the attempt to wrangle a narrative favorable to the U.S.-led coalition hasn’t ceased — even amid the emergence of the family’s actual plight, pro-Western media outlets like the Guardian and Washington Post maintained speculation and withheld details disputing the original maudlin horror evinced in the August 17, 2016, image of Omran in the ambulance’s orange chair.
Where Alloush and other journalists, interviewing Daqneesh with Omran by his side — now clean cut and hinting smiles — listened intently to the man fed up with misinformation circulating for almost a year, Western corporate media insisted there could be no way to verify whether coercion forced him to speak out.
Mohamad — gasp — supports the rule of Assad.
But where eagerness to paint the Syrian war in the broad strokes of good versus evil might have fabricated the story to the benefit of shared goals possessed by the West and barbarous militants, reality is never so simple.
Nor is it so verily sterile and concrete, even when tinged with hollow tears from a world audience eager to pin blame and continue dropping bombs as usual.
War’s messes cannot be encapsulated so facilely in the resigned, dusty face of a single child — not when thousands of children whose stability, limbs, life, and homeland have been ripped to shreds — but go unnoticed by the same corporate media backing interventionist policy wreaking that havoc in the first place.
Omran, it turns out, suffered only minor injuries — not even severe enough to warrant head bandages, much less a footnote in history as the poster child for why the West must oust Assad — and he left the hospital after receiving first aid to return to whatever remained of their home in Aleppo.
Read More @ TheFreeThoughtProject.com
via IFTTT