Whilst the expensive Leveson inquiry rumbles on, looking at arcane details of how papers selected by the Guardian and the BBC behaved, a very real scandal surrounds our media. Do you know what our strategy is in Afghanistan? How things are going out there? No? But hundreds of our forces have been killed in that God forsaken land. Yet our media thinks we have no right to know.
Certainly we get the odd snippet like Mike Brewer going out there and talking about kit (but strangely not the shortages, or the failures), or some special report that after it is over you realise, you didn't actually learn anything important from it.
What about Syria? Is the inability to tell us what is going on there due to complexity? That the situation is too dangerous for journalists? We should find it really annoying that the BBC just keeps saying in every report that 'we cannot verify the truth of these claims', by whichever side is making them.
We see footage of artillery shells landing in towns and Assad tells us it is the rebels. Rarely have I seen an armed insurrection by the people include artillery. I know the state has such weapons and they could have mislaid some, but it seems a cumbersome piece of kit for a movement without significant organisation and mobility to deploy.
The Taliban don't seem to have asked their friends for any and I assume they are much better placed to not only use it but to acquire it. But who is doing the shelling in Syria remains a mystery. By our standards, Assad makes it onto the bonkers scale, but internally in Syria, he has kept the fundamentalists from the throats of many other religions, not least the Christians.
Are the rebels Islamist fundamentalists? We don't know. But if they are, I dare say that Assad's admittedly nasty actions to date, would come to be insignificant should the fundamentalists seize power and begin the cleansing that is promised.
No comments:
Post a Comment