@BBCWeather twitter feed hacked by Syria regime loyalists (but order has now been restored and the hacked tweets deleted)
(Source: twitter.com)
Two Years of Meta-Narratives: How Not to Cover Syria
- The Amateur Journalist: If he is not kidnapped on his first day of reporting, after mistaking a mukhabarat informant for a taxi driver, the Amateur goes on to send starry-eyed reports from FSA-held Idlib province. His story most likely includes an adrenaline-soaked adventure of running through bullet fire as he crosses the Turkish border with the help of men wearing black scarves with white squiggly lines on them. The article usually follows with this freelancer’s encounter with a local FSA leader (or activist, since these are considered interchangeable) who coincidentally turns out to be in charge of most of the province. This leader's long, scruffy beard contributes to his stoic, battle-worn mystique. The Amateur aims to show the human side of the story. The leader chats with him while nursing to health a stray wounded cat while the leader’s wife, who is wearing a traditional abaya that flows in the wind, refills the would-be journalist’s glass of hot, sticky tea. For two weeks, the mujahid gives the amateur the exclusive inside scoop on the revolutionary democratic system that he and his fellow villagers have implemented. A system where everyone - except of course women, young people, and Alawites - has a voice in deciding the appropriate sentence for those sinful souls who stole bread from the bakery. Yes, the future looks bright for the amateur journalist who chose war-torn Syria for his first beat (we are not counting his summer internship at the North Dakota Times).
- The Syrian-American FSA Revolutionary: The Syrian-American FSA Revolutionary's maternal great-grandmother was born in Damascus and immigrated to the US in her childhood. Since the beginning of the uprising, the revolutionary reminisces on Twitter about those two summers spent at his teta's house in the Shaam, where he would chase his cousins under the olive trees as the call to prayer emanated from the Umayyad mosque. This Revolutionary makes you look twice -- you may think he is reporting to you live from Aleppo, with his tweets every three minutes describing the situation on the ground with exacting detail and certainty, but after a few weeks, you find out he is actually broadcasting from the messy and chaotic battleground of his college dorm room in Chicago. His preferred news sources include "my second cousin Abu Mohammed in Homs," the Syrian Revolution Facebook page, blurry and unverified YouTube videos, and "#Syria" on Twitter. His "confirmed" reportage of events is retweeted religiously by his 5,272 followers, and even if his assertions are later contradicted, he rarely follows up: he is too busy hoisting his revolution flag at fundraisers for Syria with unverified recipients. The Revolutionary mocks the piss-poor media coverage of Syria, as he believes deeply in the importance of disseminating leaked naked pictures of Asmaa al-Assad, ridiculously good looking Syrian rebels nuzzling kittens, Bashar wearing different wigs, and other essential topics.
Whilst the world looks onto Palestine’s (a bit irrelevant) “statehood” bid, Syria’s internet has been totally taken down.
Syria’s shutdown of all Internet services has been confirmed by two web-monitoring services. One of them, Akamai, says the traffic is at zero, a remarkable indication of how swiftly and completely Syria seems to have taken its offline. Removing an entire country from the Internet is no small feat, and has potentially serious implications for Syria’s economy, its security and the uprising that began last year.
Still, the country has already taken far more severe action, including reports of targeting children, so the government’s apparent decision not to switch off Web access until now was in some ways surprising. Egypt and Libya both shut down Internet service early in their own uprisings last year.
In this piece, first published at Open Democracy, Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Rime Allaf, two of Syria’s brightest intellectuals, discuss Robert Fisk’s moral and professional collapse.
On the Syrian regime and their manipulation of the ‘facts’ coming out through certain journalists.
oh ffs come on Robert Fisk
wellI’mnot, but the person that set up this uber-ambitious FB page is
Cameron’s “considered” storming the ship. that’d be an epic disaster.
Former detainees and defectors have identified the locations, agencies responsible, torture methods used, and, in many cases, the commanders in charge of 27 detention facilities run by Syrian intelligence agencies.
The systematic patterns of ill-treatment and torture that Human Rights Watch documented clearly point to a state policy of torture and ill-treatment and therefore constitute a crime against humanity.
Check out the interactive map here.
(via mohandasgandhi)
The BBC annoy the hell out of me sometimes.
The first headline is a shortened version of the full headline, it has an entirely different implication i.e. truth from the (trusted) BBC’s mouth.
Ugh.
(Source: BBC)
disappointing that the PFLP is still supporting the Syrian regime - didn’t realise that
Earlier this week, the US advocacy group Women Under Siege launched an open-source crowdmapping site that tracks incidents of sexual violence in the ongoing conflict. Since the anti-regime uprising began a year ago, rape has been a common tactic used by Syrian forces against the opposition. But sexual violence in Syria largely remains an underreported topic, and the project—funded by the New York-based Women’s Media Center—hopes to change that.
Seems like a genuinely decent way of helping those on the ground. Kudos, them!
