Syrian Government Sued for Killing US Journalist

Here. I am sure that they did it. That’s a nasty little regime they have over there in Syria. On the other hand, Assad seems to be better than any of the alternatives, which isn’t saying much. I never agree with targeting journalists during war, but increasingly just about everyone does it. We definitely targeted journalists and even whole media outfits in the first weeks of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. We bombed the Al Jazeera building in Kabul, and we attacked Al Jazeera reporters in a Baghdad hotel. There were fatalities in both cases. In both Iraq wars, the US bombed all major Iraqi news outlets and newspapers, but most of them kept reporting anyway. The Pentagon said they were targeted for “disseminating enemy propaganda in wartime.” Recent Pentagon documents discuss the need to “control the narrative” during wartime and speak of another need to silence enemy critics and journalists who are seen as combatants in an information war. The language used to describe propaganda, controlling the narrative and targeting journalists sympathetic to the enemy is genuinely creepy. Lousy countries always do this sort of thing in wartime, but I thought we were above this. Putin has had reporters beaten up for reporting on Russian soldiers who were killed fighting in Ukraine when there supposed to be no Russians there. He is also implicated in the killing of journalists, including a woman who was famous for reporting on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Turkey routinely targets journalists, especially Kurdish reporters. A number of them have been killed. Israel is notorious for targeting journalists. Palestinian journalists are arrested regularly, and a number have been shot by soldiers. A fair number of them have been killed. Some American journalists have also been killed by the IDF, and at least one was killed. The US would not defend this journalist at all, and instead seemed to take Israel’s side. So here we have a government that supports a foreign state over its own people. Our country should be called “USrael” to symbolize the extent to which we dutifully support this foreign country against all common sense. An interview with a representative of the Israeli government regarding this case was tense and combative, and the Israeli seemed to be arguing that journalists were legitimate targets as some sort of “terrorist supporters” or “terror propagandists.” I was always taught that my country was the good guy. I was taught how we generally fought fair and square in World War 2. This made me so proud to be an American. I learned quite a few things since then that made me question that line. But this recent behavior of the Pentagon’s has made me lose all hope. I had thought we were above this sort of crap and that we believed in fighting fair at least out of a gentlemanly honor. Turns out I was wrong. While we do fight quite a bit more fairly than most other countries (and so do the Israelis), a lot of our behavior is scumbucket low down there with the worst Turd World shitholes. Color me disenchanted. I am not so much an America-hater as a disappointed patriot gone sour.

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6 thoughts on “Syrian Government Sued for Killing US Journalist”

  1. Speaking of the middle east, it seems incel frustration plays a role in recruiting males into extremist groups:
    http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21688587-young-single-idle-males-are-dangerous-work-and-wedlock-can-tame-them-men-and-mayhem?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/ofmenandmayhem

    If young men are jobless or broke, they make cheap recruits for rebel armies. And if their rulers are crooked or cruel, they will have cause to rebel. Youth unemployment in Arab states is twice the global norm. The autocrats who were toppled in the Arab Spring were all well past pension age, had been in charge for decades and presided over kleptocracies.
    Christopher Cramer of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London cautions that there is no straightforward causal link between unemployment and violence. It is not simply a lack of money that spurs young men to rebel, he explains; it is more that having a job is a source of status and identity.
    Throughout history, men have killed men roughly 97 times more often than women have killed women. The reasons are biological. In all cultures, the appetite for mayhem peaks in the late teens or early 20s, “just when males are competing more fiercely for mating opportunities, as in other mammals”, notes Matt Ridley in “The Evolution of Everything”. In “Homicide”, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson put it like this: “Any creature that is recognisably on track towards complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory.” Wars, alas, give young men a chance to kill potential rivals (ie, other men) and seize or rape women. From Islamic State to the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, rebel forces often let their troops treat females as spoils.

  2. Robert,
    What does it mean to be an America hater? If you detest most foreign policy since the Truman Doctrine and oppose the foreign interests of the US state, does that make you an America hater?

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