Maher Al-Asad

Look at this front-page article in the New York Times.  It is yet another example of the shoddy journalism that now fills Western media in covering countries that are not aligned with the US (or even countries that happen to be aligned with the US).  Read the whole article and what do you learn?  You learn based on not one identifiable source that Maher Al-Asad has influence in Syria.  I have no doubt that he does and I have no doubt that he bars responsibility (along with his brother and others) for the repression in Syria.  But the journalism of the article is rather laughable.  There is one scene in which the article cites "Syrians" asserting that Maher himself is shooting at demonstrators.  The article tried to feign false objectivity but maintaining that it could not confirm whether this is true or not, but then added: it does not matter.  Can you imagine if "Arabs" claimed that Netanyahu actually killed Arabs himself (the claim, in the case of Israel, is far more credible because almost every prime minister in Israel since the 1950s has himself killed Arabs--not counting Golda Meir.)  Who does the article cite? It cites that Syrian in Washington, DC but seems to have stumbled on another source:  "a former Syrian diplomat who now lives in exile in Virginia".  So now you have three Syrians in the DC area who can freely feed any claims to the receptive Zionist US media.  The article concludes with this passage:  "Mr. Bitar, the former diplomat, said: “Maher, how I am going to say, he likes the blood. The minute I saw that video I said immediately, ‘That is Maher.’ ”"   Can you imagine if an article on Israel ends with such statements? I mean, every prime minister in Israel in the last two decades have killed far more than Maher Al-Asad, but such statements would be considered unacceptable by the special standards of the New York Times.  This is not about politics, mind you.  It is about how the Zionist media are rushing to print anything that contributes to a political campaign regarding the Syrian situation.  What a joke.  One more time: this article was on the front page.