The Guardian responds to my reaction to the email hoax

Again, one does not render lightly judgment about matters related to one's expertise.  The reputation of professor Hugh Trever-Roper was damaged after he rendered a judgment that authenticated the Hitler diary hoax.   In the age we live in, and in the wake of the Hariri tribunal, the notion that Bashshar Al-Asad (a dictator but no fool) would freely exchange emails with his wife and send youtube songs is just absurd.  Also, Bashshar is no free wheeling schmoozer who invites people to provide advice to him personally.  The notion that someone from Al-`Alam TV would write him directly with advice about security matters is pretty funny on the part on those who fabricated the email story.  But given the uncritical attitude of the Western (and Saudi and Qatari Arab media) media to anything coming out of the propaganda machine of the Syrian Ikhwan-led opposition, this should not be surprising.  It is not the first lie by the propaganda machine of the Ikhwan-led opposition that was fed to the Western media.  So the Guardian published snippets of my blog post about the emails but identified my blog as "a pro-Assad blog".  Imagine.  I invite the Guardian to a competition: since I started blogging in 2003, who wrote more against the Syrian regime, the Guardian or my blog?  Of course, I would not even embarrass the Guardian by inviting a competition between a lifetime comparison going back to my early activism in Lebanon against the Syrian regime and its policies, or by reminding them that I have been banned by Syrian regime and its allies in Lebanon from Lebanon for much of the 1990s because of a chapter I wrote about Syrian foreign policy which was deemed to be "offensive" to the personality of Hafidh Al-Asad.  Furthermore, I have been attacked in recent weeks on official Syrian regime TV and I was accused of shelling between $2000 to $3000 for every attack on the Syrian regime, while I don't recall that the Guardian was attacked.  I should not be defensive on this point.  I woke up to find that readers have written to the Guardian which later published this correction:  "Update: A reference to the Angry Arab News service as "pro Assad" has been deleted as this is not true. Apologies."  But that the Guardian, a newspaper that I often praise, would fall into this lousy error is not surprising: such is the climate in Western countries these days, including in progressive media.  Anyone questioning the lousy standards of media coverage of Syria is automatically accused of being "pro-Asad regime".  If anyone out there thinks that they can intimidate me with such trashy accusations, just as Zionist hoodlums tried to intimidate anti-Zionists by accusations of anti-Seimitism, he/she should think again.