From Christian: I thought you might be interested in this article from Patrick Cockburn
about the media coverage in Syria, look what he had to say about AJ
Arabic:
"But
at the very time I was in the town, Al Jazeera Arabic was reporting fighting
there between the Syrian army and the opposition. Smoke was supposedly rising
from Tal Kalakh as the rebels fought to defend their stronghold. Fortunately,
this appears to have been fantasy and, during the several hours I was in the
town, there was no shooting, no sign that fighting had taken place and no
smoke."
"Back
in the Christian quarter of the Old City of Damascus, where I am staying, there
was an explosion near my hotel on Thursday. I went to the scene and what
occurred next shows that there can be no replacement for unbiased eyewitness
reporting. State television was claiming that it was a suicide bomb, possibly
directed at the Greek Orthodox Church or a Shia hospital that is even closer.
Four people had been killed.
I
could see a small indentation in the pavement which looked to me very much like
the impact of a mortar bomb. There was little blood in the immediate vicinity,
though there was about 10 yards away. While I was looking around, a second
mortar bomb came down on top of a house, killing a woman.
The
pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, so often used as a source by
foreign journalists, later said that its own investigations showed the explosion
to have been from a bomb left in the street. In fact, for once, it was possible
to know definitively what had happened, because the Shia hospital has CCTV that
showed the mortar bomb in the air just before it landed – outlined for a
split-second against the white shirt of a passer-by who was killed by the blast.
What had probably happened was part of the usual random shelling by mortars from
rebels in the nearby district of Jobar."