Seeking the truth on Syria: Tulsi Gabbard vs the ABC
“If Barack Obama decides to attack the Syrian regime, he has ensured — for the very first time in history — that the United States will be on the same side as al-Qa’ida.” Robert Fisk, The Independent, 28 August 2013
“I hate that we have leaders who cozy up to Islamist extremists, minimising them to so-called rebels.” Tulsi Gabbard to US Senate Committee Hearing, 30 January 2025
Since the start of the “Arab Spring”, the ABC has almost invariably taken the side of the Al-Qaeda dominated “revolution” in Syria. (Before it was axed, ABC TV’s Latelinewas a notable exception.)
Despite ABC Editorial Standards requiring journalists to be impartial, the ABC didn’t censor former ABC journalist Sophie McNeill’s passionate, unapologetic bias for the so-called revolution. She was an approved “activist”.
After I submitted a complaint to the ABC about one of McNeill’s tweets, I was informed that “tweets are not subject to the editorial requirements of the ABC Code of Practice”. Again I complained to the ABC when McNeill expressed her ardent support for the “revolution” to Phillip Adams on Radio National’s Late Night Live.. Then the ABC found reason not to investigate.
Now that McNeill’s “rebels” have taken over in Damascus, she sees “Assad’s removal” as “a human rights victory”, and the ABC, her former employer, also presents a positive spin on the overthrow of Syria’s secular government.
Meanwhile, in Washington quite a different view of events in Damascus has been presented, and it would be at Australia’s peril for the ABC to ignore it.
At a US Senate Committee Hearing, President Donald Trump’s then nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, spoke out against US support for Al-Qaeda in Syria, saying that Abu Mohammed al-Jolani (aka Ahmed al-Sharaa), the newly self-appointed president of Syria, had not only danced in the streets on 9/11, but had killed American soldiers.
Furthermore, Gabbard is known for questioning allegations about the Assad government’s use of chemical weapons. She has given credence to the analysis of weapons expert Professor Ted Postol, whose research points to insurgents fabricating chemical weapons attacks, and she has cited the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons whistleblowers who challenged a Syria chemical weapons cover-up.
This should not shock anyone in Washington. In August 2013, after the alleged sarin gas attack in Ghouta, Damascus, that killed hundreds of people, including scores of children, the then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned President Barack Obama that the intelligence didn’t point to Assad being responsible for it.
However, even today the ABC and Al-Jazeera, among others, continue to maintain that Assad was responsible for the 2013 Ghouta attack. In Syria, the al-Jolani regime makes use of such claims to justify abductions and extrajudicial executions of Alawite Syrians, men and women, while it reportedly imprisons and kills thousands of Syrian soldiers who fought against ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Torture, terror and fear still reign supreme in Syria.
Gabbard has now been confirmed as the new US Director of National Intelligence, which means her views will be having an impact in Washington and, presumably, in Canberra.
It would be in Australia’s interests if this were to lead to genuine efforts for impartiality and rigorous research at the ABC on the war in Syria, and wars more generally.
In Responsible Statecraft, Branko Marcetic describes Gabbard as an “outlier” in the Trump administration. He contends: “Whatever one thinks of Gabbard, she would functionally be one of the few voices speaking in Trump’s ear urging that he act with restraint towards two nuclear superpowers, as almost everyone in media, Washington, and his own administration pushes him to escalate against both.”
Surely Gabbard’s appointment is something to celebrate?
If people committed to seeking the truth and opposing catastrophic, unnecessary wars are “outliers”, then Professor Jeffrey Sachs who describes the war in Syria as a “phoney war” is certainly one. On the CIA’s efforts to overthrow Syria’s secular government, Sachs declared: “This is not democracy. This is a game. And it’s a game of narrative.”
Gabbard’s appointment may open a door to a more objective analysis of the war in Syria, but it won’t be easy for the ABC to walk back its bias.
A recent interview on LNL led to my submitting yet another complaint about what I view as the breaching of ABC Standards.
On 21 January, LNL presenter David Marr interviewed Dima Khatib about her return to Damascus after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took control of the capital.
Khatib expressed her joy following the collapse of Syria’s secular state, yet she surely could foresee the threats to freedoms enjoyed in pre-HTS Syria. Just the day before Marr’s interview of her, news about artists in Damascus being harassed by masked militants was posted on social media.
Marr didn’t acknowledge to his listeners that Khatib’s position was a highly contentious one: she was celebrating the HTS takeover when the leader of HTS had been sent to Syria by ISIS leader al-Baghdadi to establish the Al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front.
Although brought up in Syria, Khatib has worked for Al-Jazeera since 1997. Her employer was a pivotal player in the war in Syria. It helped instil sectarian hatred in millions of minds, making it seem an essential part of Islam, which it is not.
If Marr had noted Al-Jazeera’s bias for the Muslim Brotherhood and its involvement in the insurgency in Syria, ABC listeners would have been better able to draw their own conclusions about Khatib’s embrace of a non-secular Syria.
A member of the Qatari royal family has exposed the key role Qatar played in supporting regime change in Syria. The family embraced the Egyptian cleric, the late Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, said to be the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood. From the start of the “Arab Spring” in Syria, Qaradawi was platformed on Al-Jazeera, and his fatwas against the “heretical” Syrian government were viewed by millions of Muslims around the world.
When one popular Al-Jazeera presenter expressed support for the genocide of Alawis in Syria, I wrote a letter to the then Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull to alert him to this because many Arabic speaking Australians may have viewed the program and been affected by such by expressions of sectarian hatred.
For ABC audiences to countenance the ascendance of HTS, a group still designated as terrorist by the Australian Government, their attention must be misdirected. Thus, in the LNL interview, Khatib refers to a massacre in Tadamon and “kilometres of bones”.
Marr doesn’t point out that there have been many massacres in Syria and few, if any, of them have been properly investigated, but it is indisputable that the “jihadist rebels” were responsible for a great number of them, if not the majority.
One particularly infamous massacre still widely attributed to Assad Government forces occurred in Houla in May 2012. While Australia’s response to the massacre was to expel Syrian diplomats, US Congressman Ron Paul’s was to describe the evidence presented against the regime and for US military action as “bogus”.
Human Rights Watch published a detailed report on the August 2013 brutal killing of approximately 200 Alawite villagers, mostly women and children, and the abduction of around the same number by militant groups that included the Free Syrian Army, Jabhat al-Nusra, set up by the current leader of Syria, and ISIS.
In 2014, veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn reported on atrocities committed in the town of Adra by Jolani’s al-Nusra group.
“Bakery workers who resisted their machinery being taken away were roasted in their own oven.” And Cockburn related the story of a young family who decided to take their own lives rather than open the door to the “jihadists” banging on it.
The late Robert Fisk was the first western reporter on the ground after the Syrian Arab Army took control of Daraya very soon after a massacre had been committed there in August 2012. Fisk reported that the evidence indicated that insurgents had been largely responsible for the killing.
Yet, last December ABC’s Eric Tlozek reported on the 2012 Daraya massacre, inferring that the claim that “pro-government forces, including Iran-backed militias like Hezbollah” went “from house to house .. killing hundreds of people” was a fact.
When it comes to Syria, it appears even UN reports have been wobbly on the truth.
In 2013, I noted critical flaws in a UN commissioned report on Syria, the major one being its reliance on the hearsay of people who supported the insurgency.
For example, on rape allegations, the UN commissioned report only presented accusations against Syrian Government forces and none against insurgents even though extremist clerics had issued fatwas approving the rape of non-Sunni Syrian women. Before the report was published, the story of Mariam, a young Christian girl raped by at least 15 insurgents, was already known outside Syria.
Khaled Sharrouf, notorious for posting online a photo of his son holding the severed head of a Syrian soldier, was one of two Australians who enslaved Yazidi women in Syria. (Still today, HTS relies on thousands of foreign jihadists and has appointed some to top positions in Syria’s new army.)
In the LNL interview, Khatib mentions the gang rape of women, and infers that Syrian soldiers were responsible. But the Syrian Arab Army was dominated by Sunni Syrian conscripts and its ranks were made up of soldiers from different faith backgrounds. It was a regular secular army, which would have proscribed rape.
Nevertheless, as one Huffington Post report reminds us, war has been anything but kind to Syrian women: Syria’s Women, Raped And Abused In Refugee Centres, Long To Return Home (26/10/2013).
Western governments and mainstream media outlets have enabled terrorists to come in from the cold. This was most evident when Syria’s new foreign minister was interviewed by Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum.
But enabling Syria to be a base for rebranded Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists doesn’t augur well for the West, for anyone.
On Syria, Gabbard’s inconvenient questions about US support for Al-Qaeda and alleged chemical weapons attacks might give ABC executives courage. Journalists might be instructed to dig deeper for the truth, to be objective, to be open-minded and to present a range of perspectives.
Let us hope that our politicians, also, find the courage to seek the truth about Syria and speak out as the new US Director of National Intelligence has done.