01/11/17 – Rania Khalek on the Western media’s cheerleading for Al Qaeda in Syria – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Rania Khalek.
She is a journalist and co-host of the weekly Unauthorized Disclosure podcast.
She's written for The Nation, Salon, FAIR, Vice, The Intercept, Electronic Intifada, and other places as well.
This one is for fairness and accuracy in reporting, FAIR.org.
In Syria, Western media cheer al-Qaeda.
Welcome to the show, Rania.
How are you?
Good to be on.
Thanks for having me.
I'm good.
How you doing?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm doing real good.
And I'm very happy to finally have you on the show here.
And this is a very good piece of work.
Obviously, you know, this is a very well done, long drawn out.
Obviously, it took you a long time to get all your links just right and really draw this thing out the way you did.
And it's, of course, extra important that you did because the truth is crazy and you sound crazy for saying it.
So you just got to make sure that you really explain yourself very well.
And you do from the very beginning.
In fact, you say, well, the Syrian government is a dictatorship known for imprisoning, torturing, and disappearing dissidents and that they're easy to vilify.
So that, I guess, covers the you're a shill for Assad angle.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Got to start out with that.
But it's also true.
I mean, it is easy to vilify and that's part of the problem.
But yeah.
Sure.
Well, OK, well, go ahead.
Well, yeah, you got to cover all your bases because with this issue, like you said, it's like it sounds crazy to say the media is a mouthpiece for al-Qaeda in this country.
And you also get viciously attacked for pointing out really obvious things on Syria because the narrative is just so skewed.
And so, yeah, you got to cover all your bases and you got to make sure that you're up front.
And it's ridiculous, but you got to make sure you're up front about where you stand.
Do you like the Syrian government or not?
Sure.
All right.
Well, and so do you?
Well, no, actually, I really don't.
I'm not a fan, in all honesty.
Not a big fan.
I just happen to think that there are very few things that are worse than al-Qaeda rule.
And that's what the people in Syria are facing.
People want to pretend like there's some middle ground of something different.
But in Syria, it's a war between a bunch of different clones of al-Qaeda and ISIS that we like to, in this country, call moderate rebel groups.
And the Syrian government, which has very, very many flaws, but at the same time, they're not the worst in the world and they are stable.
There's a sense of stability under the government that you just don't have in al-Qaeda areas.
And also on top of that, Syria is a country that, despite the political repression, it's fairly socially liberal.
It's pretty secular.
It's pretty free in a social capacity.
Women have more freedoms in Syria than in some of the other parts of the region.
It's just not a conservative place.
And so that's what people are facing in Syria.
And obviously, I visited in November, and I mentioned that in my article, I visited government areas of Syria where 75% of Syrians live.
That's the vast majority of the population.
And even people I spoke to there, I mean, they're not big fans of the government.
Even people who don't like the government still want the government to win in this war because to them, the alternative is the Taliban, and they don't want to live under the Taliban.
So now here's the thing of it, too.
I guess it's fair to say that this audience, most of the people listening have been listening and are familiar with this kind of stuff anyway.
And I don't want to waste the whole interview with you having to prove just how dominant the al-Nusra Front and Arar al-Sham have been on the battlefield all these years because we all already know that.
What's, I think, more important, and it's what your article is really about, is the Western media, particularly the American media, and this consensus that they have created about these mythical moderates, which, of course, even Barack Obama has said, that the idea that we were ever going to be able to create an army of secular moderates to replace the jihadist extremists on one side and the secular Ba'athist state and its army on the other side, especially with the latter being backed by the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Russia, is just not in the cards.
It never could be.
He kept arming and financing them anyway, the actual fighters, in the name of arming and financing the moderates, but even the president himself had conceded that.
But so now, this is the part that's really almost as interesting as the war itself, is the sociology of the American media here.
I don't know if that's the right word for it.
The social psychology of the people who make up the leadership of the American media and what their narrative is and just how stuck to it they are in the face of, as you said, what amounts to a policy of treason, of backing those still sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher in New York City.
Yeah, it's really stunning, and I think the reason for that, too, is that U.S. media likes to give itself, like the U.S. mainstream press and the corporate press, they like to think of themselves as really independent and somehow better than other media outlets around the world because they're so independent and they're not run by the government.
But really, a lot of them just end up adopting the views of the government.
And when it comes to Syria, even though Obama has been pretty candid about some aspects of Syria, like you just mentioned, the overall government policy in Syria has been to knowingly back al-Qaeda-linked groups, which your audience probably already knows.
So the U.S. media has gone to work, as they always do, trying to justify U.S. policy.
And beyond that, there's a couple things going on.
There's that, there's adopting the geopolitical ambitions of the U.S. government.
That's one aspect.
Another aspect of this is the fact that, and this is the big irony, is that U.S. media, media overall, actually, haven't been able to enter rebel areas for a very long time.
Why?
Because when they were entering those areas, journalists were getting kidnapped and ransomed and sold to ISIS and executed.
And so, there was actually at one point in 2013, when media outlets collectively around the West, from the BBC to the AP to the New York Times, wrote a letter to the Syrian opposition, basically demanding and urging them to stop kidnapping their journalists.
I mean, that actually happened in late 2013.
And so, the big problem has been just a lack of reporters on the ground.
And so, they become dependent for their information on propaganda outlets for the rebels.
And a lot of these propaganda outlets for the rebels, interestingly enough, are funded by the U.S. and U.K. and Gulf state governments.
And so, you've got this whole rebel propaganda apparatus that basically went in to fill the information vacuum with just complete BS about what's happening in rebel areas.
And that basically is propaganda for Al-Qaeda.
Like, when you've got people talking out of East Aleppo saying that they're activists, right, or that they're media, you know, they're like their media in East Aleppo, you've got to question what they mean by that.
Because according to reports by human rights groups, you can't be an activist or an independent media person in East Aleppo.
Or you will be killed, or you will be kidnapped, tortured, or possibly summarily executed unless you toe the line of the armed groups who are in charge there.
And so, that's another thing that's been utterly shocking.
These U.S. media outlets aren't on the ground, so they start looking to these media activists, many of whom have been in some capacities maybe trained with U.S. money or U.K. money.
But either way, they're basically under the control.
Everything that comes out of their mouth is approved by the groups, the armed groups that are in charge in these areas.
And you've got their claims and statements and accusations against the government, some of which may be true, being amplified uncritically by U.S. media outlets.
And so, that to me, during the taking back of East Aleppo, you had some insane claims being said by a lot of these media personalities and activists, some of whom are proven to be sectarian, like sectarian extremists themselves.
Without any level of skepticism whatsoever, just people were saying, oh, women are killing themselves in mass in East Aleppo to avoid being raped.
And you had several media outlets in the U.S. just pushing this as though it was true.
Meanwhile, still till now, no evidence has ever happened.
And so, that's how the whole storyline in Syria's been messed up.
And then on the other end of that, other than just relying on rebel propaganda, you've also got a refusal to believe anything the government says.
So, anything the rebels say is treated as fact, and then anything the government says is treated as like, oh, well, they're a dictatorship, they're lying, you can't believe anything they say.
And so, that has completely distorted and skewed the narrative in this country.
And then you've also got, and this is something that other people like Patrick Coburn have actually talked about extensively, is a lot of reporters who initially were reporting on the uprising in Syria and then went and saw the rebel areas, they start to take on the views of the rebels and they become heroes in their minds and then they start to censor themselves because they don't want to talk badly about the people they made friends with.
And that's an actual thing that happens.
So, that's like, all of that put together has created a really distorted, skewed narrative in the mainstream U.S. press and in even some progressive circles in this country on what's happening in Syria to the point where you've got people basically cheering on Al-Qaeda.
It's insane.
Yeah.
Now, well, so that's the thing too, right, is if Bashar al-Assad is a fascist, which, pretty sure, yeah, Ba'athism is pretty much analogous to fascism.
I guess there's some kind of socialist aspects to it, but yeah, there's socialist aspects to fascism.
But his government is more or less a right-wing nationalist phenomenon.
I'll go with that.
So, does that mean then that, well, geez, obviously, you know, the Al-Qaeda guys, you wouldn't call them conservatives, they're radicals, but they're radical rightists, right, as far as where they're coming from in terms of their theology and would-be theocratic dictatorship there and that kind of thing.
But so, does that mean, Rania, then, that some of the rebel groups are actually just a bunch of real progressive Daily Coast types who are trying to create a kind of Hillary Clinton democracy over there?
I mean, that was never the case with the armed groups.
It just wasn't the case.
And even with the initial protests, there was definitely peaceful protests more in the urban areas demanding democratic reform, and they're absolutely right to demand democratic reform.
But, you know, another, you know, there's also, there was also some protests that did engage in violence that were more in, like, the more, I guess you could say, like, the more rural areas, more conservative areas that, you know, from the beginning were saying things like kill, you know, Alawites to the grave and Christians to Beirut.
So it wasn't, like, it wasn't just, like, even the narrative about the uprising itself, like, it's like people can't even admit, okay, like, there was certainly peaceful protests, a lot of idealists, and that said, like, you talk to the people who were involved in those peaceful protests today, which I did when I was in the region, and even they will tell you, like, there were protests that scared them because they started to realize the protests in some of the more conservative areas had a really religious flavor to them and they were saying really insane sectarian things.
And so, like, it's, like, basic facts about what happened in Syria you're not even allowed to talk about because there's so much investment in this narrative of, like, freedom fighters and, you know, of, of, like, moderate rebels and of some, and yes, okay, like, the Syrian government, I actually wouldn't even call it fascist, I would say it has some fascist elements to it and that's the security services and that's really the bad, the really bad part of the Syrian government, but at the end of the day, what it is, it's a dictatorship of bureaucracy and, you know, Bashar al-Assad sits at the top of it but there's, underneath him, there's, like, a bunch of smaller Assads and, I mean, even people in the government, like, at this point, are anti-government because the way the government works is, like, it's inefficient and it's also just, like, you know, it polices discourse in a ridiculous way because the security services were basically trained by the Stasi, like, that's what you have in Syria.
So that's, like, that element of fascism.
That said, there, you know, there's a new level, I would say that the actual fascist side here is the armed groups because they're, like, religious fundamentalists, they're fanatics and, I mean, I don't know what else you call Al-Qaeda, they are fascists, like, they want to impose things, like, you know, they want to impose styles of dress on women where you have to cover head to toe.
They want to impose stoning of, like, people who engage in blasphemy and sorcery.
I mean, they basically are Saudi Arabia but, like, walking around in armed gangs across the Middle East.
Like, so I think that's actual, I mean, if you're going to compare one to the other, that's the fascist side and so people who are actually living in Syria or in the region and are directly affected by this who aren't Salafi Islamist males, I can understand why they would prefer the government over, you know, religious fanatics.
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CommodityDiscs.com Well, you know, I mean, hell, I guess if I was David Wormser and it was 1996, then I could see how he could talk himself into writing that, yeah, you know, if Islamist, Jihadist, terrorist-type movements gain when we destroy the Baathist states in Iraq and Syria, you know, that's a thing, but still, we should still do it anyway because getting rid of these states is more important.
Okay, but then, since then, we've had the September 11th attack on the United States, plus never even mind the war in Afghanistan, which really hadn't been against Al-Qaeda, but we had a war against a Sunni insurgency in Iraq which included elements of Al-Qaeda, which were responsible for mass atrocities in that country and including major attacks against American forces there.
And, well, and like the minorities in Iraq, I mean.
But then somehow, well, yeah, and everybody else too, but I'm just trying to say from the American nationalist government perspective, from, if you're a general in the army perspective, that to still act like it's 1996 and the worst we've suffered so far is six people at the World Trade Center and 19 at the Khobar Towers, hell, let's go ahead and push on with our crazy rude Nick policy, but to continue with this policy now to try to overthrow the dictator with the clean-shaven chin and the three-piece suit in favor of Zarqawi's guys, the veterans of Iraq War II who are now the vanguard of the Syrian war on the other side is, well, it's one for the record books if they ever would tell it straight, you know.
Well, it's actually, I would say it's even more reckless It's more deliberately reckless than Iraq War II.
Iraq War II is obviously the reason you've got ISIS and Al-Qaeda, right?
It opened the floodgates to Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That said, that wasn't a deliberate part of the policy.
With Syria, our government knowingly, as early as 2011 knew, according to a report in McClatchy, as early as 2011 was warned that these armed groups were linked to Al-Qaeda, working with Al-Qaeda and that Al-Qaeda was a dominant strong force and still armed them.
That's even more insane.
You're actually giving weapons to people you know are linked to Al-Qaeda and now you've got actual intelligence people saying, look, Al-Qaeda in Syria is the biggest Al-Qaeda affiliate in history.
We did that.
Our government did that after 9-11.
That's insane.
You've got U.S. intelligence saying these people are also planning attacks against the U.S.
You've already got attacks taking place in Europe.
You've already got blowback from this in parts of Europe, in Paris, in Germany, with jihadist attacks there.
Eventually, it's going to hit back at the U.S.
The policy, what's it going to be then?
It's going to be like we have to go to Syria to get rid of Al-Qaeda that we basically started there?
It's just insane, but I guess at the end of the day if you think about it, it's a really great business strategy for weapons companies.
I don't know.
Obama and Jeffrey Goldberg talked about this in 2012 that Obama said, it's in the Atlantic, as President, I don't bluff was the title on the Iran nuclear program was the interview.
He said, that's right, Jeffrey, getting rid of Assad in Syria would be a great way to take Iran down a peg.
Now you've got Iran fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda still being demonized.
This is another thing that is a really big problem in policy circles in the U.S.
They've adopted this sectarian tendency that is almost as extreme as the Al-Qaeda groups.
It's this Sunni victimhood complex.
There's a problem in the Middle East right now.
It's a Sunni identity crisis.
A lot of it starts with the Iraq War.
Bush took Baghdad from them and gave it to the Shia.
The problem is that Saudi Arabia filled that vacuum with its ideology.
Now you've got parts of the Middle East, like in Lebanon, for example.
Lebanon never really had this problem between Shia and Sunni.
In recent years, it's become really severe.
Predominantly Sunni areas, there's a larger presence of Wahhabist-style thinking.
That's largely because of Saudi Arabia and because of outlets like Al Jazeera Arabic that really promote this narrative of Sunnis are being victimized everywhere and it's the evil Shia who are doing it.
I don't think people here realize that, realize how severe that sectarianism is and how genocidal Wahhabism is, especially towards the Shia.
At the end of the day, we always hear about the Shia militias in our media here, the Shia militias in Iran, the evil Shia state.
When in fact, you've got groups like Hezbollah, yeah, and they're not perfect for sure, but at the end of the day, Hezbollah also has the support of other people like Christians and Druze and even Sunnis.
Meanwhile, groups like Nusra and the entire, actually, armed rebellion in Syria is entirely Sunni and if you could, I mean, you don't hear it in English because it's sanitized in English, but when they talk in Arabic, I mean, the things that they say, it's very genocidal.
They want to wipe out all the Shia.
They want to kill all the Alawites.
That's what you're dealing with in the Middle East and that's what the US, at the end of the day, is supporting when it promotes this narrative about Sunni grievance.
Well, on the Syrian side of the front, right?
Because in Iraq, we've been backing the Shiite militias since March 2003.
This whole time, even when we were fighting against the Sadrist militia, we're still fighting for the Bata Brigade.
That never stopped this whole time.
Yeah, and that's where this all started.
And they are some brutal butchers, too.
The El Salvador option.
These guys are, they are the Al-Qaeda of the Shiite side, really.
Well, this is the thing.
In Iraq, that was like, and this is not to excuse atrocities, but it was, in Iraq, there was a back and forth.
There was a time in Iraq when, yeah, there was these Shia militias that were just death squads.
They went around killing Sunnis.
You also had Sunni militias going around killing Shias.
And that's what was happening in Iraq.
And that is where the whole Sunni victimhood thing started because you had a Sunni minority that was taken out of power.
And then all of the power was given to the Shias.
And then you had Al-Qaeda in Iraq come in and take advantage of that.
And it worked.
It worked really well because there was also a time in Iraq where you had Shias being brutally massacred as well by the Al-Qaeda in Iraq group.
So there was a back and forth going back, taking place there.
But that said, what I'm saying is that in the rest of the Middle East, in somewhere like Syria, Syria is not Iraq.
The majority of the population in Syria is actually Sunni.
You go to a city like Damascus, and the vast majority of Damascus is Sunni.
And Sunnis are some of the strongest supporters of the government.
In fact, they're really pretty well represented in the government.
And I wanted to ask you about that too because, of course, you know, aside from the moderate rebel thing, that's sort of the background narrative too, is that in fact, this is almost implied oftentimes, maybe even accidentally, by those sort of defending the position of your same position, making your same statement here about the side that the West is backing against the Assad government here.
Because, of course, people say, well, look, it's a secular fascist government, so yeah, it's a dictatorship.
But they are, and you know, something I've oftentimes said as well, they are, this state is the only standing between the Christians, the Druze, the Shiites, the everybody, and a good beheading.
But usually, the rest of the Sunnis are left off the list, and it's sort of implied, I guess I'm pleading guilty here to sort of my oversimplification of it, makes it seem as though I'm saying all the Sunnis are on the other side.
And so that was what I wanted to ask you about, was to what degree, and I know, you know, that the army is full of Sunnis and all kinds of things, but I wonder if you could really sort of explain the truth of that about just, I mean, if you have any kind of real estimate that you could give about just how much of the Sunni population is actually on the side, or you know, at least sympathetic with and supporting the Al-Nusra Front rather than the Syrian state.
Well, so the majority of the country is Sunni, and I would say, I mean, I would estimate, I can't say for sure, like, I would estimate, though, the majority of Sunnis because they live in government areas, support the government.
I mean, the people I spoke to, both in Damascus and Aleppo, I mean, I went to Aleppo when it was still split between the east and west side, and like, the majority of people of course were on the eastern side.
The majority of people in both those cities are Sunni, and they are some of the most, they are some of the strongest voices against the rebels.
They actually are embarrassed by them.
They feel like it's like an embarrassment, and also like, they call them, they say that they're the moderate Sunnis, like, we're the moderate Sunnis.
These people are all like, these people are all like Wahhabists, like, and they despise, like, they despise, like, the Gulf States and the Wahhabism, and, you know, in Syria...
And a lot of them are really from the Gulf States, right?
They're not even Syrians.
Yeah, yeah, there's also that factor, too, is not all of the rebels are Syrian.
There's a lot, you know, we know there's a lot of foreign fighters who came across the Turkish border from the Gulf States, also everywhere else in the world.
But yeah, a lot of them are from the Gulf States.
A lot of people in these areas who are like, administering, who are like, in the administrative positions in the rebel areas are from the Gulf States, from what I understand from people who lived under them for a while.
And so, yeah, in Syria, I mean, there's, obviously there's like a history of, like, Muslim Brotherhood activism in Syria, but that said, there's also, like, a lot of, like, Sufis in Syria, which is, like, a different strand of Sunni Islam that is nothing like Wahhabism.
And so that's, like, what, you know, that's these are the people who are arguing against, like, what they're seeing happen on the other side.
And Aleppo was really striking because in this country, if you were following what was happening in Aleppo, in some cases, the narrative came off as though there was some sort of genocide taking place against Sunnis.
And the fact of the matter is that Aleppo is a majority Sunni city, and the majority of people, a million and a half of them, were living in the government area on the west side.
And I would ask people, in both Damascus and Aleppo, I'd be like, without asking, like, what sect they're from, because you don't ask people that in Syria.
It's actually kind of offensive and insulting to do that.
But I would ask people, I'd say, hey, like, in the U.S., there's this framing around the issue in this country that there's some sort of genocide happening against Sunnis.
What do you think about that?
And people would burst out laughing at me.
And I'd be like, why are you laughing?
And the response was always, you know, where's Sunni?
And we support the government.
We support the state.
And so in Syria, unlike Iraq, in Syria it's really more of a fight.
It's really more of Sunni versus Sunni.
There's not even very many Shia in Syria.
I mean, there's far more Christians, I think that's the second largest group of people, than there are Shia by far.
So it's not a Shia-Sunni fight, necessarily, in Syria.
It's Sunni versus Sunni.
It's like Al-Qaeda versus Sunni in a lot of ways.
And so that's one of the things that is really striking when you go there, because a lot of the people in this country have adopted, basically have adopted the Saudi mentality and the Qatari mentality, when in fact, in Syria, it's a lot more nuanced and complex than that, and people hate the Gulf states there, and they're more secular.
And even the religious, like I spoke to Imams in Syria who were also, you know, just like this one guy, actually it's kind of funny, this one guy who's an Imam, he was an Imam in East Aleppo, and until the rebels took over, and he was arrested, and he was charged with three things.
The first one was for, the first charge was for writing in a newspaper, like criticism of them.
The second charge against him was that he had named his first-born son Hassan Nasrallah, which is the leader of Hezbollah.
And the third charge against him was that the people who had attended his mosque hadn't gone to the protests afterwards, because a lot of the, in the more conservative areas, the protests were like after Friday prayer.
And so that was what he was charged with, and like he was just so utterly disgusted by the groups there, and you know, he himself like was explaining that it's a fight, you know, he saw it at least, he saw it as a fight between, a fight between a secular, like people who want to be secular, who want a secular state and a secular government versus, you know, people who are like Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda who want an Islamic state, that's how he saw it.
And this guy was Sunni, so yeah, it's a lot more complex than it's been made to sound.
Alright, now, we were talking for just a minute before the interview started, and you were telling me about meeting some of the prominent media personalities when you were in Damascus and the contradictions between their behavior and their narrative, I thought was pretty instructive.
Could you repeat a little bit of that for us, please?
Yeah, so like I was saying, I went to, before we started recording, I went to Syria on this trip that was with a bunch of other journalists from every mainstream media outlet you can imagine.
And when we first got there to Damascus, we were all sitting around eating dinner and drinking wine and preparing to go out bar hopping because there's this line of really great bars in the old city of Damascus.
And one journalist, I'm not going to mention anybody by name, but it's just important to know, one journalist who is very pretty pro-opposition, very pro-opposition and basically thinks the opposition should win, is drinking wine and just turns to everybody and is like, you know, I miss Damascus so much.
I miss being here.
I don't even want to do any work while I'm here.
I just want to go to all my favorite pubs and enjoy myself.
And everybody's sort of nodding in agreement except for a few of us who just kind of exchanged looks of irritation.
And it's just so striking because it's like, dude, you want the opposition to win.
You want a Hararel Shem and everything that comes with that to win.
Like if they were to take over Damascus, you wouldn't be able to go to your favorite pubs, you know?
And then there was another instance, like later that night, I was talking to this person who works at a think tank in the U.S.
And he's a really nice guy and he's like, you know, drinking his beer and we're talking about a Hararel Shem and he's defending them.
And he's like, yeah, they're not so bad.
And I'm like, dude, they use minorities as human shields and we're proud of it.
They've done some really atrocious things.
And he's like, yeah, they're not so bad compared to the government.
And I'm like, so you wouldn't mind?
So you think they should be able to, what, take over Damascus?
And he just kind of shrugs his shoulders.
He's like, why not?
And I look at him and he takes this big, you know, he guzzles on his beer.
And I'm looking at him just like with this look of disgust.
And I look around and I'm just like, if you got your way, you wouldn't be able to be drinking your beer right now, first of all.
Second of all, all of these young people hanging out, their lives would change dramatically.
They wouldn't be able to do this.
And again, he just kind of shrugged his shoulders.
So that's the mentality of people who don't have to live under it, I guess.
They don't have to live there.
They think it's okay for a bunch of jihadist groups to come and impose a Saudi-style, if that's even possible, impose a Saudi-style tyranny, tyrannical government over people in Syria.
Let me ask you here, and this may be asking you to speculate.
If you know, then that's a different answer.
But does it seem, or do you know whether this is because, hey man, in the larger picture, like Jeffrey Goldberg and Obama agree, this is about weakening Iran and Hezbollah and the Assad government is part of that axis, and that's more important?
Or is it really just this line about, oh, boo-hoo, Assad is worse, and so that's why I support al-Qaeda's suicide bombers?
I honestly, like, I guess there's probably a mix of those things.
At the end of the day, there's also, I think there's like a weird, I guess like, because a lot of these people would consider themselves to be liberal people who say this kind of stuff.
And so I think a part of it is also this weird style of like inverted Orientalism.
I don't know if that makes sense.
I'll explain what I mean by that.
It's like, the idea that, look, if people want to live under Islamist rule, who are we to tell them what they should have?
So let's help them.
We either gotta back secular dictators, or we gotta back al-Qaeda against them.
How about just not?
What are these choices we're choosing from here?
They refuse to even admit that it's al-Qaeda.
It's like, we're talking pretty openly about who the rebels are.
It's like, they all work with al-Qaeda and have similar ideologies as al-Qaeda, right?
All the different groups.
But there's a like, you know, a really strong belief among a lot of these Western journalists who support the opposition that the opposition isn't al-Qaeda.
It's like, they're actually, the opposition, al-Qaeda is just an element of it and there's actually other elements of it that are a lot more moderate Islamists.
Like, that's what they'll say.
And even that, to me, sounds ridiculous.
Like, you still are telling me you want to impose moderate Islamists on people who don't want to live under Islamists?
Like, I don't know what this idea is that somehow the Middle East and these regions of the world like, desire to live under Islamist rule.
The only people who want to live under Islamist rule are Islamists.
And they're not the majority.
In fact, I would argue that they've been empowered mostly by like, Western powers in a lot of these regions and other imperial powers who just want to use Islamism against whoever, you know, to do their dirty work against whoever their adversaries are.
Yeah, we killed all their nationalists and all their communists and all their everybody-elsists and there's nobody left now except the suicide bombers although at least they don't live very long, you know?
Yeah, I guess not.
Yeah, they don't live very long.
But then also, like, we, and it's like in Afghanistan, like, I've been reading back through the coverage, the media coverage of the war in Afghanistan in the 80s and there was a similar, um, like, there was a similar take by journalists, like a similar sympathy with the Mujahideen.
Even though, like, people in the Mujahideen, the people that were being framed as, like, freedom fighters um, and the ones getting a lot of the American money that were being profiled by different mainstream outlets in the 80s were actually, like, really popular in their country not popular, I should say, notorious in their countries for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.
And these are the people that, you know, US media got behind and pumped up as, like, these people are great, this is what Afghanistan wants.
Hey, Hegmatyar is back in Kabul right now.
Yeah, no, it's amazing, man, now he, like, gets to be in charge.
But it's unbelievable, like, going back and reading that coverage and then, you know, that's what, you know, the precursor, that was the precursor to the Taliban and the precursor to Al Qaeda.
And now we're back to where we started, where, like, another generation of journalists is doing the same exact thing.
And I can't, I really, you know, that's like a question, I guess, maybe for psychologists, for social psychologists, because it's kind of fascinating.
It's like, how on earth are you able to whitewash and sanitize the people who, like, are a part of the group that did 9-11 and are also, like, stoning women?
Like, you're, like, some of these journalists, I'm like, you're a woman, like, what are you talking about?
Like, how can you support this?
But they do, and it's really bizarre.
All right, Charles Scott Horton here, and I got a great deal for you.
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Well, you know, one of the more prominent of the so-called moderate groups in the earlier days of this, say 2012, when John McCain went and met with him, was the Northern Storm Brigade.
But even then, as soon as he went there, I searched Northern Storm Brigade, and the first thing that came up was a Time Magazine story and a video interview from just a few weeks before, I guess.
Elizabeth Obagi didn't Google it like I did first.
And there was their leader telling Time Magazine, yes, I'm a veteran of Iraq War II, where I fought with Zarqawi's guys against the Americans and the Shia.
And these were the moderates that McCain went and posed with on the porch there.
Yeah, no, it's shocking.
You can become a moderate overnight if you just support US geopolitical interests or geostrategic interests for like a day.
But at the end of the day, these groups are really contradictory because they want to take American support, they want to take Western support, but they also hate the West and want to attack it.
And that's another thing I think that didn't...
A lot of us, especially on the left, after 9-11, a lot of their response, which is great, that you want to talk...
We often blame things like foreign policy grievances.
And there are foreign policy grievances by a lot of these Islamist groups that are legitimate foreign policy grievances, but that's not why they're attacking the West.
It's not just because of that.
It's the Saudi-style ideology that literally preaches hate and preaches civilizational war.
And so down the line, because there's going to be blowback from Syria.
We're being told it's al-Qaeda's biggest affiliate is now in Syria.
They're planning attacks against the West.
And they're super pissed off right now because they're losing.
The government's winning.
Whether the people at the outlets in America like it or not, the Syrian government is winning.
And so these groups are pissed off because they feel like their benefactors have abandoned them because they kind of have at this point.
And they also have an ideology that's really cultish and that they're not going to give up.
They're actually going to keep pursuing their interests and their ambition for this Islamic state and this civilizational war.
They're already attacking parts of Europe, as we've seen.
And they're attacking Turkey.
And they're eventually going to attack the US.
And when that does happen, it's going to be used and it already is preemptively being used as a reason to continue operations in Syria.
But now it's going to be against al-Qaeda.
The narrative is shifting now, even in the mainstream press, where it's now like, how are we going to fight al-Qaeda in Syria, which we helped create.
And so I feel like people on the left and people who are anti-war in general, we need to have a better analysis to offer other than just foreign policy grievances.
Because at the end of the day, it's our government that is deliberately empowering groups that have an ideology that hates liberals, that hates liberal anything.
And so it is a foreign policy issue.
It's just a matter of, it's not necessarily that all these jihadists are victims of American foreign policy.
They are just the product of it, I guess.
And if we don't start being more, I guess, if we don't start being more honest about that, we're going to end up ceding the conversation to the right wing in this country and the far right in parts of Europe, like Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump's here.
Yeah, I think that's totally wrong.
The fact of the matter is there were only two or three hundred of these guys on September 11th.
And it's been, you know, the CIA can create as many, you know, militias of Islamist kooks as they want.
The only reason they're attacking Europe is because of the terror war in the last 15 years and because of the degree of radicalization that has taken place because of all the wars and all the intervention.
Same reason for the refugee crisis.
It's why they're in Europe in the first place.
It's because we burned all their countries to the ground.
And so, yeah, starting with occupying Saudi, I mean, really before that with support for Israel, too, but especially with occupying Saudi in order to bomb and strangle the people of Iraq from those bases there during the Bush senior and Bill Clinton years.
That's what got us into this mess.
And yeah, they're kooks, but why are they even in Europe?
Why are they not attacking anyone pushing for liberal reform inside Saudi Arabia where they're from?
And that's because the CIA has brought them from Saudi Arabia to Syria, right?
Basically, it's like training a rabid dog and you can't control them, you know, kind of a thing.
Just because we back them doesn't mean that they do what we say.
Well, that's the point is they're doing the same thing, but the thing is like they're killing...
These are the same groups that are every week you hear about suicide bombings in Iraq.
Those bombings target Shia, and they're by the same groups that are doing what they're doing in places like Paris.
They're not bombing.
They're not doing suicide bombings at Shia mosques because of foreign policy grievances.
They're not...
Rania, look, it's a war.
It's a war over power on Earth.
It's not a religious war.
I'm not saying it's a religious war.
I'm saying that the U.S. has empowered an ideology that comes from Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. has empowered an ideology that comes from a place like Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis have literally...
I mean, this is actually happening.
As we discussed, the Sunnis lost the capital city.
They were the Ba'athists, secularists in Iraq, and America fought for the Shiites to give the whole damn city to go from a 50-50 city to a 90-10% Shiite versus Sunni thing here.
I mean, ideology is one thing, but ideology, as you know, is usually just dressing for recruitment for...
Look, Al-Qaeda...
Here's my thing.
Al-Qaeda is not a group of a bunch of victims.
Its leadership is all people who are generally well-educated and come from scientists and engineers and eye doctors and things like that.
It's more complex than just foreign policy grievances.
The same people who every once in a while get lucky, and that's what they do.
They get lucky when they attack targets in the West.
They do this every single day in the Middle East, and they're doing it against...
And it's not about Sunnis doing it.
It's about Al-Qaeda-style groups doing it, and these groups are empowered, not just by our foreign...
They are by our foreign policy, but they're not just reacting to being bombed.
It is a struggle over power, but there's also...
It's an extreme fundamentalist ideology that they have.
And my point is, it isn't to say it's some religious war, but they...
I mean, that's like...
I guess if you're from the region, it's one thing...
It's one thing in the US...
I know it's a balancing act to play in the US because you don't want to come off as you're trying to demonize a certain religion.
That's not what I'm saying here.
What I'm saying is that in the Middle East, it's like...
I don't think people understand how severely and how bad the sectarianism is and how much it's fueled by Saudi Arabia and by the Qatari government.
I don't think people recognize...
Because they're not there.
They don't see it.
And even because I hadn't visited in a while, I didn't see it.
But it's not just in Syria.
It's in Lebanon as well.
And it's like a hatred...
I mean, it's like a really eliminationist style of hatred that Saudi Arabia preaches and indoctrinates people with.
And that's where...
That's what I mean.
There is the foreign policy grievance element, but there's a reason that the groups that end up attacking the US are groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Those groups share the same if not identical ideology that you see in Saudi Arabia and that the Saudi Arabian government uses as a tool to pursue its own geopolitical strategic ambitions across the region.
Sure.
Well, it's kind of a question between who they are and why they do what they do.
And there's some overlap in that, right?
They could be attacking...
They could be waging their entire jihad to create a caliphate in Afghanistan right now.
The reason that they're headed West is because of American and Western policy.
Well, also, we know...
I mean, they say it themselves in their own literature, whether it's Al-Qaeda or ISIS, especially ISIS, is the whole idea is also to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment in Western countries.
They don't want...
It's like they want to destroy, as they say, they call it the grey zone, which is the plurality that exists in Western countries where Muslims can live.
They want to destroy that, so Muslims in Western countries have to make a choice.
You either move to go live amongst the Muslims in the caliphate as they see it, or you become one of the infidels.
That's actually something they say.
They want to play this game of fueling the far right in the West.
If anything, the neocons, for example, in the West, end up also fueling Al-Qaeda.
It's almost like this gross, weird cycle where they play into each other's ambitions.
They both have this civilizational war mindset.
Right.
Just like in The Power of Nightmares.
They're the perfect mirror image of each other.
Exactly.
That's my point.
At the end of the day, we have to be able to talk about it more like that.
I think it's really simplistic to just say foreign policy grievances.
Me and my family have foreign policy grievances, too.
Right?
Against the West.
There's a reason that it's Al-Qaeda who keeps attacking, and ISIS who keeps attacking, and not people who are just pissed off at the West for good reason.
I just always like to go back to the fact that there were about 80 of these guys who escaped from Afghanistan into Pakistan back in 2001.
Virtually the entire phenomenon is built out of, as you said, Bush's huge blunder in creating Jihadistan in Western Iraq with Iraq War II and then Obama's very deliberate premeditated plot to take their side, really bring them back to life after they've been marginalized by the Iraqi tribal forces there, and resuscitate them and make them more powerful than ever before during this war in Syria for the last five years.
They really acted like, well, as long as Osama's dead, we can back his guys in Libya and Syria, and it'll be just fine.
I don't even know when we're going to get to the next stage of the Mali War, but it's coming, too, right?
It's been a complete disaster, and now you've got this refugee crisis.
I mean, the disaster overall has just fueled the worst forces in Western countries, because there's also the refugee crisis it's created.
Whenever you've got an influx of refugees from anywhere, people get scared.
The racist demagogues come out and try and use that to gain power, and that's also what you see happening.
I mean, it's just across the board been a disaster.
I can't imagine how much worse it could be, but I guess it could always be worse.
Hopefully, things change, but I don't know if they will.
We seem to be on this cycle of a death spiral, where it's like, you support Al Qaeda one decade, and then you end up with going to war with Al Qaeda the next decade.
Hopefully, that ends at some point, but I just don't see an end to it anytime soon.
Now we seem to be wanting to go to war with Russia.
I think you're right to put it that way, like a cycle, because I think we are at one point in the cycle now where we're probably going to stop overthrowing secular regimes in favor of the jihadists for a little while, and just go back to the Bush policy of making them more powerful by fighting them instead of making them more powerful by fighting for them.
Although, big question remains to be seen what Trump's going to do in Yemen, whether he's going to call off that war for Al Qaeda there.
But anyway, I'm sorry that we're out of time, but we'll have to cover that one the next time you write up an article about media coverage of the Yemen war there, Rania.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate the discussion.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
That's Rania Khalek.
You guys can find her on Twitter, of course, and at fair.org.
This one is called, In Syria, Western Media Cheer Al Qaeda.
It's a really well done piece.
I hope you guys will help pass it around here.
And you can also find her writings.
She hosts the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast, and she's written for The Nation, The Intercept, FAIR, Vice, etc.
So thanks, y'all.
ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
Hey, y'all, check it out.
Me, Sheldon Richman, and Jarrah LaBelle, three-fourths of the Libertarian Institute.
We're all going to the Students for Liberty thing in Washington, D.C., February the 17th through 19th.
So I guess that's Friday through Sunday there.
And it's a whole big thing.
I gave a talk there about three years ago, I guess, at the Future Freedom Foundation thing.
We may or may not have our own kind of breakout session to give talks and all that, but we're definitely going to have a table and we're definitely going to be around, so if you guys are going to be anywhere near D.C., then me and the boys from Libertarian Institute would love to meet you, so come on out.
And, by the way, if you'd like to help support this expensive effort to get the three of us to Washington, D.C., in order to make this appearance at this conference, well, then, you know, your help is always welcome at LibertarianInstitute.org slash support.
Thanks very much.