Max Blumenthal — How the White Helmets Became International Heroes While Pushing U.S. Military Intervention and Regime Change in Syria

Backed by Washington and marketed by a top PR firm, the White Helmets are saving civilians while lobbying for airstrikes.…

The White Helmets’ leadership is driven by a pro-interventionist agenda conceived by the Western governments and public relations groups that back them. Anyone who visits the group’s website—which is operated by an opposition-funded PR company known as the Syria Campaign—will be immediately directed to a request to sign a petition for a no-fly zone to “stop the bombs” in Syria. These sorts of communiques highlight the dual role the White Helmets play as a civil defense organization saving lives while lobbying for a U.S. military campaign that will almost inevitably result in the collapse of Syria’s government…

Slick propaganda wrapped in sentiment designed to trigger liberal interventionism. The Bush-Cheney administration propaganda was neocon inspired and fear based. The Obama-Biden-Clinton propaganda is liberal interventionist inspired and oriented to R2P based on sympathy and outrage.

But.…

Critical questions about the White Helmets’ role in an interventionist public relations apparatus have been raised by only a few marginal websites that generally support the Syrian government. Thus the issue has been kept off the table, along with the public debate over the consequences of a regime change policy that the Obama administration still supports.…

Far from the gaze of most Western media consumers, videos and photographs have surfaced on news sites and social media accounts sympathetic to the Syrian government showing White Helmet members boasting about discarding the body parts of Syrian troops in dumpsters, posing triumphantly on the corpses of Syrian soldiers, joining fighters accostingan alleged political opponent, waving the flag of Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra alongside jihadist fighters, giving interviews in the middle of an Al-Nusra rally, and carrying weapons.

The liberal interventionist alternative to the neocons mushroom cloud, brought to you and paid for by your government. Like Saddam and Gaddafi, Assad must go.

AlterNet
How the White Helmets Became International Heroes While Pushing U.S. Military Intervention and Regime Change in Syria

Max Blumenthal