Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes:

Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is not a friendly place for journalists. Since the onset of the uprising in 2011, the regime has issued few visas. In 2012, when the American journalist Marie Colvin and the French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik entered Syria unauthorized, they were targeted and killed. But in 2021, a Canadian podcaster was given unusual access to regime-controlled Syria, and among his various dispatches, one in particular stood out. Standing in front of the ruins of Yarmouk — a Palestinian refugee camp that the regime had besieged, blockaded and bombed from 2013 to 2018 — he obscured Assad’s responsibility for the camp’s destruction and, in a move breathtaking in its cynicism, appealed for an end to sanctions on his regime.

Aaron Mate, the podcaster in question, was a pro-Palestine activist before he pivoted to whitewashing Palestinians’ killers. He once worked for independent media organizations like Democracy Now! and the Real News Network, but as his career foundered it was propped up by new benefactors. He was trotted out by the Russian mission to the United Nations when it needed someone to obfuscate the facts about Assad’s April 2018 chemical attack on Douma. A cache of emails obtained by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability also revealed that he was seen by the Russian propaganda apparatus as a useful channel for the placement of leaks: An employee of the Russian media organization Ruptly confided to two of Mate’s British allies — the controversial academics Paul McKeigue and Piers Robinson — that he had gathered personal information on the witnesses and survivors of the Douma massacre, which he intended to leak to Mate for amplification. This would have put the individuals in mortal danger since the regime was ruthlessly suppressing any information about its responsibility for the attack.

Mate was only following in the footsteps of his American comrade Max Blumenthal, who had had his own Damascene conversion. In 2012, Blumenthal came out strongly against the Syrian regime and resigned from the Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar English over its pro-Assad stance. But as the so-called Arab Spring was beset by counterrevolution, Blumenthal trimmed his sails. After a pilgrimage to Moscow in December 2015, he returned a new man with new politics — and a new website: The Grayzone. Russian media helped raise his profile, and Blumenthal even married a producer for RT, the state-funded TV station previously called Russia Today. At the time, Russia was facing a public relations disaster because the Syrian volunteer rescuers and medics known as the White Helmets, whom it was systematically targeting, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. A documentary film about their heroics was up for an Oscar. Enter Blumenthal to muddy the waters. He concocted a narrative out of extant conspiracy theories (the pro-Assad activist Vanessa Beeley claimed they were mostly stolen from her), starting with the White Helmets and later extending the to the medical professionals of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS). Deploying Islamophobic tropes that echoed Assad regime propaganda, Blumenthal tried to associate both organizations with al Qaeda, calling SAMS “Al Qaeda’s MASH unit.” These smears have been refuted by seven governments, including the United States. Blumenthal would also appear at the U.N. as a guest of the Russian regime. [Continue reading…]