21st Century Wire says…
Kids are getting so savvy these days. Masters of Twitter and Facebook, with some even possessing the uncanny ability to tweet about the nuances of geopolitics, in tones of irony and cynicism. Like the 7-year-old Kissingeresque prodigy known as Bana Al-Abed.
After 21WIRE exposed the Twitter deception of social media phenomenon ‘Bana of Aleppo‘, we replied to one of Bana’s tweets where she was pleading for the US to start World War III on behalf of the ‘moderate’ Salafi militants who have occupied and terrorized East Aleppo since 2012.
We simply asked the unnamed adult who we knew was managing the epic sock puppet account why they were exploiting a child for cynical political purposes, in this case, to lobby for a No Fly Zone over Aleppo – giving respite to terrorists using the 150,000 remaining residents as human shields?
At this point, the 7 year old wunderkind promptly blocked us on Twitter:
Cheeky monkey.
Censorship. Like the Sharia Courts her father set up, along with his cohort of occupying foreign mercenaries and assorted Al Nusra terrorists who have held the residents of East Aleppo hostage for the last four years. She sure is catching on fast.
Still, more nuggets of wisdom from this budding Samantha Power protégée…
Dear @potus, @putin @assad can you please work hard to stop the killing of Aleppo people before we are finished off? Bana, Aleppo.
— Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana) September 24, 2016
With over 285,000 followers on Twitter, Bana has become an icon of the ‘Syrian Revolution’ (the one which is happening on Twitter) and she is quite possibly Al Nusra Front’s most valuable PR asset.
To activists, she is a child sage, and for western journalists, she embodies the new “don’t know, don’t care” ethos adopted by those movers and shakers in mainstream media.
With so much youth and success, what will she be when she grows up? She’s already a dab hand at this propaganda game, so maybe try film and media? She could be a latter day Leni Riefenstahl. Who knows.
Yes, it is absurd, and it’s utterly ridiculous. By definition, the Bana hoax is actual fake news – and not the kind which sparked a national panic in America; you know, the stupid slew of Trump articles produced by teenagers in Macedonia (read about them here and here), or the ones made by unemployed scam artists in Long Beach (see them here). No, the Bana fake news phenomenon was gleefully sucked-up and elevated to the top of the headlines by countless, highly paid mainstream media ‘journalists’ (we use that term loosely) from some of the biggest ‘real’ media outlets on the planet. Here is a tiny roster of some of the so-called journalists who helped to promote the preposterous Bana Project:
The Guardian’s Kareem Shaheen in Istanbul, and Julian Borger in Washington, and their masterpiece, “Where is Bana? Fears for Syrian girl who tweeted from Aleppo“
“Hours before the account was shut down, mother and daughter tweeted a farewell message saying forces loyal to Assad were bearing down on their neighbourhood.
“We are sure the army is capturing us now. We will see each other another day dear world,” read Sunday night’s tweet.
“Fears remain over the fate of the family if they are captured by forces loyal to the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad…”
Notice the propaganda jargon, “strongman.” That’s just one step away from Hitler, right?
Normally, covering a story like this with a straight face would be career suicide, but not these days. These days they give awards to writers who don’t ask questions.
Apparently, this corps of All-Star journalists went into withdrawl because Bana stopped Tweeting for 48 hours. No more hard news. You’d think it was the Day the Earth Stood Still, on Sesame Street. Yes, it’s utterly ridiculous. Shame on editor Alan Rusbridger.
Then there’s the London Telegraph’s future Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Josie Ensor, in her wartime classic entitled, “The seven-year-old girl tweeting the horrors of war in her Aleppo neighbourhood.”
“While the al-Abed family have become accustomed to the strikes in the four years since rebel fighters seized control of her neighbourhood, never have they been so indiscriminate and so merciless.
Bana has not been to school since it was destroyed in one of the bombings, joining seven million other Syrian children out of education. Fatemah, an English teacher, is tutoring her daughter using the few books they have at home.”
“Bana wants to become a teacher like her mother, but is worried she will not live long enough to see it happen.
“Please stop killing us,” she tweets, “I need peace to become a teacher. This war is killing my dream.”
A complete joke, but reported as if it were real. Embarrassed? Never.
Bana’s doting father Ghassan Alabed, is an Al Qaeda-linked extremist who served on a self-styled Sharia Court before the terrorists were driven out of East Aleppo by the Syria Army this week.
According to the same mainstream media who invented Bana’s celebrity, the 7-year-old girl’s Twitter account is managed “with the help of her mother,” Fatemah Alabed, allegedly (it’s all alleged in this story) an ‘English teacher’. A kind and gentle soul living in rebel-held utopia, and no doubt a wonderful role model for the child star.
The NATO-affiliated ‘open source’ website Bellingcat appears to have been tasked with defending the Bana of Aleppo mythology, and claims that this Twitter account is a fake, set-up to discredit Bana’s mother, Fatima:
The mythology is only credible because it has been laundered by the mainstream media in the west, so many people believed the story to be genuine. There are too many fundamental problems however, many of which are so obviously it beggars believe how adults in the west could be taken in by such an obvious fiction.
Newsflash: little Bana doesn’t actually speak English. Yes, we know, this might come as an awful shock to the Washington Post, CNN line producers, Avaaz subscribers, most British MPs, and J.K Rowling, but you really have to ask how could hundreds of mainstream journalists from “respected news outlets” in the US, Canada, UK and Europe (and lovingly in Norway), all accept this packaged narrative on face value, without even questioning the authenticity of what is clearly a put-up?
Clearly, Bana cannot speak any real English, certainly nothing near the highly nuanced and politicized commentary on Twitter. For Western media outlets like NBC News, The Guardian, the London Telegraph and others to suggest that Bana wrote any of her Tweets – shows the level of pure news fakery which these ‘respected’ mainstream corporate media outlets operate on.
Watch her on camera, being forced to read off of cue cards by an adult, uploaded on October 6, 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoWhYOsf3PY
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All jokes aside, what is happening to Bana Alabed is not her fault. She is innocent.
This child is being shamelessly exploited by one or more adults for propaganda purposes. We don’t really know who, nor do we know exactly which location they are at, nor does anyone in the media really know who is tweeting on her account, and from which location. She is being used. By definition – that is child abuse. Any mainstream journalists, or ‘activists’ who promote this type of behavior – and who glorify it – are also glorifying child abuse.
Why are US and British journalists so eager to run with these type of stories when they are so clearly staged? How could you accept a story in which a child is being used explicitly to promote the western foreign policy objective of regime change in Syria? It is not by accident, it’s intentional.
Watch this report on child propaganda in Aleppo, filed by RT’s Murad Gazdiev:
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Maybe journalists and editors were willing to look the other way – because, after all, it’s ‘for the children.’ Even the great bastion of truth, The New York Times, was forced to admit last week, after months of going along with this hoax – that there might actually be a problem with the Bana story. Congratulations to the Kings of Fake News.
In their article, “Girl Posting to Twitter From Aleppo Gains Sympathy, but Doubts Follow,” the writer still plays the ‘children’ card though, somehow justifying the hoax, in order to ‘raise awareness about the suffering of children in war zones.’ Seriously you cannot make this stuff up:
“International aid advocates have expressed mixed feelings about Bana’s fame — satisfaction that she has increased global sympathy for child victims in Syria, but concern that her story, as presented on Twitter, may not be entirely accurate.
“Whether it’s Bana, or Alan Kurdi, or Omran Daqneesh, they bring attention to an issue in a way that helps people visualize a little more clearly the situation of children,” said Sonia Khush, the Syria director of Save the Children.
“In the case of this girl, I don’t know whether it’s true or fake in this age of social media,” she said.
Considering what we are looking at here, that is a very sick and twisted statement by a high-profile charity like Save the Children. In other words, just like the mainstream media, director Sonia Khush doesn’t care if it’s real or not. Thus, ‘fake news is OK’ so long as it promotes our issue. What is wrong with these people? Funny, that these are the very same charities which supply information about the war to the US State Department, including the Goebbels throw-back John Kirby, who will normally defer to these NGO’s and charities when he can’t actually give any details about accusations he’s making about the “regime” and the evil Russians.
Remember Omran, the Dusty Boy of Aleppo? That was a staged photo-op too, produced by Jihadist terrorists Nour al din al Zenki, via the French government-funded ‘activist’ media outlet Aleppo Media Centre. But why let a little detail like that ruin a good media moment? CNN’s Kate Bolduan didn’t care where the images came from, or whether they were real. She did what she had to do – which was cry over the poor 5 year old Omran. So real, so moving. Now that’s great TV. Emmy material.
SEE ALSO: Child Exploitation: Who is ‘Bana of Aleppo’?
All this, by definition is fake news, only this fake news is not for party politics – it’s designed to start and prolong violent wars. This brand of fake news has played a role in the death of countless innocent people, and the journalists who peddle this brand of fake news should ask themselves whether or not, at the very least, if they have breached some ethical code, and at most – like any paid war propagandist throughout modern history – ask whether or not they have blood on their hands.
With the Syria War, the examples are endless. Start with looking into the White Helmets. Watch their infamous “Rag Doll video” and ask yourself if this is indeed fake, and even more importantly, is this also child exploitation?
Watch these evil clowns in action:
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To think the White Helmets were being tipped for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaking of fake news, what about the “Gay Girl of Damascus”? Remember that fake female named Amina Arraf, who blogged under an even faker name, Amina Abdallah? This was another fake news story lapped-up by the mainstream media. You would’ve had to have been an idiot to believe this story – and yet, it seems there is no shortage of them working for western mainstream newspapers and broadcast TV networks. Leading the fake news parade again, of course, was the The Guardian and its would-be Pulitzer prospect Nidaa Hassan (hopefully, that’s a real person) in Damascus, who wrote this literary cannon entitled, “Syrian blogger Amina Abdallah kidnapped by armed men.“
“She was kidnapped last night as she and a friend were on their way to a meeting in Damascus. The kidnapping was reported on her blog by a cousin.
“Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father. One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad.”
Basel is the brother of president Bashar al-Assad, and was being groomed for the presidency until his death in a car crash in 1994.”
They even set up a Free Amina Arraf Facebook page. It turned out that the “gay girl in Damascus,” was a 40-year-old American man from Georgia, apparently working out of Edinburgh, Scotland (working for who?). Totally fake, but good for the West’s demonization campaign of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, and good for the West’s war effort. This is no different than the Bana hoax.
We’re sure that the Guardian’s Nidaa Hassan got a nice promotion for carrying that bucket of swill. Well done you.
They never learn. And by the looks of it, neither will John Kerry, Samantha Power and the rest of New York City and New England’s R2P elite.
Because with defense budgets soaring, shame is a luxury they simply cannot afford.
SEE MORE ALEPPO UPDATES HERE
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READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Syria Files
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