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Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Are Scott Horton & Ted Postol holocaust enablers?

There are forces, some on the Right and some on the Left, that speak out on questions related to Syria only when the slaughter that has been raging for the past five years rises to a level that floods it into the mainstream media. Then they jump into action to defend those that have unquestionably been responsible for the overwhelming proportion of murders in Syria by arguing that it can't be proven that these particular murders were committed by regime forces. These people are what I call

HOLOCAUST ENABLERS.

Scott Horton and Dr. Ted Postol are but two examples. Scott Horton is an alternative Left radio personality that generally peddles a variety of conspiracy theories for the entertainment of his listeners on Pacifica radio station KPFK and other outlets. Dr. Ted Postol is a MIT rocket scientist that moonlights over Alabama as an "Assad didn't do it" SME. More on them later.


Syria is becoming the first holocaust of the 21st Century. Over a half million Syrians have been killed already. Most have been killed by Assad, and now Russia. The girl in the pictures above on the left had her head blown off by Assad's artillery in 2012 before the chemical massacres started, and the people in the picture on the right were starved and tortured to death in Assad's prisons. They were among the two hundred thousand disappeared into state custody. Like the vast majority of Assad's victims, they did not die of chemical poison. What is more important is that these deaths did not make the news, so the Assad defenders could remain silent.

Although we didn't hear from many of these holocaust enablers when the Assad regime first began using mass murder as a political tool, or even when it started killing with sarin in December of 2012, we did as soon as a military response was threatened in response to the unprecedented sarin murder of more than a thousand near Damascus in August 2013. They then swelled the ranks of the Assad defenders until the danger passed. Not the danger of chemical murders mind you! The danger that effective action would be taken to stop them. And so the chemical murders continued, with little fanfare, as most of the holocaust enablers forgot about Syria and put themselves on reserve status.

Now when the regime and its allies are stepping up the killing, including by using chemical weapons, in the hopes that they can finally crush the rebellion for once and forever, people like Scott and Dr, Ted come out of the swamp to add their intellectual attacks on the Syrian people. They can prattle on about a single chemical attack without ever acknowledging the victims or suggesting what needs to be done to stop it, as they did here:

Woman looks for her child after 2013 Ghouta sarin massacre
Scott Horton begins by mentioning the only Syrian they refer to in the YouTube clip, which is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They don't want to talk about the gruesome sarin deaths of 92 other Syrians, the chemical wounding of hundreds more, and the chemical terror of thousands, so they don't. Without ever first honoring this massacre with a noun, they instead first refer to "it" with a pronoun. That is how far removed they want to be from the real subject matter of their discussion. They don't want to acknowledge other Syrian voices, so instead they target Bellingcat, which in addition to contributing its own valuable insights, has done a first-rate job of gathering those Syrian voices and making them accessible in English on the web.

Half a million people are dead in six years, more than two thousand have died illegal chemical deaths, and Scott Horton has the arrogance to brag that he hasn't given the matter a fair hearing:
I admit I have not gone and tried to give a fair hearing to the Bellingcat version of all of this which I'm sure is that Assad did it.
And Dr.Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks it is a laughing matter:
your only comment [is] laughter?
Dr. Postol thinks he can press science into the service of acquitting Assad of his crimes, but his application is always corrupt. For example, he draws maps with precise times and wind directions to show that people couldn't have possibly died from chemicals the way they died, but his maps always show winds blowing in a straight line and that is not what winds do at ground level in built up areas. In the case of the 2013 Ghouta sarin attack, Postol thought he could prove Assad's rockets couldn't reach that far. Even after all his fancy math, he had no way to prove Assad's forces couldn't get that close, so he just declared "rebel controlled areas," as indicated on his map, as impenetrable, so he accused them of:
inventing the information that there were Syrian troops really operating in with within the rebel controlled areas
That was pretty much the extent of it for reasoned arguments such as they are. The rest was ad hominem:
I could have done better with a rather young child relative to what they seemed to be able to understand
basically these guys are frauds
less than a bunch of amateurs
they're really a bunch of frauds
I'm very disturbed by the press continuing to use them
these guys have been shown in detail to be frauds

They apparently see no need to look at what happen in terms of the victims. We get the sense that they really don't care about them. They aren't trying to solve a crime. They aren't trying to stop it from happening again. This was also true in 2013. The two of them, and many others, fought hard then to sow seeds of doubt about the responsibility of the Assad regime for those murders. They never pursued the matter beyond that. They never tried to prosecute those who they thought were the real culprits and they never tried to stop it from happening again.

Now that it has happened again, they have again arose from the swamp to again play their role as holocaust enablers.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya

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