Google correct the record: Little girl was beheaded by Assad not ISIS [GRAPHIC!]

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Originally titled "Open letter to a Putin Propagandist"

This is going to be a brutal post, but then it has been that kind of day, because all day a Putin propagandist has been tweeting me pictures of jihadist beheadings as if to say these are the people I support, these are the White Helmets, these are the Syrian revolutionaries. He wants us to think all the people Assad is killing deserve to die, and he hopes to distract me from the more important work of exposing more prominent Putin apologists. I call him a Putin propagandist because I have taken a look at his timeline and he tweets for the whole gamut of Putin projects.

So he has been baiting me all day:

@clayclai You never responded, did you?

— Tim Owen (@oddlots) April 30, 2017

So let this serve as my respond. Not to him, of course, waste of ink, but to all who follow me and may have seen his tweets, and to the world at large, because now this has become a bigger project, and let me tell you why:

Beheadings are a gruesome thing, and shocking to most people. The conflict in Syria has become very much associated with beheadings - especially in the West where the focus is on the crimes of ISIS and the jihadist terrorists.

From right-wing "Eye of Vigilance" website

There is one image of a little Syrian girl that had been beheaded that has never left my mind in all the years since I first laid eyes on it. It is one of the images that keeps me up at night - writing posts like this in support of the Syrian struggle, year after year. It is the kind of image that once seen, and never be unseen, probably because it doesn't deserve to.

Oh, the caption is wrong, she was actually beheaded by Assad's artillery, but if you find it on the Internet, most likely you will be told it is the picture of a Christian girl beheaded by ISIS. If you do a Google search on this image with their image search feature, you will get an incredible 25 billion hits like this, and Google's description is: Best guess for this image: isis crimes against christians.

That is the lie that now has become accept fact because of the diligent work of Putin propagandists and Assad apoligists to cover their crimes, but I know better because I first used this image in a piece for The North Star titled Barack Hussein Obama: Enemy of Syrian People on 21 September 2012, just 5 days after she was killed and a month after Obama told Assad that he was OK with this and much, much more with his famous "red-line" statement. On the day he issued it, I called it a "green-light" for what was done to this poor child.

When I published my main research piece on that question, Barack Obama's Courtship of Bashar al-Assad, 14 September 2012, this little girl had only two more days to live. That was long before ISIS started beheading people in Syria, and even today the Assad regime is responsible for 95% of the killing, but there has been this concerted effort to convince us that the jihadist terrorists are the main problem. I have been subject to that today by a Tim Owen.

Syrian Revolution Digest

This is where I first saw it, on Ammar Abdulhamid's Syrian Revolution Digest, the same day she was murdered by Assad's army, 16 September 2012.  If you restrict the Google search on this image to dates before 2013, suddenly the 25 billion, that' s BILLION with a "B" returns drop down to a relative handful, but you can find out what really happened to this little girl.

Abu Okasha in Karachi, linked to a picture on Twitter on the evening of her murder:  Brutality of Maloon Assad, Recent Massacre ( Viewer Discretion ) 16 September 2012, 10:56 PM. The next day someone posted this image to Flickr.

This more complete record shows the bereaved father holding his headless daughter, and some of the art produced, probably by children that have been force to absorb such brutality into their psyche. Think of them when you get mad at me for showing you this.

In December 2012 Uncovering the World, a blog featuring uncensored events and news, did this picture layout:

They had no axe to grind in the Syrian conflict. They were just reporting what happened. But since then nefarious forces have gone to work the bury the true nature and real perpetrators of this little girl's murder. Those that wish to deflect blame from Assad and gin up our fear of ISIS have appropriated the last image of this little girl, and through their sheer power to propagate a lie on the Internet, have buried the truth about her murder with billions of lies.

And they have been successful. They have convinced everyone, even Google, that this is most likely an example of ISIS crimes against Christians. While I don't think Google wants to be part of a Putin/Assad driven propaganda campaign, I think in this case, that is what they unwittingly have become.

Tim Owen, reminded me of the tragic case of this little girl again, and made me want to do something. I know we can never bring her back to life. We definitely don't have that kind of power. We can't even  be sure that she had a proper burial, anyway that was more than four years ago. We can't even do much to keep other Syrian children from a similar fate. Maybe a hundred thousand Syrian children have followed her into the grave already.

But we can still make sure she is properly remembered on the Internet. We can demand that the truth be told about her murder and that the image of her headless body not be used to strengthen the position of her killers.  With that in mind, I am hereby kicking off a campaign to ask Google to not fall victim to the Putin propagandists brute-force attack, re-evaluate the available information about this image, and correct their description to point the finger at Assad rather than ISIS.

Please sign my first ever Change.org Petition 

Google correct the record: Little girl was beheaded by Assad not ISIS

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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