Syria: Where is the Alternative Narrative?

Let me first state that I have never been an admirer of the Syrian governments of the Assads, father and son, just as I was never an admirer of Saddam Hussein. I do consider the leftwing of the Ba'ath Party, which both of them hijacked, to have been a very progressive, secular movement in the Arab world, and the secularism and freedom for women which predominated in both countries is a direct result. All of that said, I have to point out the almost total censorship in the news we are getting in the USA about Syria. When I talk to friends in Beirut and East Jerusalem and when I read news reports from India and Russia, there is another narrative which almost never appears in the USA, not even on KPFA or Democracy Now! This morning I listened to an old friend Reese Erlich on KPFA, and he dismissed this narrative in what I consider a naive and shallow way. The only exception is the reporting of Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, particularly his June article on Iran. He asserted at that time--and I also heard it on Democracy Now!--that the real danger in the region is not Iran but Saudi Arabia, which is flooding Syria and Lebanon with money and arms going to jihadist extremists. The monolithic narrative that we hear in the USA is that there is a democratic movement fighting the government in Syria. Reese at least acknowledged that the opposition is armed and killing soldiers and police, but he dismisses any notion of foreign invovement. Certainly, there is a genuine democracy movement in Syria and certainly the government has used terrible repression against it. But the alternative narrative is that there is also a foreign-subsidized heavily armed jihadist opposition which is not only fighting the government but other Syrians. The censorship of this narrative from nearly all USA reporting is highly disturbing to me. It smacks of manipulation of the news at very high levels. But the absence of mention of this narrative by reporters like Reese and Amy Goodman is doubly disturbing. Only Seymour Hersh covers it and only as a sidebar on the story about the nonexistent nuclear weapons development program in Iran. None of us knows exactly what is happening in Syria, but that makes it even more irresponsible to not at least mention this alternative narrative in reporting. There is a huge Saudi-funded, jihadist party in Lebanon, too, and who is talking about that? It's time to focus our attention on what is occurring in the world without ideological blinders imposed by the US government and its allies.