Madaya Starvation Images and Faking News
The Syrian war hit the front pages on global media with fake pictures of starving children in Madaya, a town besieged by Bashar al-Assad's forces. It turns out most of the horrifying pictures are taken from a variety of sources, including people suffering from diseases, drug addiction, etc., and have nothing to do with Madaya. Western news agencies and media, blindly followed by the Indian media, acted as tools of propaganda in the guise of news; no fact checking, and easily gamed by so-called activists groups, who in this case, are very much a part of the western regime change operations in Syria. The tragedy for Syria is that while these fake images have been widely carried by global media, the retraction has either not occurred or buried in fine print so that readers will only remember Madaya's starving images.
Some examples of fake images
This image is of a Syrian refugee girl in Amman in Lebanon and has nothing to do with Madaya. The pictures on the right are not of the girl on the left. The same girl that appeared in Al-Arabiya on January 6, 2014.
Again, this picture is from refugee in Europe, which had been released in 2009 in a campaign on drug addiction. Al Jazeera's twitter page had the image claiming it is from Madaya.
The above, published in www.globalresearch.ca, shows on the right, the picture of a boy, which was originally published on 13th May 2015 from the East Damascus suburb of Douma. This iamge has been widely used in the Indian papers claiming to be one of starvation from Madaya.
Some new items exposing the fake images are given below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMnm9zl2qwk
http://news.antiwar.com/2016/01/10/fake-images-of-crisis-in-syrias-madaya-making-the-rounds/
Yes, Madaya town, controlled by the rebel forces has been under siege by the government forces for months. So have numerous other towns -- Kafria and Foua'a regions in Idlib province as well as al-Zahra and Nubl in Northwest of Aleppo province – besieged by the rebels. None of them or their hardships find mention in the dominant western media. The western media narrative is Assad's brutal forces starving people and Russians bombing civilians.
The Syrian government and other pro government agencies claim that while food has been allowed to enter Madaya, the rebel forces control its distribution completely. They are selling it at high prices to the remaining townspeople, causing the hardship. While this may or may not be true, the rebel forces look quite healthy in Madaya compared to the townsfolk. If there is starvation in Madaya, it does not seemed to have affected the rebel militias.
The dirty war in Syria is not just a shooting war. It is also a propaganda war, carried out in social and mainstream media. The IS might now be recognised as a threat to the region, and indeed to even the west. The priority for the western powers and their subservient media is still regime change. Any weapon that vilifies the Assad government is acceptable, as long as it reinforces the slogan “Assad must go”. The truth is a small casualty in Syria, where already 250,000 have died and 4 million Syrian have become refugees in other countries.
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