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#14907070
An interesting read: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-chemical-attack-gas-douma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html

The search for truth in the rubble of Douma – and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attack

Exclusive: Robert Fisk visits the Syria clinic at the centre of a global crisis

This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks – and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.

War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.

As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?

By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.

France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.

At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.

Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.

So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.

I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab officialdom – I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted off.

It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.

“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”

Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.

But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.

The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.

Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.

There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes – are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed genuine perplexity.

How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy – as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?

They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?
#14907569
One of the actors in the White Helmets video production speaks out on Russian TV:



Busted! Syrian Boy in White Helmets FAKE Chemical Attack Video Reveals Truth

Earlier the White Helmets, a Western-backed NGO known for its ties with terrorist groups, released a video showing alleged victims of the false-flag chemical attack in Douma. The US and its allies used the video as a pre-text to conduct a missile strike on Syria.

The Russia 24 TV channel released an exclusive interview on April 18 with a boy, who participated in filming a fake video, as evidence of the false-flag chemical attack in Douma by the White Helmets. In the interview, Hassan Diab says that he and his mother heard loud voices on the street, urging everyone to rush to the hospitals. When Hassan entered the hospital, unknown people grabbed him, poured water on him and then put him with other patients.

“We were in the basement. Mom told me that today we don’t have anything to eat and that we will eat tomorrow. We heard a cry outside, calling “go to the hospital.” We ran to the hospital and as soon as I entered, they grabbed me and started pouring water on me,” Hassan Diab said.

His father continued the story. He was at his work when he heard that his son was in hospital. He rushed to the hospital and found his family there in good health. He added that he was on the street, smoking and didn’t feel any chemical weapon. According to him, it turned out militants gave all the participants food — dates, cookies and rice — and then released them.

“There were no chemical weapons. I smoked outside and felt nothing. I entered the hospital and saw my family. Militants gave them dates, cookies and rice for participating in this film and released everyone to their homes,” Hassan’s father said.

The TV channel also broadcast an interview with a doctor who was in the hospital when the White Helmets filmed their fake video. He said that no patients with signs of chemical weapons-related injuries arrived that day, but there were many people with respiratory problems due to smoke and dust from the recent bombing. All doctors were busy taking care of them and didn’t have time to react to the White Helmets’ film crew.

The White Helmets is a Syrian NGO, financed by several Western countries, which is associated with staging and filming false-flag chemical attacks. They have been seen several times working with terrorist groups in Syria.

On April 9 the group published another video suggesting that doctors in one of the Douma hospitals were treating patients that had suffered from the chemical attack and accused Damascus of the ordeal. However, the information that later surfaced, as well as witness testimonies, demonstrated that it was staged, performed by the White Helmets.


Too bad the White Helmets fled together with the terrorists. The West only has the testimony of the terrorists and their supporters for justifying a massive illegal missile attack on the government of Syria.
#14907612
Stop the War protester – ‘Assad is a good man – he’s a doctor for heaven’s sake’



PB: You believe Assad over Theresa May?
Attendee: I do, yes
PB: You believe a murder over the Prime Minister of Britain?
A: He’s not a murderer, he’s a president of a country for god’s sake.
PB: So he hasn’t murdered anyone then?
A: What do you mean? Personally, no. But Theresa May gave the order to bomb Syria without anyone’s say so
PB: Is President Assad responsible for the deaths in Syria of his own people.
A: No he’s not – the Opposition is and Britain is and France is and America is
PB: Is President Assad a good person?
A: Yes he is. He’s a very good man and he’s a doctor for heaven’s sake.


In fact many Arab terrorists were physicians


Doctors as Terrorist Leaders

Spoiler: show
Joshua A. Perper, Stephen J. Cina-When Doctors Kill_ Who, Why, and How-Springer (2010)

Doctors as Terrorist Leaders
Some physicians have traded the gratitude of patients, financial well-being, and
preferential social standing for leadership positions in terrorist groups. Dr. Ayman
Muhammad Rabaie al-Zawahiri (1951–), an Egyptian surgeon by training, is
unquestionably the foremost figure among doctor-terrorists. As a leading member
of al-Qaeda (the number two man, after Osama bin Laden) he has masterminded
many of its terror operations. He has been referred to as the “real brains” of al-
Qaeda by bin Laden’s biographer no less! Dr. al-Zawahiri enrolled in his first
fanatical group, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, when he was only 14. This is
not surprising as racial, ethnic, and religious hatred is virtually always a home-
grown product and al-Zawahiri’s father, Dr. Mohammad Rabi al-Zawahiri, was also
a Muslim Brotherhood enthusiastic follower. The younger al-Zawahiri managed to
complete medical school in between episodes of terrorist attacks and prison.
In his elective time, he directed a number of rebellions designed to overthrow
the secular Egyptian government. He eventually joined Islamic Jihad, which assas-
sinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, and he spent time in prison on
charges related to that murder. After Sadat’s death, Islamic Jihad split and Dr. al-
Zawahiri became the leader of one of the splinter groups. Hard pressure from the
Egyptian government forced him to seek refuge in Afghanistan where he met and
worked closely with his future commander and friend Osama bin Laden. In the
early 1990s al-Zawahiri was smuggled into United Stated under a false name and
succeeded in raising more than half a million dollars for his terror organization.
In 1998, the doctor engineered the simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in the
East African capitals of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya) in which
hundreds of people were killed. Zawahiri was sentenced to death in absentia by an
Egyptian military tribunal in 1999 for his role in the 1997 “Luxor Massacre” in
which 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians were gunned down or hacked to death.
The United States is currently offering a reward of $25 million for information
leading to his arrest.
There are other physicians, including many Palestinians, who occupy important
positions of leadership in terror organizations including:
• Dr. Abu Hafiza is another high-level al-Qaeda operative. A Moroccan psychiatrist,
he was the mastermind behind al-Qaeda’s devastating terror attacks in Spain in
that left 191 dead and almost 2,000 injured on March 11, 2004. He was hoping
that this attack would be such a blow to the European psyche that a “domino
effect” would ensue leading to the removal of several Western leaders including 146 14 Trading Treatment for Terror
Britain’s Tony Blair. Although this phase of his plan didn’t quite work out, 3 days
after the bombings Spain elected a new Prime Minister and all of their troops
were removed from Iraq within 3 months. He also provided “counseling” to the
9/11 killers.
• Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a Palestinian pediatrician, was the co-founder and
spiritual leader of the militant Palestinian organization, Hamas. He was targeted
and killed by an air-to-ground Israeli missile.
• Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, an Egyptian-trained surgeon born to an Egyptian mother
and a Palestinian father, is also a Hamas co-founder and leader. He was appointed
Foreign Minister of the Gaza strip region controlled by Hamas in 2006 by Prime
Minister Ismail Haniyeh. He has stated in the past that he would like to see the Gaza
strip become “Hamaston.” Some sources suggest he became the leader of Hamas
after Ahmed Yassin was assassinated in 2004 but the organization would not con-
firm this rumor out of fear of Israeli reprisals. He also teaches medical students.
• Dr. Fathi Abd al-Aziz Shiqaqi (1951–1995), co-founded the Palestinian Islamic
Jihad (PIJ) faction in the early 1970s, was also a pediatrician. He was an early
advocate of and creative genius behind suicide bombings. In the 1990s he repeti-
tively visited Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi who promised to help finance
Shaqaqi’s group. He was also financially supported by Iraq and Hizballah. In
1995, a lone man (probably an agent of Mossad, Israel’s Secret Service) walked
up to Shaqaqi as he was returning to his hotel in Malta and shot him with a gun
equipped with a silencer. Over 40,000 people attended his funeral.
• Dr. George Habash, a pediatrician and Christian Palestinian, founded and served
as chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an influential
group second only to Yassar Arafat’s Fattah movement. His group created and
mastered the tactic of skyjacking for political gains. The PFLP’s first major success
was the hijacking of an El Al plane in 1968. Two years later, he masterminded
the hijackings of four Western airliners over the United States, Europe, the Far
East and the Persian Gulf. The aircraft were blown up after the passengers and
crews were forced to disembark. Perhaps his medical training resulted in this
unusual act of compassion for a terrorist. Dr. Habash was also behind the hijacking
of an Air France plane to Uganda which was resolved after Israeli commandos
stormed the airport in Entebbe. Fortunately, he died of a heart attack in 2008 in
Amman, Jordan and is no longer practicing.
• Dr. Wadih Haddad was second-in command to Dr. Habash in the PFLP and
worked out many of the details of its terrorist operations. Little is known about
his background. The famed assassin and terrorist “Carlos the Jackal” worked
closely with Haddad and the PFLP to perpetrate skyjackings and other terrorist
attacks. The 1968 skyjacking of the El Al flight by PFLP was Haddad’s debut
on the terrorist scene. Haddad also planned the assassinations of several of the
Arab world’s oil ministers including the Saudi Arabian Oil Minister. He died of
cancer in East Berlin in 1978.
The world is apparently fated to suffer the scourges of terrorism for many years
to come. We do not have and we cannot devise a reasonable way to deal with the Doctors as Terrorist Leaders 147
terrorist problem because with extremists their way is the only way. Negotiations
and diplomacy simply don’t work with people who are committed to killing you
even if it means killing themselves. This does not mean that we cannot take mea-
sures to protect ourselves. Western governments can make determined efforts to
uproot centers of hateful indoctrination, punish their proponents, deny any funding
to terror organizations or countries, and dedicate staff and money to developing
means of detecting terroristic activities. Weakness is not an option against these
folks. Doctor-terrorists will continue to surface, particularly in countries that combine
education with religious fanaticism. These physicians will kill more people in a
fraction of a second than any other doctor will save in a lifetime.149
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved
innocent.
#14908311
noir wrote:Stop the War protester – ‘Assad is a good man – he’s a doctor for heaven’s sake’


It's crazy how someone can live into their 70s and still not have a fucking clue about the world they're living in. In her simple little mind Assad must be the good guy because the West is bad. :knife: It's never occured to her that maybe there are no good guys and that she doesn't have to pick a side.
#14908320
Sivad wrote:It's crazy how someone can live into their 70s and still not have a fucking clue about the world they're living in. In her simple little mind Assad must be the good guy because the West is bad. :knife: It's never occured to her that maybe there are no good guys and that she doesn't have to pick a side.


It's peculiar British thing.


A leaflet by the Stern Gang (Jewish terrorists) in the early 40's was:

During the years of organized Zionism, its leaders sought relief in the circles of lovers of Israel who opposed anti-Semitism. The Zionist press old as "new"- praised the names of Righteous Among the Nations - old bereaved and old virgins - who love the "living and the flora", all the persecuted and tormented, the Negro and the Jew, and may tomorrow love the Arab too, if they prove that he is also persecuted and tortured.


They concluded that the "good British" are worthless and clueless. Nothing was changed since then. Same "old virgins" who believe in their own phantasies.
#14908323
Sivad wrote:It's crazy how someone can live into their 70s and still not have a fucking clue about the world they're living in. In her simple little mind Assad must be the good guy because the West is bad. :knife: It's never occured to her that maybe there are no good guys and that she doesn't have to pick a side.


In time of war you cannot not pick a side. You either become guilty by association in murder and war crimes your country commits in the pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions, or you chose to resist. If you do not resist, you may become complicit in genocide no more nor less than the guardians at Auschwitz. The same applies to Assad, he defended his country against imperialist powers and their Islamist head-chopping proxies. Even if he did use chemical weapons prior to the destruction of his chemical weapons stockpiles in 2014, he had infinitely more justification to do so against the head-choppers and the overwhelming might of the imperialist powers than did the US in using Napalm in its war of aggression in Vietnam.

For the president of the country that killed innumerable people by Napalm to loudly proclaim that Assad the animal enjoys gassing his own people is the heights of perfidy. I cannot judge the means employed by Assad, however, I do know that he did the right thing in resisting the destruction of his country by foreign powers and their terrorist proxy forces.
#14908329
skinster wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfSrk2HfRN8

:lol: Dear oh oh dear or dear, the pathetic fantasy world of the leftie. Nothing's ever the fault of the Muslim.
If Trump did want to leave Syria, that would actually bring the return of peace to Syria.

Yeah like Turkey, the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs and Assad would all just live in peace. I mean if it wasn't for the West no one else would think of supplying arms to the Sunni Arab terrorists.
#14908386
Rich wrote:Yeah like Turkey, the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs and Assad would all just live in peace. I mean if it wasn't for the West no one else would think of supplying arms to the Sunni Arab terrorists.


Turkey isn't going to go to war with Russia to annex bits and pieces of Syria. And the Sunni terrorists will just evaporate into thin air without Western support. The Saudi pariahs are far too incompetent to launch a terror force in Syria without their Western backers.

For the last 150 years most conflicts in the region have involved the FUKUS imperialists in one way or another. You are the curse of the Earth. Be gone already!
#14908389
noir wrote:The German elites hate America—the power that had destroyed their Nazi-fascist dream of world hegemony.


Oh, there are groups out there that took the whole Nazi-Fascist ideology underground before the end of the Great Patriotic War, and having done so, strive by fraud and division to revive the project soon. I believe this with all my heart, that they will work towards gaining world hegemony.
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