May 5, 2015

Skewing Readers’ Perceptions

by Vaska

The venerable Guardian carries a new in-depth article on IS and its recruiting work – this time in Russia. It does so under the headline

How Isis is recruiting migrant workers in Moscow to join the fighting in Syria

The title clearly gives the impression that Russia is being lax about monitoring Islamist terrorist networks and is letting ISIS itself do the dirty on its territory.

It is only in the body of the article that we discover that exactly the opposite is the case. As Daniil Turovsky, the author of the piece written for the New East Network (itself an anti-Russia propaganda media venture The Guardian is participating in) then reveals, for the past few months Russia has been alerting the world to the danger ISIS poses in Tajikistan and to parts of the Russian Federation itself, where it is using Chechen gangs to recruit Tajik and other foreign workers for the jihad in Syria.

Further into the article, Turovsky informs us that when Tajikistan’s president declared ISIS “the plague of the century and a serious danger” for the country last December, Russia offered Tajikistan 70 billion roubles ($890m) for weapons and the means to secure its border with Afghanistan.

If you were a little busy or tired, disinclined to read the whole piece, The Guardian‘s headline would leave you with the impression that Russia is tacitly on the side of the currently most loathed Islamist terrorist forces in the Middle East. Which feelings about and towards Russia is that impression and that headline intended to provoke in the unwary skimmer of the day’s news?