Some questions for DemocracyNow!

by Vaska

What’s going on at DemocracyNow! for Amy Goodman to be interviewing a Saudi crown prince on the subject of combatting Daesh?   A Saudi crown prince born in Amman, Jordan, who’s arguing that there’s no military solution to the problem of Daesh, to boot?   [Does the good prince perchance want us to negotiate with the heart-and-lung eating jihadis, i.e. de fact recognize their “Islamic State” in Syria?]

Like anyone else who’s been paying attention to what’s been happening in Syria and the countries around it since 2011, Amy Goodman knows full well that the Saudis are the major financiers of Daesh/ISIL and that Jordan has been the chief training area for the so-called FSA. Throughout 2013 and 2014, fighters nominally identified as FSA members would, once trained by the US military advisors in Jordan, go back to Syria where they routinely defected to either Al Nusra or Daesh.  Knowing that, how can the doyenne of the alternate media in the USA permit herself to conduct a full interview with a Abdel Bari Atwan, a known supporter of terrorism, who claims, like a State Department spokesperson, that “using military solution alone, it means we are prolonging the problem. We are strengthening the Islamic State”?

Note also how Goodman lets her interlocutor ramble on about the use of the term Daesh, without once pointing out that ISIL dislikes it intensely because it sounds like the Arabic term for trouble-maker or sower of discord — and without once challenging him on his own preference of the term “Islamic State,” which makes these cannibals sound like a legitimate political actor or questioning his claim that Daesh is somehow not the group’s “correct name”. With his insistence on “Islamic State” as the proper name to use for the group that has been beheading Christians, non-compliant Sunnis and Alawites in Syria alike, Abdel Bari Atwan and Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein sound like their PR men in the West, where the latter is the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

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