Syrian official media speak of reforms. One can look in vain for evidence of the reform.
Alakhbar / By As'ad AbuKhalil
20-Oct-2011

It is getting more and more difficult to get news out of Syria. The propaganda war between the Saudi-Qatari camp and the Syrian regime camp has been intensifying. There is little news in what they release. Syrian regime TV lives in a fantasy world: camera crews find a handful of tourists from Europe, often inebriated, who insist on camera that Syrian cities and towns are all peaceful and that the news about killings in Syria are sinister rumors. The rhetoric of the regime (very much like Saddam’s rhetoric after 1990—it must be a Ba`thist thing when the regime seems on its way down) is getting more and more nationalistic (in the narrow qutri or provincial sense which was alien to the Ba`thist Arab nationalist ideology in its heydays). Syrian political rhetoric about Syria is almost mimicking the vulgar Lebanese nationalist rhetoric of March 14 movement in Lebanon. Dunya TV, presumably owned by the Makhlufs, is a notch more effective as a propaganda tool: it uses sarcasm and humor—two qualities that have historically been frowned upon in the Ba`thist media of Syria and Iraq.

But it is particularly jarring when Syrian official media speak of reforms. One can look in vain for evidence of the reform. Some may point to the cancellation of the state of emergency, but many Syrians sarcastically show a preference for the state of emergency, given the daily death toll and repression since it was lifted. The regime still runs footage of (small) funerals, allegedly of... >>>

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