International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 58

Syria: An Epistemological Obstacle
platforms entitled “The Whole Truth,” recounting a host of completely unverifiable
information, linked to hackers based in Romania and Ukraine, and pocketing
maximum advertising revenue before disappearing from digital air. But what is
NATO doing? The teachings of George Orwell have been surpassed like the sound
barrier and herald, in the near future, the criminalization of European—including
French—journalists who continue to collaborate with media outlets such as Radio
Sputnik and Russia Today. The process is gradual: we shall soon encounter the
joys of a new McCarthyism, which has already begun to extend its moralizing and
normative tentacles.
Under the heading “Aleppo propaganda,” researchers from Lebanese television
channel Al Mayadeen (an internationally recognized media outlet) scanned
the images from blogs and digital networks claiming to document the martyrs of
Aleppo. Among them they discovered images of the streets of Islamabad following
the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (December 27, 2007), summer scenes in Deir
ez-Zor filmed in the areas held by Islamic State (ISIS), and old footage of Cairo’s
Tahrir Square in full Egyptian revolt in spring 2011.
The poor victims of Eastern Aleppo certainly did not ask to be drafted into
this phenomenology of war discourse. One still now recalls with fear the martyrdom—the
term here is entirely appropriate—of the village of Maaloula, which fell
into the hands of Islamists from the Free Syrian Army (FSL) and the Al-Nusra
Front on September 7, 2013, along with other settlements in this mountainous
region to the north-east of Damascus. Reports and witness statements received by
the Maronite Catholic Patriarchate of Bkerké (Lebanon) described women being
raped for hours on end before having their breasts, hands, and feet cut off.
Patriarch Bechara al-Rahi hastened to send these terrifying documents
to the office of Laurent Fabius, who did nothing with them, judging that Syria’s
Christians—as a majority—supported the bloody dictator Bashar al-Assad, and
that some of these “moderate” rapists had been armed by France itself. At the
time, the Parisian press had no interest in such information concerning Christians
suspected of supporting the “Damascus regime.” Nicolas Truong, editor of the
“Discussion” pages of Le Monde, preferred to stick to the mainstream statements
of historian Jean-Pierre Filiu and media “experts” who more or less all shared the
same black and white discourse.
Finally, the most recent outage in the country of the Enlightenment: last
December 14, mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo decided to turn off the lights of the
Eiffel Tower in solidarity with Aleppo. Such courage!
The academic symposium on Syria, which was due to take place on Saturday
November 26, 2016 at the Caen Memorial museum, was cancelled two days in advance
with no form of hearing. “We cannot hand over the keys of the Memorial
museum to a symposium suspected of defending Bashar al-Assad, who has been
waging a vile war since 2011,” declared Stéphane Grimaldi, director of the Caen
Memorial museum, to Agence France-Presse (AFP). And our brave redresser of
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