In a video analysis on Tuesday, we spoke about how one Western journalist — Patrick Cockburn of London’s The Independent — had reduced Syria’s conflict to “the next 9/11”, with the opposition disappearing in favor of “extremists” and “jihadists” bent on attacking the West.
But was this merely the excess of one reporter, effectively embedded with regime officials on his trips to Syria?
No.
Step up, The Washington Post and columnist David Ignatius.
The Post’s headline this morning verges on panic, “A Nightmare Group in Syria Could Target the US”.
Perhaps needless to say, this group is not the Assad regime, with its barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and “starve or surrender” sieges. Those don’t threaten “us”, after all.
Instead, Ignatius writes about the “hyper-militant terrorist group” Islamic State of Iraq and as-Sham, barely distinguishing between it and other factions such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham — and not mentioning anyone else in the insurgency, let alone the non-violent opposition.
His attention is only on “about 10,000 to 15,000 foreigners”, including about “1,500 foreign fighters who hold European passports, which allow them to travel freely across the continent and to enter the United States with relative ease”.
Ignatius concludes, “The United States may be less focused on the jihadists than it was a decade ago, but they remain very much interested in the United States.”
He does not note the mirror image: Ignatius, Cockburn, and other Western journalists are “very much interested” in the “jihadists”.
Excluding almost everyone else in Syria.
