British analyst Craig Murray, who served as the U.K. Ambassador to Uzbekistan before being removed for exposing that the U.S. and the U.K. were involved in torture in that country during the war on Afghanistan, authored a diatribe in Consortium News—originally published on his Craig Murray website on Jan. 7—against the Western press coverup of Israel’s bombing in Lebanon and media misreporting of the coup in Syria. He said he had visited the locations in Lebanon which had been bombed by Israel, and that they were not Hezbollah sites, as Israel claimed and reported as such in Western press. He reveals that “not one single member of Western mainstream media ever visited a bomb site in Lebanon to verify whether Israeli claims it was a Hezbollah base or missile site were true. Because they knew the answer is negative, as I found across dozens of bomb sites, and that is not the narrative they are paid to promote.”
He goes on that the media moguls all gladly proclaim the HTS takeover in Syria as a democratic victory against a dictator, despite the fact that the HTS is officially still considered a terrorist organization in the U.K., in order to “promote Syria’s new Israel-, U.S.A.- and Türkiye-sponsored ‘democratic’ government of entirely ‘reformed’ HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] Wahhabists.”
Murray then notes: “Now in the past I had unfortunate arguments with some who broadly take a similar view of politics to me—Vanessa Beeley comes to mind—because I was never a fan of the Assad regime and its human rights record. Nevertheless, I consistently preferred Assad to the NATO-, Gulf- and Israel-sponsored extremist Wahhabi ‘rebels’ who were fighting him.
