By Ollie Richardson
In what is surely a sign of absolute desperation by the State Department, western media has been given the green light to gift the White Helmets a huge PR boost by making a movie about them and publishing it on Netflix. The video below, released on September 7th, is a trailer for the movie – called “The White Helmets”:
Time magazine helped the launch of this fraudulent fairytale; the following is an excerpt from their sales pitch:
A trailer released first to TIME, ahead of the Sept. 16 premiere, begins with a child placing a white helmet on a man who then kisses them goodbye and says “Don’t give mom a hard time. Okay?” Seconds later, a helicopter appears overhead, and then a short series of explosions can be heard. The sights and sounds that follow—dust, screams, bodies and blood—are what the White Helmets face every day. Stretcher bearers hurry into a mess of cement and iron and dense smoke, and emerge carrying a child.
The White Helmets gained fame in 2014 when rescuers pulled an infant from the rubble—he was later dubbed the “miracle baby”—and again in August when the group helped save Omran Daqneesh. The boy in Aleppo was carried to an ambulance after an airstrike destroyed his family’s home and photographed alone and in shock. Footage of the rescue went viral, bringing attention back to the White Helmets and the crisis in the northern city that for years has been divided by government and opposition forces.
Often, the White Helmets are targeted by the government. In what’s called a “double-tap,” suspected Syrian government planes drop an initial barrel bomb at a site and then a second one after the rescuers begin to arrive. In June 2015, Raed Saleh, head of the group, made an impassioned speech to the United Nations Security Council that specifically asked for an end to such indiscriminate killings. Overall, more than 130 rescuers have died.
At one point during his speech, he asked, “can you imagine even one single day that we live?”
This is not the first cinematic piece to glorify Al-Qaeda-in-disguise: Al Jazeera published a short documentary in August 2016 called “Syria’s White Helmets – Witness“, and shortly afterwards they published another one called “The White Helmets Are Saving Syria From Within“.
What is most worrying is that this movie will be viewed by many people who are not necessarily politically inclined, but will watch it anyway if there is nothing else of interest. Accompanied by a few beers on a Friday night, this propaganda is as potent and effective as the many 9/11 disinformation movies that spend 90 mins deciding which fuel burnt the twin towers down, and not who actually did it.
Unfortunately, the nationwide consensus on which narrative is the correct one is often cemented in place by people like Rupert Murdoch and Ken Roth. Within the first few months of the Syrian War, words like “regime”, “barrel bomb”, and “chemical weapons” were already embedded in the minds of mass media consumers, but the emergence of new media such as Al Masdar News has effectively neutralised the efforts of rags like the New York Times to convince its viewership that 2+2=5.
Here is a better (truthful) White Helmets movie:
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