Cockburn's Counterpunch Runs a Syrian Mouthpiece

Joining the other insects and virtual varmints who turn out anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda for Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch cyber-rag is now one Ramzy Baroud. Baroud's contribution to web thought is to argue that the US is simply being manipulated by dem Joos in Israel into confrontation with Syria. In Baroud's "mind":

"And now that the Lebanese people have had the courage to demand that Syria stop meddling with their affairs, will Americans prove equally courageous to demand and expect an end to Israel's role in shaping American foreign policy? Time will tell."

So who exactly is this intellectual prodigy?

Turns out Baroud runs a PLO-front propaganda outfit called Palestine Chronicle, and also moonlights for Al-Jazeera. But Baroud is also a pro-Syrian propagandist and he has worked for a Syrian propaganda publisher, which published Baroud's tissue of lies concerning the Battle of Jenin.

Baroud is author of "Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion."

To understand it, imagine that someone were to publish a book about how Germans were brutalized and terrorized by American racist GIs who unjustly occupied their country in 1945 for no reason at all besides anti-German bigotry. Imagine that this same book never quite got around to mentioning that the brutal Americans had occupied Germany only after Nazi Germany launched World War II, which produced 55 million deaths. Imagine that this book ignored Auschwitz and Dachau. Well, if you can imagine such a book, then you are only partly on your way to understand Searching Jenin, a vile shallow propaganda screed that makes the PLO's Covenant look like a masterpiece in cool impartial analysis.

The book is published by Cune Press, a small propaganda outfit based in Seattle that produces the sorts of Far Left anti-American and pro-Arab books of which Osama bin Laden would approve, and with a special interest in printing sycophantic volumes about Syria.

These days, even the BBC admits that there was no massacre at all in Jenin and at most a handful of Palestinian civilianz got killed in the crossfire when Israeli troops hunted down terrorists. The Israeli Arab film producer Mohammed Bakri, partly responsible for inventing the lies about a supposed "massacre" in the battle in his film "Jenin Jenin", now admits that his film about the battle is full of lies.

Baroud's propaganda "book" about the same battle contains a foreword by the Khmer Rouge's apologist Noam Chomsky, also a Burncock columnist, and jacket endorsements by professional Arab propagandist James Zogby and other anti-Israel thugs.

As one would expect from this genre of propaganda, one never learns in the book why Israel launched Operation Defensive Wall against Jenin terrorists in the first place. You will never hear how the UNs own investigators proved there was no massacre at all in Jenin. You will never hear about how so many Israeli troops were killed there because they were risking their lives NOT to harm any innocent Palestinians. And you will never learn that Jenin was crawling with mass murdering terrorists and those who had organized suicide bombings against Jewish civilians.

The book begins by telling us the tragic saga of photojournalist Mahfouz Abu Turk, who - Baroud insists - mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the Jenin battle, implying that he was murdered by the rampaging Israelis. Only in the appendix will you discover that Abu Turk is alive and well, was never injured, and I guess disappeared only in the sense that Baroud did not know where he was for a few hours.

This is the latest recruit to the ranks of the Cockburn Cockroaches.