Why the Press Pays Less Attention to the Murder of Journalists Not Named Khashoggi
- Ironically, the same members of the media who have been obsessed with Khashoggi and the Saudi-US alliance have devoted little space to the reality that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government has been imprisoning, torturing and killing journalists for years.
- The ongoing story of Khashoggi's murder at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, more than being a function of concern for the Saudi journalist, was less important to Western journalists than attacking the Trump administration.
While the October 2 murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, continues to be discussed across the world, the November 23 assassination of a Syrian journalist, Raed Fares, and his devoted friend and cameraman, Hammoud al-Jneid, gunned down in Fares's home village of Kafrandel, Syria.
This neglect is noteworthy: Fares was among the most prominent critics of Syrian President Bashar Assad's brutal regime. According to CBS News:
In 2013, Fares posted a satirical YouTube video depicting cave men repeatedly killed by the men representing the Syrian government as men wearing American and European Union flags idly sit by. "This is how the international community reacted to the genocide committed by Assad against the Syrian people," Fares wrote.
Fares was also a key voice in the "Arab Spring," and he daily challenged Assad as well as terrorist organizations operating in Syria, such as the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah. According to The New Yorker:
Three years before his assassination, to the day, Fares posted a photo on Facebook of a protest banner lampooning the fact that other countries were fighting proxy wars in Syria: "BLACK FRIDAY SPECIAL OFFER, WHOEVER WHEREVER YOU ARE, BRING YOUR ENEMY AND COME FIGHT IN SYRIA FOR FREE (FREE LAND & SKY) LIMITED TIME OFFER."
"In the absence of peaceful, democratic political voices," Fares noted in an op-ed for The Washington Post, "terrorists have been able to convince Syria's vulnerable youth that violence and destruction can somehow pave the way to stability."One can view his talk to the Oslo Freedom Forum here. In an interview with NPR, Fares said:
"... Jabhat al-Nusra tried to bomb my car. And I was in it, but I survived. And December, 2014, Jabhat al-Nusra, they kidnapped me from their checkpoint, and three days in their jail. They hanged me to the ceiling for six hours. But an activist in Istanbul, he came and talked to them and convinced them to release me. And earlier this year, they attacked my Radio Fresh station and attacked the Women's Center, which belongs to us."
In 2013, Fares established Radio Fresh, where he bravely broadcast support for the Syrian civilian population, without regard to their religious affinities. In 2014, he escaped being murdered at the hands of ISIS.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13375/journalists-murder
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