Thursday, August 21, 2014

How many journalists have been killed by the Syrian government? Let us ask Human Rights Watch

A Human Rights Watch staffer tweeted this today: "Fadi Al-Qadi (@fqadi) 8/20/14, 1:33 PM
#Syria government still detains 492 media workers & journalists, #ISIS detains 23. Now we know the price!  "@SN4HR pic.twitter.com/4pOYn4OsDX".  (And it was retweeted by the Sarah Lee Whitson, the Director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of HRW).  I thought that the number was way too high so I decided to look into their evidence. It is based on a poster (image attached in the tweet above) by a Syrian exile opposition group.  But the hilarious part is their definition of journalist: in English Fadi Al-Qadi called them "media workers" but in English in the same poster attached they are referred to as "media activists".   So Al-Qadi changed the description from media activists to media workers only to make it more credible.  The whole idea of the campaign by this Syrian exile opposition group is to prove that Syrian regime is worse than ISIS or that ISIS is not that bad.