Sweet Child In Crime

There’s a new propaganda game in town.

If you remember back to the days of 1990, there was a certain girl who claimed to have been a nurse in a Kuwaiti hospital when Iraqi soldiers threw babies on the floor to steal incubators. Her “testimony” went a long way in persuading the American Congress to authorise war against Iraq. Only, later, it was admitted that she wasn’t even in Iraq at the time. She was, in fact, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Warshington, and had been coached by a marketing firm to sell the case for war.

When the Killary Klingon-created war against Libya was in preparation, the internet was filled with claims that Gaddafi was feeding his troops Viagra to commit mass rapes, and one woman claimed to have been a victim. She subsequently not only turned out to be a hoaxer, she found a home...where else...but the Imperialist States of Amerikastan, where she ended up in jail.

Then in Syria, there was the case of the so-called Gay Girl In Damascus, who was soon exposed as a 40-year-old British man. The idea of this hoaxer was to present a case for a western invasion of Syria, but he was exposed fairly early on. And at that time it was assumed in the imperialist nations that the Syrian government would fall without any overt invasion anyway.

Things are a bit different now. It’s late 2016, and the terrorists are on the run. The remnants of several groups are cut off and surrounded in East Aleppo, under relentless Russian and Syrian bombing and Syrian and Hizbollah ground assault. A jihadi counteroffensive on Hama to try and take the heat off Aleppo failed disastrously. As America’s pet Al Qaeda cannibals cower under the bombs, and lose one sector of Aleppo under another, the only hope they have left is if Amerikastan enters the war on their side.

Enter Bana Alabed.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared Bana Alabed. Apparently a seven year old girl in East Aleppo, she tweeted, literally from under Putin’s and Assad’s bombs, begging the “world” to save her, even “at the cost of nuclear war”. The usual suspects where mediaganda go – the Brutish Bullshit Craporation, the Telegraph or the Guardian – eagerly lapped her up and regurgitated her, without caring about how utterly unlikely this would be. After all, it was no business of theirs to expose a transparent fake for a fake.

But Bana Alabed is fake. She is fake even if you don’t think about the utter implausibility of some kid with no previous history of tweeting suddenly appearing out of the blue, speaking perfect English at that, and being able to tweet more or less nonstop while the bombs that are allegedly falling all around don’t seem to affect her WiFi signal. All you have to do is look at this photo, which “Bana Alabed” claims shows her reading in order to “forget the bombs”:

Note the strategically placed doll, the impeccably combed hair and clean clothes, the deliberate appeal to the middle class market. Bana Alabed is a packaged product, almost certainly created in consultation with an advertising agency, to gather the maximum attention by pretending One Of Us is under threat from Evil Assad. And note the strange distortion on the right of the photograph. According to a friend who knows about these things, it’s almost certainly the result of bad Photoshopping.

Why would a seven-year-old girl need to Photoshop herself?

Let me make a prediction: when East Aleppo is liberated, hopefully within the next few days, “Bana Alabed” will abruptly disappear. Not only will there be no trace of her, no evidence will be found to show any such person ever existed. The True Believers, of course, will keep on believing.

Because, as Mark Twain said, it’s easier to fool someone than to convince him that he’s been fooled.

 

I probably spent more time on this cartoon than they did on their fake "Bana Alabed", honestly