The Morning Star on the Douma massacre, Russia, and Israel

Submitted by martin on 10 April, 2018 - 3:38 Author: Martin Thomas

The Morning Star's editorial of 10 April 2018 shows how perception of world affairs can be skewed by the Star's fixed insistence on seeing Russia (even way-post-USSR, blatantly capitalist Russia) as the good guy, and Israel as the world's prime source of evil.

Israel did a bombing raid against Assad on 8 April after the Douma massacre of 6 April, says the Star... as a ploy to divert attention from the killings in Gaza.

The Star stops short of claiming that the Assad regime's chemical-weapons slaughter in Douma - which is what "diverted attention" from Gaza, if anything did - was in fact done by Israel. Since the Star also claims that the Islamist rebels against Assad depend on support from Israel, it could hardly do that.

Those (Sunni) Islamist rebels the Star denounces as "jidhadists" and "terrorist groups". The (Shia) Islamist militia Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, which allies with Assad, is in contrast described approvingly as a "resistance group".

Though not saying who else did the chemical-weapons attack, or clearly saying that no such attack was made, the Star insists that Assad could not have carried out the massacre. It quotes George Galloway as an authoritative voice supporting its view. Yes, the Star says, Assad had chemical weapons, but the Star is sure that Moscow demanded he dispose of them, and he did.

The Star denounces the White Helmets civil-defence organisation at some length, dismissing it with the comment that it is "funded largely by Nato countries and Japan".

The old Stalinist politics at least had the rationale that the Communist Parties believed, at some level, that the old USSR really was socialist. And from 1968 at latest - when the British CP condemned the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia - the CPs at least attempted some independence of judgement.

The Morning Star's current decayed post-Stalinist politcs are getting worse rather than better.

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