The Guardian: Buyer Beware

This being the internet age, I suspect that many consumers of international news are now resorting to the Guardian, whether the UK original, or the Australian spin-off. 

'Buyer beware' is my advice. On Palestine/Israel, you invariably get softcore Zionism, and on Syria, crap like this:

"The hope must be that criminal justice will one day close in on Syria's murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad, his henchmen and enablers... It may take time... but criminal investigators will eventually work their way up the chain of responsibility to incriminate Syria's tyrant for the slaughter of his own people for almost eight straight years... The Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia were held two decades after the genocides. Pinochet was arrested eight years after his dictatorship ended in Chile. Slobodan Milosevic dies in jail, not in a palace." (Assad can still be brought to justice - and Europe's role is crucial, Natalie Nougayrede, 1/3/19)

The good news is that a scan of the comment thread which follows Nougayrede's purple prose reveals that the overwhelming bulk of readers just aren't buying her regime change line.

As one astute reader wrote scathingly, "I am utterly amazed that the comments were ever opened for this article. In fact, there are hardly any Guardian articles open for comment these days. Sometimes I think I might as well be reading Hello magazine."

Exactly why he was amazed becomes clear from his/her second comment: "Natalie Nougayrede - I've never read an article so out of touch with reality. The US, UK, and one or two others, were responsible for fomenting this war; and it never was a civil war. The people who belong in the dock in the Hague are the leaders of these countries. And, as has been known for a long time, Assad did not use chemical weapons against his own people or anyone else. Assad, the Russians, and the Iranians deserve credit for preventing the destruction of yet another Middle Eastern country by Western forces and their proxy terrorist groups which, as always, when it suits them, ignore or flout international law. Iraq was an eye-opener for me. The lies and complicity of our Western mainstream media and its journalists are utterly deplorable, and this article and its like deserve the utmost condemnation."

That comment, by the way, had garnered 42 likes last time I looked.