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Syrian Bloodbaths: From Nefarious to Benign Gregory Shupak ([link removed])


In The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that the American ruling class and corporate media regard bloodbaths as being constructive, nefarious or benign. A constructive bloodbath is typically carried out by the US or one of its proxies, and is endorsed in establishment media. The most obvious contemporary example is the genocidal US/Israeli campaign in Gaza, approved by media commentators in the New York Times (2/11/25 ([link removed]) ), Wall Street Journal (3/20/25 ([link removed]) ) and Washington Post (10/24/23 ([link removed]) ).
Headlines condemning massacres in Syria

Headlines from the Washington Post (8/27/12 ([link removed]) , 8/23/12 ([link removed]) ), New York Times (6/2/11 ([link removed]) ) and Wall Street Journal (6/15/12 ([link removed]) ) treated massacres in Assad's Syria as what Chomsky and Herman called a "nefarious bloodbath."

The two other approaches that Chomsky and Herman outline illuminate the corporate media’s approach to Syria. When Bashar al-Assad was in power in Syria and the US was seeking his overthrow, corporate media treated killings that his government and its allies carried out as nefarious bloodbaths: Their violence was denounced in corporate press with unambiguous language, and prompted demands that the US intervene against them.

For David Brooks of the Times (6/2/11 ([link removed]) ), the Assad government was “one of the world's genuinely depraved regimes,” and thus it was necessary for Barack Obama to “embrace the cautious regime-change strategy that is his current doctrine.”

An editorial in the Journal (6/15/12 ([link removed]) ) saw “Mr. Assad's efficient butchery” as a reason that the US should conduct an “air campaign targeting elite Syrian military units." This

could prompt the general staff to reconsider its contempt for international opinion, and perhaps its allegiance to the Assad family. Short of that, carving out some kind of safe haven inside Syria would at least save lives.

The Post published an editorial (8/27/12 ([link removed]) ) saying that “according to opposition sources, at least 300 people were slaughtered in the town of Daraya late last week.” The piece added that this

newest war crime, like those before it, reflects a deliberate strategy. As the Post’s Liz Sly has reported [8/23/12 ([link removed]) ], the Assad regime is seeking to regain control over opposition-held areas by teaching their residents that harboring the rebels will be punished with mass murder.

The paper called the Obama administration “morally bankrupt” for not taking more aggressive military action in Syria.


** Embracing Damascus
------------------------------------------------------------
France 24: Syria monitor says more than 100 people killed in two days of sectarian violence

France 24 (5/1/25 ([link removed]) ): "The latest round of violence follows a series of massacres in Syria's coast in March, where the Observatory said security forces and allied groups killed more than 1,700 civilians, mostly Alawites."

In the months since Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power, with substantial assistance ([link removed]) from the US and its partners (New York Times, 8/2/17 ([link removed]) ), his government has opened ([link removed]) Syria’s economy to international capital, arrested ([link removed]) Palestinian resistance fighters, indicated ([link removed]) that it's open to the prospect of normalizing relations with Israel, and opted not to defend Syria against Israel’s frequent bombings ([link removed]) and ever-expanding occupation
([link removed]) of Syrian land. In that context, Washington has embraced Damascus, with Trump praising ([link removed]) al-Sharaa personally, and finally lifting ([link removed]) the brutal sanctions regime on Syria.

As these developments have unfolded, US media have switched from treating bloodbaths in Syria as nefarious to treating them as benign. A benign bloodbath is one to which corporate media are largely indifferent. They may not openly cheer such killings, but the atrocities get minimal attention, and don’t elicit high-volume denunciations. There are few if any calls for perpetrators to be brought to justice or ousted from government.

Those unaware of the shifts in Syria and US policy toward it might expect the horrors of Syria’s recent massacres to generate a cavalcade of media denunciation. In March, the new Syrian government’s security forces and groups allied to it reportedly killed 1,700 civilians, most of them from the Alawite minority (France 24, 5/1/25 ([link removed]) ), following attacks that Assad loyalists carried out on security and military sites.

Amnesty International (4/3/25 ([link removed]) ) reported:

Our evidence indicates that government-affiliated militias deliberately targeted civilians from the Alawite minority in gruesome . . . attacks—shooting individuals at close range in cold blood. For two days, authorities failed to intervene to stop the killings.

Amnesty called the killings “reprisals,” a reference to the sectarian view that the Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam, deserve to be collectively punished for the Assad government’s crimes. The group observed that families of Alawite “victims were forced by the authorities to bury their loved one[s] in mass burial sites without religious rites.”

The Druze, a religious minority with Islamic roots that accounts for approximately 3–4% of Syria’s population, have also been massacred. At the end of April, “auxiliary forces to the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” killed 42 Druze in an ambush on the Damascus/Al-Suwaidaa highway, and another ten civilians from Druze community “were executed by forces affiliated with the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25 ([link removed]) ). Some of the victims’ bodies were incinerated (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/1/25 ([link removed]) ).


** 'Lack of control'
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: Syria Is Trying to Get Up With a Boot on Its Neck

A New York Times op-ed (4/2/25 ([link removed]) ) treated the killing of "hundreds of Alawite civilians" as a sign of " the government’s lack of control over its own forces."

Yet commentary on the grisly mass murders of people from these minority groups has been decidedly muted. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times together have published just one op-ed that focused on the killings. The lone piece (Washington Post, 3/10/25 ([link removed]) ) pointed out that Syrian government forces have evidently “embark[ed] on the sort of sectarian slaughter of civilians that many had feared when rebel forces gained power three months ago.” Author Jim Geraghty, however, stopped short of issuing the call for US military intervention that characterizes media responses to nefarious bloodbaths.

Other op-eds treated the al-Sharaa government’s violence as little more than a footnote. A Journal editorial (5/9/25 ([link removed]) ) offering a rundown of recent developments in Syria waited until the last line of the sixth paragraph to mention that “government-aligned forces have slaughtered Alawites and attacked Druze,” as if doing so were a minor detail. A Times essay (4/2/25 ([link removed]) ) took nearly 800 words before referencing the massacres:

And in March, when insurgents loyal to the Assad regime clashed with security groups affiliated with the new government and bands of fighters—including some nominally under the control of the government, according to rights groups—responded by killing hundreds of Alawite civilians as well as suspected insurgents, it displayed the government’s lack of control over its own forces and ignited fears that the country was descending into sectarian violence.

Painting massacres of hundreds of civilians from minority groups as a “respon[se]” is far from the full-throated denunciations deployed for nefarious bloodbaths: “killing hundreds of Alawite civilians” evidently does not show that the government is “depraved," but rather demonstrates its "lack of control over its own forces."


** 'Recent surge in sectarian violence'
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: Trump Meets Syria’s Leader After Vowing to Lift Sanctions on Ravaged Nation

A New York Times news report (5/14/25 ([link removed]) ) on a meeting between the US and Syrian presidents referred vaguely to "a recent surge in sectarian violence."

For the New York Times (5/14/25 ([link removed]) ), the massacres of Alawites and Druze weren’t important enough to warrant mentioning in their rundown of Trump’s meeting with al-Sharaa. The paper referred instead to “the unstable situation” in the country and “a recent surge in sectarian violence.” That vague language provided no sense of the severity of the violence, or of the al-Sharaa government’s share in the responsibility for it, highly relevant information in an article about the Washington/Damascus embrace.

The phrase “recent surge in sectarian violence” is particularly obfuscatory, as it wrongly suggests that it’s impossible to assign responsibility for that violence, even though it’s well-established that the government and its allies have done most of the killing (Amnesty International, 4/3/25 ([link removed]) ; Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25 ([link removed]) ). The wording also inaccurately suggests that this phenomenon is new, an implication debunked by the Carnegie Endowment (5/14/25 ([link removed]) ):

In 2015, fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, a predecessor of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS], which is led by Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, killed at least 20 Druze villagers in Qalb Lozeh in Idlib governorate. Others were coerced into converting to Sunni Islam, while Druze shrines were desecrated and graves defaced.

Similarly, in August 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra ([link removed]) was part of a coalition of armed groups that attacked predominantly Alawite villages, killing 190 civilians, including 18 children and 14 elderly men (BBC, 10/11/13 ([link removed]) ). That track record might have been the basis for expressions of moral outrage against the al-Sharaa government’s “butchery,” but, fortunately for HTS and its partners, their massacres are benign.

The relative indifference with which the corporate media has treated sectarian killings carried out by HTS and allies, both before and since they came to power, could also have something to do with the US’s role in helping foment sectarianism in Syria in the run up to the war in the country (Truthout, 10/9/15 ([link removed]) ).

A New York Times (5/16/25 ([link removed]) ) report on Saudi Arabia and Qatar paying off Syria’s World Bank debt called that move "the latest victory for Syria’s new government as it attempts to stabilize the nation after a long civil war and decades of dictatorship.” Reporter Euan Ward went on to say that “there are still significant challenges ahead for the fractured nation, which has been rocked by repeated waves of sectarian violence in recent months.” At no point did Ward note that the government he said was trying to “stabilize” the nation has been carrying out that “sectarian violence.”

Nor did the Times' May 14 or May 16 articles mention, as the Conversation (5/12/25 ([link removed]) ) did, that civil society groups have called for the al-Sharaa government “to issue protective religious rulings for minority communities"—the sort of step a government would take if it were seeking to “stabilize the nation.” "Their appeals have gone unanswered,” the Conversation noted.

The difference in the tenor of coverage of killings by the Assad government and that of the al-Sharaa government’s killings demonstrates the cynicism of corporate media’s humanitarian rhetoric whenever a state in America’s crosshairs is accused of serious crimes. Such preening is not merely hypocritical. It has nothing to do with protecting any population, and everything to do with how the US ruling class generates consent for its blood-drenched empire.
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