People have asked me for a response to the Newsbud exposé of Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett, entitled Syria Under Siege: Guarding Against Wolves in Sheep Clothing, for which I was interviewed. The video is of course Newsbud’s, and not the one I would have made. Some of what Newsbud presented I disagree with, and some is a revelation.
1) My non-negotiable position on Beeley and Bartlett is that they are prepared to lie and vilify at the top of a hat for personal or tribal interest. I don’t think that came across in the video strongly enough.
2) It’s my understanding that Tim Anderson was wrongly imprisoned for terrorism, and, assuming I’m right, I regret Newsbud suggesting otherwise, as I indicated to Sibel Edmonds yesterday. It’s difficult to see either Anderson or the Grand Mufti as condoning murder, frankly.
3) The question of whether the “democratic opposition” in Syria should be termed terrorists is an interesting one. We’ve all seen the scary-looking pictures of the opposition, and their leaders like Saudi Muhaysini, we’ve seen the video (till removed) of al Zinki sawing off Abdullah Issa’s head, we know about the shelling of civilians in Aleppo and Damascus. We want them defeated. On the other hand, the Russians have been negotiating the surrender of thousands of insurgents, with a view to them being reincorporated into Syrian society. How well this will work out remains to be seen, but it’s probably not for us to make it any harder.
4) Eva Bartlett’s “outing” of Zak Alsawi’s alleged draft dodging is simply incredible – this alone justifies Sibel Edmond’s questioning her sense of decency. As she probably knows, Zac paid his military exemption in 2008. As a dual US and Syrian citizen not born in Syria, Zac would lose my US citizenship if he joined the Syrian military, unable to visit his family in the US
In any case, in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, one meets a large number of young men who are there to escape the war. Most people would not dream of throwing this in their faces, or outing them to others.
5) Sibel had some interesting things to say about doctors working for MSF. However the evidence that at the top level the raison d’etre of MSF, like Amnesty, is propaganda, and much (or all) of what MSF has underwritten in Syria has been propaganda, was glossed over. It will be interesting to see how many doctors have actually been caring for civilians in Idlib, for example.
6) I have always thought Beeley and Bartlett knew their stuff about Syria, with no need to lie to get their point across. However there has been a certain amount of sensationalising of what is known, and improving the story. There is evidence that Ghassan Alabed, Bana’s lawyer father, worked in the eye hospital when ISIS used it as a base. Given the Syrian government’s policy of reconciliation, it’s not for us to declare, as Beeley did, that Ghassan served on a sharia count condemning Syrian soldiers to torture and death. We don’t know that he served on such a court, the courts have a wide range of functions, and in any case, Ghassan, clearly NOT an extremist, may even have been a force for a good.
Likewise, the declaration that the White Helmets carried out a mass murder as a false flag in Khan Sheikhoun. There is no evidence that anyone died at Khan Sheikhoun – it’s not for us to point the finger at everyone involved in the hoax as a war criminal, whatever our own views of them.
7) Beeley and Bartlett have done some good work as Syrian activists – the videos Beeley did in Aleppo on its liberation were particularly fine. However they are also guilty of piggy-backing onto the work of others, without due recognition, and then taking ownership of that cause. A prime example is the White Helmets. It seems that the first person to reveal the important truths about the White Helmets was Rick Sterling in Seven Steps of Highly Effective Manipulators , April 2015 (though Cory Morningstar had made the connection between the White Helmets and Soros). Beeley’s article in August, Syria: The Propaganda Ring, relied heavily on Sterling, but he is given little credit nowadays.
When Beeley had a fit about OffGuardian not giving credit to herself and others in a factsheet published by Off-Guardian, the upshot, after Beeley had accepted Catte’s offer of private discussion, was the following.
and
So still no acknowledgement of Rick Sterling, whose contribution to White Helmet debate is destined to disappear without trace.
In July 2017 Eva Bartlett, who had taken no interest in the Bana Alabed saga, and contributed nothing to the research to date and when it mattered, chose to write an article herself. She contacted me to ask which article I would like referenced, I said Crucifixion, fine she said, I’ve got it open here. Subsequently I wrote a critical piece about her friend Hayward’s eulogy to Eliot Higgins, and coincidentally Bartlett chose not to credit me then or ever for work I had done on the Alabeds. I don’t own the Bana case, I’m not complaining. However Bartlett, in her interview with James Corbett, an egregious and dishonest piece of self-promotion on several counts, chose to credit to her friend Khaled Iskef work that was done by @Navsteva, which was clearly credited in my article, which she would have read at least once
8) Leaving aside the perfectly natural concern about Tim Anderson, the defence of Beeley and Bartlett appears to be driven largely by tribal interests. It’s hard to take seriously the knee-jerk defense and prating about “truth” from people who have actively condoned or failed to question Beeley and Bartlett’s lies and vilification of others, e.g.
- Bartlett’s slanderous charge that @Navsteva (Scott Gaulke) stalked her (thereby throwing Neil Clark’s genuine case of harassment into jeopardy);
- Beeley’s slanderous charge that I ‘savaged’ her friend in Beirut, a reversal of the truth;
- the lie that criticism of Tim Haywards extolling of Bellingcat was a witch-hunt driven by nefarious motives, when in fact the witchhunt was driven by them;
- the lie that Hayward’s article was a work of “high dialectic”, when the most charitable interpretation is that it was failed satire;
- Beeley’s dishonest labelling of myelf as an Orientalist when I (correctly) pointed out that the great majority of women in Yemen wear the niqab.
These same people condoned Marwa Osman’s lie that I’m a white supremacist.
9) Vanessa Beeley’s bullying behaviour in her attempt to change my article on Robert Fisk and pervert the truth over Maaloula was unconscionable.
Videos, photos, reports were to no avail
To this day Beeley has neither apologise for her behaviour nor conceded she was wrong. On the contrary, a few months later, after I had the temerity to criticise her friend Tim Hayward:
10) I have heard time and time again that it’s ok if Beeley and Bartlett lie their heads off, and all others are expendable, because “they have been to Syria” (subtext: they’re the most famous people who follow me on twitter, or they’re my friends on Facebook, or I’ve been to Syria too so …). As Richie Allen pointed out, this is mythomania: many Syrians, RT journalists and others are reporting on the ground, with fabulous stuff coming out from Ghouta at the moment. And there is no evidence that these journalists are vindictive liars, as Beeley and Bartlett are, beyond any doubt.
Much of this “on the ground” stuff is hyped up. Beeley claimed to be an expert on Maaloulah, of a status out-dignifying videos, photos and news reports, because she had spent two weeks in Maaloula and with fighters from Maaloula. This claim is based on a few hours in Maaloula as part of a package tour (itinerary has been well publicised) and maybe a lunch or two in Beirut.
11) Of COURSE it’s good when people promote the issue of the war on Syria, regardless of whether they are promoting themselves at the same time. For that reason people actively following the Syrian war in the issue have tended to keep any misgivings to themselves. If Newsbud choose to take the lid off and reveal the unethical behaviour associated with some of the activists who have been successful at this promotion, well, maybe it was always inevitable.
barbaramckenzie 
March 22, 2018 at 11:29 pm
Hello Ms McKenzie, thanks for clarifying your position on the Newsbud piece. There is one thing here that I know you’ve gotten wrong because it involves me directly, so in the spirit of us all helping each other to get things right I hope you won’t object to me offering a correction.
I am the tiniest of irrelevant bit players in this drama but I was the person who defended Tim Hayward’s approach to Bellingcat as a “high-level dialectical move”, a phrase you refer to above. So, two things: 1) it had nothing whatsoever to do with Vanessa Beeley or Eva Bartlett; and 2) it wasn’t a “lie” it was my interpretation, which might of course be wrong and which in any case anyone is free to disagree with, even vehemently.
For the record I described his collegial and erring-on-the-side-of-too-respectful approach to Higgins that way because a dialectical process, as I understand it, is one in which a thing contains within it the seeds of its own destruction or transformation, its own internal contradictions. Bear with me here, I’m probably getting boring but I’m nearly done. It is an immanent process driven from within a given framework, in other words, as opposed to a change arising from an external attack or an outside force.
So, when Dr Hayward engaged with Higgins in a friendly way, as opposed to attacking him outright, I believe he was trying to tease out the flaws and contradictions in the Bellingcat position — ultimately to help it to self-destruct…or possibly to transform, or in any case at least to confront its own problems directly. You can’t elicit honest self examination or get someone into their own logical corner by just calling them an asshole, for example. It’s practically impossible to do it at all but by removing the emotional baggage of overt hostility and trying to acknowledge someone’s strengths, you permit dialogue and raise the probability to something above zero.
Maybe that’s not a dialectical approach, I suppose you could just call it diplomatic, or polite, or going the extra mile to encourage actual communication. Or maybe I’ve gotten it 100% wrong from start to finish. But to call it a “lie” strikes me as pretty peculiar, and just sort of lexically incorrect. When you start throwing accusations of lying around and there’s at least one that’s definitively not a lie, it really casts doubt on the argument as a whole. Several of the things you list seem similarly to be matters of perspective where there might be differing opinions with equal claims to validity depending on point of view. Most arguments are that way, are they not?
Anyway, I do appreciate your efforts to distinguish your views from both Sibel’s and Vanessa’s and Eva’s. I look forward to this unfortunate situation resolving back into a focus on Syria and away from personalities.
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March 23, 2018 at 12:23 am
John Schoneboom
You described Tim Hayward’s article On Beliingcat’, at some length as high-dialectic. The basis for this interpretation is the claim that Hayward teased out of Eliot Higgins a damaging admission about the UK government, “Higgins was clear on behalf of Bellingcat that the UK Government position is an ‘opinion’.
In fact this admission consisted of a 1) single 2) deniable 3) tweet made 4) in a conversation to which Hayward was not party, 5) PRIOR to Hayward’s article. The claim that Hayward elicited the admission, through his article, is … claptrap.
What bothers me most about incidents like this, is the number of people who go along with it, the complete absence of any desire to find and speak truth. A number of people cheered your finding, Vanessa Beeley said we all had to up our game to keep up with Hayward, Tim Hayward said he wanted you to write his epitaph. You loved it.
Another example is Marwa Osman’s framing me as a white supremacist. Our twitter history is full of Marwa banging on about her hijab and me giving her loyal support. Marwa and I had met not once, but twice in Beirut a few weeks earlier. But a few days after I criticised her friend Tim Hayward, Marwa deliberately misinterpreted yet another supportive comment, and subsequently called me Western white trash and a white supremacist. Nobody genuinely bought it of course. But again, the striking thing is the number of people, including possibly yourself, who cheered and agreed. Why is it that nobody said, “the story is rubbish, there’s no history, haven’t you anything better?”?
It’s not about truth, it’s all about tribe.
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March 23, 2018 at 6:48 am
Sorry about the doctor mistake, Dr. McKenzie; I should have double checked your correct title. I don’t have idols; my “claim” was just my offered interpretation; and it was based not on anybody’s admission or tweet, but simply and only on how I read Dr Hayward’s writing. And I think it was also me who said that thing about raising your game if you can’t see what he was trying to do, which, ok, was arguably obnoxious of me and failed to allow for other valid interpretations. In short: claptrap, maybe; mendacious, no. Anyway, thanks for responding, I’ll leave you in peace, having done my best to clear up this one minor point.
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March 23, 2018 at 8:42 pm
John Schoneboom.
I have edited my original reply to you – I don’t know if you want to edit your own response.
You suggest that your interpretation is one amongst many options, and equally valid. In fact you are taking what Hayward said – that a past conversation had a certain result -, in order to claim that just the fact of his writing up this past event, accompanied by fulsome praise, is the cause of that result, and so this justified the fulsome praise. If you misunderstood Hayward’s article, this cannot be assumed of others – Vanessa Beeley has acknowledged involvement in its writing.
You must know that your false interpretation was seized on as evidence that criticism of Hayward’s article was illegitimate and therefore could only be inspired by ulterior motives – ‘cui bono’ was bandied about a lot. This was held to justify the campaign of lies and vindictiveness Hayward’s critics were subjected to, with slanderous accusations leveled at us by Beeley and Bartlett, and vicious personal attacks against us by complete strangers. Beeley, who had only a few days previously sent me love and kisses, wrote not one but three Facebook posts attacking me – one of which was called Lord of the Flies…
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March 24, 2018 at 8:26 pm
Hi, We have previously breifly conversed on Facebook. I write concerning MSF’s reports on Al-Quds attack that the Newsbud expose takes as accurate in making the allegation that Eva Bartlett knowingly misled people in her comments at the UN. I have posted comments with links to sources that clearly unndermine that narrative and I am hoping for proper acknowledgement from Newsbud or Sibel Edmonds. I think they should at least post a correction as regards Al-Quds as they depend on mainstream reports of highly dubious validity in making that particular accusation . I paste the comments below in case they are deleted from Newsbud site. Please let me know if you doubt the veracity of the information I am linking to. Thanks
All best
neil Broatch says:
March 23, 2018 at 2:58 pm
Unfortunately the youtube videos of al quds hospital linked in Rick Sterlings open letter to MSF are deleted. https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/05/about-bias-and-propaganda-on-syria/#more-62556 Please can you confirm your position as to the veracity of the original MSF reports? I am not clear what we should take as fact on this. Are the anomalies raised by Sterling not valid? And what of the other accusations levelled about MSF reports from Syria, that I asked about above. I was an MSF donor but cancelled due to concerns over their impartiality raised.in alternative media at that time.
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Sibel Edmonds says:
March 23, 2018 at 4:10 pm
Please refer to our latest post (a short video) at our YouTube channel. It is a 2-min video: documented. Eva Bartlett, during her UN talk said: “The Hospital Was Never Bombed.’ Later, when exposed, she spun that, and said: ‘I did not say that- what I said was the hospital was not completely grounded turned into rubble.’ That is called a LIE. Spinning. Journalistic ethics dictates that: You issue retraction and correct that. That is if that was by mistake. In this case, it was not a mistake but a deliberate misinformation, because SSM had already warned her about ‘The hospital 60% destroyed due to mistaken Russia bombing.’ Every single case in this report was documented, with multiple witnesses, and triple fact-checked, so, unless you bring in a document that (fully documented) challenges the facts we presented (There won’t be any hole: 3 people spent 8 weeks researching, interviewing witnesses, documenting every single case) go back watch the report, and conduct your research (those based on multiple legitimate and ethical sources). Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odhRqFv4k_8&t=50s
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neil Broatch says:
March 23, 2018 at 4:45 pm
The Rick Sterling statment raised anomalies concerning reports on Al quds. If those reports were indeed misleading then Bartlett’s comment at UN may have been sloppy and open to uncharitable interpretation, but if the facts are not as stated in the NPR article you cite then it does undermine your claim that it was misinformation to challenge the veracity of those reports, even if she didnt do so in a properly qualified manner. I may be wrong, but taking the mainstream reporting on Al quds at face value seems to be pivotal to this particular accusation against Bartlett. I dont have the resources to ascertain the facts concerning al quds and I am more interested in the question of MSFs integrety than Eva Bartlett’s. So could you say your view on whether the concerns raised by sources contemporaneously, that I have linked to are not valid? Thanks
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Steven Athearn says:
March 23, 2018 at 8:46 pm
My first thought in seeing this particular confutation of “Bartlett’s claims” was that a proper criticism would cite the article Rick Sterling wrote as it is clearly the original basis of Bartlett’s claim that al Quds hospital was “not attacked” in April 2016 – referring to evidence that the building was in similar shape after the alleged airstrike to what it was in October 2015. Bartlett’s account was given in an extemporary speech in which she made many points in quick succession, and she certainly made a few missteps in what was generally a brilliant rebuttal to mainstream media’s dishonesty on Syria. Yes, it would have been better if she hadn’t made those errors, but what can one expect? My clear recollection is that she has acknowledged on multiple occasions that her words were inaccurate, and that what she had meant to confute was the claim that the hospital had been “reduced to rubble”. Indeed this was the relevant point made in Rick Sterling’s original, which also raised questions about what had really occurred in April 2016 (there were conflicting accounts). The Newsbud report obliquely acknowledges that she acknowledges this – and has so acknowledged repeatedly from the time the first criticisms on this point were made – by saying that she has “walked back the claim” (or words to this effect). The latter in its vagueness rather insinuates something underhanded on Bartlett’s part. But Newsbud fails to acknowledge that Bartlett’s revised statements on the point simply reflect more accurately Sterling’s original.
Does the Newsbud report even allude to Sterling’s open letter to MSF or the questions it had raised? I’ll have to check on second viewing. Certainly there is no substantive discussion of its contents, which would have offered additional important context. In this respect, Newsbud’s focus on Bartlett’s spoken words on one occasion, subsequently corrected, is rather a straw man.
I don’t know whether the words Sibel has quoted, beginning “I did not say that…” are a direct quotation or merely a paraphrase.
On the other hand Bartlett clearly did not say in her talk at the UN that “the hospital was _never_ bombed” (my emphasis). Rather she alleged that it was “not attacked” in April 2016 – as shown in the full quotation of her words which Newsbud has (properly) provided. Again, this is a claim that clearly went beyond the evidence, but different from the unqualified “never bombed” that Newsbud seems to want to attribute to her.
I began this as a reply to Neil Broatch because my initial reactions are similar to his.
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neil Broatch says:
March 24, 2018 at 11:29 am
Blog post from Adam Larson. There seems to be good evidence that there was not an external strike as per MSF and channel 4 and there is reason to believe the video footage of explosions. Included in newsbud presentation was staged. http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/al-quds-hospital-blast-inside-job.html?m=1
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neil Broatch says:
March 24, 2018 at 2:06 am
http://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Al-Quds_Hospital,_Aleppo Extensive and referrenced examination of range of sources on AlQuds
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March 24, 2018 at 9:39 pm
Thank you Neil. It’s a while since I researched MSF statements on al Quds hospital – what I found then was that they were certainly making some false claims. I can’t comment now on whether Newsbud have misinterpreted Eva Bartlett or whether alternatively Bartlett did a bad job of explaining at the UN (or improved the story), at least not without taking the time to review original events and evidence, Bartlett’s statement, and Newsbud’s statement.
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March 26, 2018 at 12:26 am
Just to be clear: regardless of whether Newsbud has misrepresented Eva Bartlett in any way, it would be outrageous for any apology to be offered to either her or Vanessa Beeley before they have apologised for defaming, smearing, attempting to discredit and waging hate campaigns against so many people, Syrian and otherwise, who work hard for Syria.
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March 28, 2018 at 5:55 pm
“There is no evidence that anyone died at Khan Sheikhoun”. I think they are being kept in the same secret hideaway as the people who supposedly died in the passenger jet that supposedly hit the Pentagon on 9/11. (Of course, everybody knows that the Pentagon was attacked that day by a chemtrail funded by the Rothschild bank.)
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March 28, 2018 at 6:55 pm
I’m always interested when people scoff at the idea that the Rothschild family have money and power, or that they use that money and power.
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March 31, 2018 at 6:36 pm
Louis Proyect, now there’s an interesting name from the past. In around 2011, Mr. Proyect, a well known leftist, teamed up with a self-proclaimed “member” of the anarchist movement, Occupy Wall Street, Pham Binh. Together with Clay Claiborne, a crazy military veteran from Los Angeles who was obsessed with or hired to promote the Arab Spring, they launched a web site called The North Star. The purpose of this web site was to convince the Trotskyist left in the U.S. to support not only the NATO/GCC war on Syria, but also the recent NATO intervention in Libya. Pham Binh was obviously working for the U.S.G., but by associating himself with Binh, Proyect revealed himself as a longtime U.S.G. agent, something nobody would have suspected otherwise.
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April 1, 2018 at 2:47 am
Nothing you say surprises me in the least.
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