Robin Yassin-Kassab has distinguished himself as one of Britain’s leading regime-change propagandists. Whether it’s Libya, Syria or Venezuela, Mr. Yassin-Kassab can be handsomely relied upon to supply the clever and poetic armoury to push forward narratives to facilitate Western imperialism militarily overhauling a nation-state not to its predisposition. For most of the last decade, Syria was his favoured target for spewing regime-change propaganda. His byline has furnished The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Newsweek as well as the media of the Gulf state despots such as Al-Jazeera, The National and Al-Araby. Yassin-Kassab’s main contribution to the Syria regime-change campaign culminated in a book he co-authored with a certain Ms Leila Al-Shami titled, ‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’.

War or regime-change propaganda is obviously nothing new. For the hundred years before the outbreak of the war on Syria, the Western establishment have provided bogus claims as pretext for war. Among the most infamous are Huns eating Belgian babies during World War One; Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin when the United States directly attacked Vietnam on the pretext of falsely claiming it was attacked by the Vietnamese; Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals in 1990; Weapons of Mass Destruction falling in the hands of al-Qaeda peddled by George Bush and Tony Blair regimes; Iraq’s purchase of Uranium from Niger; African mercenaries on Viagra killing and raping their way through Libya before the regime-change in Libya commenced. This essay argues that Yassin-Kassab’s account in ‘Burning Country’ of what happened in Aleppo in July 2012 must be seen in this ignoble historical context of regime-change propaganda. He begins his account of Aleppo with the following:   Continue reading →