“What the Media Won’t Tell You about Syria” (ReallyGraceful, 2017)
Among other news and facts that the Western mainstream news media ignores about Syria and its war against terrorists and their foreign backers that has raged since 2011, is one juicy piece about the Golan Heights which have been contested territory between Syria and Israel since 1967 when the Israelis seized a large part of that region from Damascus: in 2013, a subsidiary of Genie Energy, an energy company based in Newark, New Jersey, secretly acquired a licence from an Israeli court to drill for oil and natural gas in an area covering half the Golan Heights. Now that fact alone might not seem important in the context of the Syrian War, were it not for who sits on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy: gosh, the directors include US media mogul Rupert Murdoch, former US vice-president Richard Cheney and former CIA head James Woolsey. Could the fact that those luminaries happen to be Genie Energy directors partly explain the slanted Western media reporting on the Syrian War which repeatedly paints the Syrian government as a brutal, repressive dictatorship that attacks its own people with chemical weapons or arrests them by the hundreds if not by the thousands and throws them into the supposedly notorious Saydnaya Prison to be tortured, killed and cremated?
Narrator Grace at ReallyGraceful can’t cover every lie and propaganda smear about Syria and its government so she sensibly concentrates on the Golan Heights and the hydrocarbon wealth there that attracted the attention of Israel and Genie Energy initially. She notes that Israel’s action in awarding a drilling licence to Genie Energy is clearly illegal under international law. She points out also that the war in Syria and the chaos there benefit Israeli interests and Western corporate energy interests: the war drives out refugees from their lands which can be seized by companies of the countries waging war in Syria. Grace also fingers Rex Tillerson, US State Secretary under US President Donald Trump, as having an interest in shutting out Syria and its allies Russia and Iran out of global collective actions against ISIS in Syria: his background as a former executive of energy giant Exxon Mobil might greatly influence the kinds of decisions he makes, especially in a context where Qatar and Iran are rivals to build natural gas pipelines across land from the Persian Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean – land that also includes a sizeable chunk of Syria.
In just seven minutes, Grace elegantly and languidly provides more information about Western energy and geopolitical interests in Syria than the Western news media has so far done. The collage of newsreel stills and photographs of Murdoch and others is put together well and visually arresting but the voice-over narration actually stands on its own very well. Grace’s conversational style may be very rambling and it hardly pauses for breath but at the same time it feels very intimate. The film can be seen at this link.