Given the increasing hysteria of the media’s current reporting of the situation in Syria, which may well be the precursor of more violence to be rationalised as “humanitarian intervention”, we’re returning to our ongoing series on the BBC’s “Saving Syria’s Children” documentary and the numerous problems arising from it (see our previous articles here and here).
If you have been following and if you’ve read Robert Stuart’s excellent investigation, you’ll know the BBC Panorama program in question featured a doctor named Rola Hallam, who works with the charity “Hand in Hand For Syria”, and who – according to the program – just happened tp be present at the Atareb hospital in Syria, with a Panorama film crew when a “chemical attack” occurred nearby at a school in Aleppo.
We’ve already covered many of the reasons to question or even reject portions of this narrative, as well as some of the issues surrounding the charity Hand in Hand For Syria, but this short film airs yet another area of doubt. Was/is Rola Hallam’s father, Mousa al-Kurdi, just “a gynaecologist” as Rola herself claims, or is he in fact a senior figure in the major opposition group – the Syrian National Council?
There is a good deal of evidence for the latter, as Robert Stuart shows:
…According to a February 2013 article written Dr Hallam’s colleague, Dr Saleyha Ahsan, Dr al-Kurdi is “involved politically with the Syrian National Council”. In an Al Jazeerainterview Dr al-Kurdi passionately advocates for the Syrian National Council’s recognition as the “sole representative” of all Syrians and relates how, following his address to the Friends of Syria summit in Istanbul in 2012 (attended by Hillary Clinton), he told Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu “You’re not doing enough” and demanded of Professor Davutoğlu and several other foreign ministers, including Victoria Nuland of the US State Department, “either you defend us or you arm the Syrian Free Army to defend us – you have the choice.
The question matters, of course, because the daughter of “a gynaecologist” can be presented as a non-political figure simply concerned with “saving Syria’s children”, whereas the daughter of a senior figure in the Syrian National Council – a major force in the campaign to remove Assad – can’t be viewed in such a light.
Is this why Hallam conveniently forgets to mention this aspect of her dad’s career? You be the judge.
On the same topic we need to ask why other members of the “Hand in Hand” charity have been photographed wielding “a cornucopia of armaments”?
More on that at a later date.
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