Sympathy vote. The gang that couldn’t slingshot straight. This is a ridiculous story; equal parts situation comedy, black comedy and farce. It looks like warfare depictions from the fall of Constantinople. The idea is to show how courageous the Free Syrian Army is, rebels with cause but not too much hardware. They are down to their last bebee, stone and spear, outmanned and outgunned but rarin’ to go; to win one for the Gipper, blessed be his name and may he aid the good guys in their time of need.
—Members of the Free Syrian Army use a catapult to launch a homemade bomb during clashes with pro-government soldiers in the city of Aleppo, on Oct. 15.—Read More:http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/15/14458274-syrian-rebels-use-catapult-to-launch-homemade-bomb
Kind of like Roosevelt describing Nicaraguan strongman Somoza, allegedly saying “He’s a son of a bitch , but he’s our son of a bitch.” Well the Rebels are America’s bastard sons and they’re as rotten, kooky and immoral as the creeps they are trying to overthrow. This photo was part of a general sympathy piece that these fighters need advanced weapons. Its pure photo-op; next thing each militia commander will have claimed to have shot down a MIG fighter with one. If they ever have used slingshot bombing it would not appear to have any sort of precision whatever. A hail mary bomb that is more likely to cause civilian death than reach the desired target, a pipe bomb with no predictable trajectory.
The other narratives are that of reinforcing Western orientalism; our guys in Syria are hardy and brave, but are also primitive Arabs who have no sanctity for human life and are backward to boot. Secondly, its a montage of the Rebels ( King David) fighting a larger and favored and implacable foe in the Assad regime, but one lucky strike and the whole structure crumbles.
Finally, what are they doing with all the weapons and money being channeled to them through Quatar and Saudi Arabia?….
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)… Both Mr. Assad and the array of insurgents seeking to topple him have shown no interest in negotiations to resolve the conflict, which has evolved into a civil war that has left more than 20,000 people dead and sent at least 340,000 refugees into neighboring countries, according to United Nations estimates. Prospects for a solution have also been complicated by hard-line Islamic jihadist fighters who have been entering Syria to fight Mr. Assad’s forces but do not share the main opposition’s goal of replacing Mr. Assad with a representative democratic government.
Reports of fighting in Syria on Monday centered mostly in and around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has been a battleground between insurgents and loyalists for nearly three months and is home to some of the world’s oldest cultural treasures. The government’s Syrian Arab News Agency reported Monday that President Assad had ordered the restoration of the 13th-century Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, a Unesco World Heritage site, which amounted to an official confirmation of reports that it had suffered damage.
But the government rejected as a lie the video evidence in the Brown Moses blog on the use of cluster munitions by the Syrian Air Force, which Human Rights Watch cited in a report on Sunday that said bomb remnants seen in the videos “all show damage and wear patterns produced by being mounted on and dropped from an aircraft.” Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/world/middleeast/brahimi-seeks-syria-cease-fire-for-holiday.html?ref=middleeast&_r=0
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