As the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War 2 rages on, people in developed nations seem to be indifferent to the helplessness many people feel about refugees fleeing war torn countries. This is reflected back to us by often simplified, one sided, media reports.
But away from that basic media snapshot, a different more authentic story emerges.
Host, Ross Ashcroft, met up with former Aleppo resident, Dina Ariss, and Filmmaker, Tazeen Ahmad, to discuss.
More than 13 percent of the British population was born abroad. Yet the media portrayal today of immigrants, migrants and refugees often paints a distorted, agenda-driven picture. It is perhaps tempting to believe that as far as the refugee crisis is concerned, there is an empathy-fail in developed nations. But this ignores the fact that the media’s depiction of the crisis is framed in a way as to engineer inertia.
Former Aleppo resident, Dina Ariss, has first hand, on the ground, experience of how the corporate media’s reporting in Aleppo presents a distorted picture of events to suit the political agendas of Western governments’. Aleppo is a war zone.
But Ariss says that the Western media only broadcast selectively on one aspect of it:
“Your obligation as a journalist is to show the audience the big picture but they decided to look at the situation with their own lens rather than the lens of the people who live their. The media want to push the agenda of political leaders so the news is then filtered to the audience to show that agenda”, says Ariss.
On that point, Investigative Journalist, Patrick Cockburn writes:
“All wars always produce phony atrocity stories along with real atrocities. But in the Syrian case, fabricated news, one sided reporting, have taken over the news agenda to a degree probably not seen since the First World War. The ease which propaganda can now be disseminated is frequently attributed to modern information technology – YouTube, smartphones, Facebook, Twitter. But this lets the mainstream media off the hook. It’s hardly surprising that in a civil war, each side will use whatever means are available to publicize and exaggerate the crimes of the other while denying or concealing similar actions by their own forces.”
Elsewhere, Cockburn makes the point that many of the pictures and films allegedly coming out of Aleppo never show armed groups, even though a war zone is what is supposedly depicted. He points out that there is a lack of knowledge about the provenance of these images and that there is every chance they have been manipulated and are the work of professional PR companies and opposition media specialists funded by foreign governments.
Cockburn relates how a journalist of partly Syrian extraction in Beirut told him how he had been offered $17,000 a month to work for just such an opposition media PR project backed by the British government.
To this incredibly dangerous point, America author, Stephen Kinzer, writes:
“Under intense financial pressure, most American newspapers magazines and broadcast networks have drastically reduced their core of foreign correspondents. Much important news about the world now comes from reporters based in Washington. In that environment access and credibility depend on acceptance of the official paradigms. Reporters who cover Syria check with the Pentagon and the State Department, White House and think tank experts. But after a spin on that soiled carousel they say they’ve covered all sides of the story.”
What both Cockburn and Kinzer are getting at is the fact that people sitting in Washington and London are not prepared to get their hands dirty by reporting on the ground.
Reiterating Ariss’s point, their function is actually to act as echo chambers for the Washington consensus by pushing a partisan political agenda.
The views of Aleppo residents on the ground, like Dina Ariss, are widely ignored because they are seen by the media and public alike, to be unreliable, while the established news channels and broadsheets are considered to be credible.
Tazeen Ahmad says that the kind of disconnect between what’s reported in the mainstream media and the reality on the ground, acts as trigger for many volunteers in camps on the coal face of the crisis.
“I felt this disconnect, particularly among the people we met and spoke to. Not everyone bought in to the racism presented at the time of the Brexit vote or the anti immigration rhetoric”, says Ahmad.
This rhetoric, allied with the images of war victims, is the catalyst for empathetic people to want to do something to help. In a scenario where volunteers come together to meet refugees, many misconceptions tend to be broken down. Refugees are seen less as an abstract problem but, rather, part of the human family who, by circumstances beyond their control, have been forced to leave their homes and to seek refuge in a safe places.
Ariss says that refugees want to be empowered, but that the desensitizing language of the media disempowers and dehumanizes them.
The general assumption is that refugees are a problem when, in truth, they are people who need help to be empowered to help themselves. Ahmad notes that alternative social media outlets have been at the vanguard of democratizing initiatives that have helped volunteers reverse this trend which has consequently saved lives.
The invisible labour of women who comprise the vast majority of volunteers, is barely quantified or recognized. But it’s precisely this demographic who mostly feel compelled to help refugees flee war because they are best able to connect at the natural empathy level.
The notion often regurgitated in the press that people in war zones such as Syria are motivated to leave their country to claim meagre welfare benefits, is dispelled by Ahmad:
“The reality is that most of them don’t want to be here in the West. They have such a love of their motherland and a reference for Syria. Many of them who I met who were volunteers at organizations just saw it as their commitment to make sure that their children aren’t part of a lost generation and receive an education so that they can go back and rebuild Syria. We heard over and over again that dream for wanting to go and rebuild somewhere that’s part of who you are, was something that really landed in this filming experience”, says Ahmad.
Ariss proffers some invaluable advise:
“I believe that it’s not always possible to drive a change in policy. But as a citizen you can always drive a change in your community. If you want to drive a change in the refugee crisis, start opening your heart and open your mind to other people and other views. Don’t look at them as a stranger coming from different country or a different planet because actually they’re exactly the same as you.”
Ahmad concurs:
“We need to take responsibility, individually, for our own consciousness, how we look at identity definition and politics and how we choose to meet the other and start to inquire. Is the value of someone with a UK passport worth more than someone from Syria? Is the race of someone living in America superior than someone from Afghanistan? Really go into that space of recognizing the thread that runs through each of us. Then we can perhaps start to increase our consciousness together and try to influence policy in a way that’s not being met or addressed today.”
Why is the West looking around the world for a war?
Has the time come for the people of West Asia to reclaim political and media narratives stripped from them by Western imperialism?
Are the chickens finally coming home to roost for the BBC?
