On the White Helmets = Al-Qaeda Debate

Adam Larson (aka Caustic Logic)
February 10, 2020

The following is an opinion piece that does not necessarily reflect the view of it some readers will form, especially when reading it quickly. The target audience is people on both sides of this debate, and my aim - it's difficult to do - is to stat narrowing the divide between the sides. It was split off from a split-off pat of  a rebuttal to something, doesn't matter at this point.
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I have not studied the White Helmets themselves as much as I could have, so I speak from a position of limited knowledge. And I don't speak to it that often either, partly lacking much to say (that I actually know) and maybe just to be "different."  But I will now step on out there with this collection of thoughts everyone can hate in their own way.

I personally find the aggressiveness and prevalence of attacks on the White Helmets to be somewhat counter-productive. The criticisms are valid; the issue I mean is only one of perceptions. Much of the public - and more so their political and thought leaders - still regard them as unambiguous heroes, following on massive efforts to enshrine that view and sideline any challenges to it. So naturally, in this unnatural situation, they'll see repeated charges of an extreme character as propaganda targeting good guys, probably organized by the same bad guys who already routinely bomb the heroes just for rescuing people (insult to injury and all that). The way attacks are amped-up every time the WH win an Oscar or whatever is only natural, but also might feed into this problematic disconnect.

What might help is a clearer establishment of incontrovertible points along the debate spectrum that all sides have to agree to, to start narrowing this gap. The bigger problem is on the side that rejects all evidence of wrongdoing to maintain their sterling image of the "Syrian Civil Defense," who have "saved 100,000 lives" and done 0 wrong. They really need to work on that, but as usual any progress would have to be led by the awake people among us setting the example, even knowing it probably won't be followed.

The debate has been "Are the White Helmets terrorists, yes or no?" Maybe we can get to more people on both sides agreeing the answer is not binary and total like that, and shift it to debating the proportions; does that formula apply closer to 1% or to 99%? I'd guess it's a lot closer to 99% but either way it's probably somewhere on that scale ignored in the yes-no debate. Might it vary from place to place or at different times? For example do we know they've never rescued anyone? I don't believe so. So we could use that (as I do) to acknowledge they might be rescuers to some degree, AND terrorists (or terrorist enablers) to some degree. They might save a cat stuck in a tree, deliver food to an old lady, AND assist in a beheading or facilitate the kidnapping of an entire village, besides any number of more banal activities between these extremes.

Pause for an example of trying too hard to negative effect: did we ever prove "baby Aya" was an extremely realistic doll designed with facial abrasions and a grimace of pain, that the WH used for a fake rescue video? Was the audio truly proven altered, or did some paid people just say that? It seemed to me it fit the video pretty well. Does her mouth really not move because she's a doll, or dead? Was it perhaps because her jaw was broken? Did that get ruled out? A lot of effort, some fundraising, was going into some stupid project about that, what many would reasonably see as literally dehumanizing a Syrian child just to score some pretty minor points against the WH. Minor? Yes. At great risk to one's credibility, the hope was to maybe prove ONE rescue video was staged. It makes limited sense, there is no such doll, and it runs these risks. Another question anyone supporting that project might ask themselves: how well has it worked at convincing the other side vs. just pissing them off? How much better or worse would it be if they ever brought the alive baby Aya back on camera with scars visible in the same spots? She could appear with her possible father and the WH rescuer, whom he'll praise for saving his girl, who IS NOT A DOLL, YOU PRO-ASSAD LIARS! (his words, imagined). There's also the question of just HOW she actually came to be injured. buried in rubble. How much progress was made to figuring that out? These are the kind of questions some of us could stand to think through more carefully, in my humble opinion.

But we know the White Helmets operate freely in areas ruled by the off-and-on Al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front (later JFS, HTS) and other extremist groups, and never seem to report any of their crimes. But so far the other side finds that okay based on their view of things, which includes almost no reason to suspect serious crimes to BE exposed.*

* After all, from 2014 forward, these have been the guys fighting ISIS! Before that they were briefly allies of ISIS who fed them a starting membership, and before that "bad cop" came along, the biggest worry HAD been … Al-Nusra front! They now get to be the "good guys" - not just the "good cop" in a massive and perhaps accidental set-up. So yeah, they're "moderate" ... in their pursuit of Islamist, terrorist, criminal and/or genocidal intentions. The "moderation" seems to be geographical; the "Nusra" (victory) this front sought ONLY referred to Syria, roughly (second and third names clarified that). They're aiming it just at the Syrian people, not at the West, not now, under the current banner(s) of "Jabhat al-Namechange".

Still, we can all kind of agree JaN is at the least … maybe not totally good? Potentially problematic? Enough clear cases are probably established to prove at least some cross-over membership between the White Helmets and JaN and other groups of the same basic character, and several undeniable manifestations of very common ideological sympathy, which gets closer to the point. There is probably zero crossover with secular groups or any non-Sunni members, I imagine? That SHOULD be a red flag to everyone. The rescuers have also been caught assisting in public executions by Islamists, celebrating over executed and dismembered Syrian soldiers, etc. These all bear repeating as needed. Their likely assistance in staging chemical attack scenes, which might involve mass murder in gas chambers, is a crazy-sounding notion that's emerged from the evidence anyway, time and again and again back to 2012. And I would not be surprised if the alleged role of some White Helmets in kidnapping and organ harvesting were true and not even exaggerated. Points like these obviously can't be ignored, even if they're not such good "selling points."

Nuances aside, the people they're accused of being - and at least partly ARE - rank among the worst that ever lived. A genocidal Al-Qaeda terrorist isn't any better just because he's also got that helmet, because he can brag he's not with "ISIS," or because his terrorism is "alleged" - or even poorly alleged at times - as well as being horribly real.

Finally, what I think underpins their undue popularity more than anything else is what they're being compared to - a genocidal regime backed by a great world power, raining death in a thousand forms upon its own people - wiping them out, crushing their spirits, with barrel bombs, chemical bombs, Shabiha thugs in-home stabbing massacres, shooting protesters, their own soldiers and police, false-flag assassinating their own officers just to blame "terrorists," mass kidnapping and detentions, mass torture, strangely selective starvation embargoes of Islamist-held areas, mass rape, mass stab-shoot-burn-bombing of babies specifically, as often as possible, always denying it brazenly, after leaving all the evidence for activists to load up in their trucks and show the "world community" who ask no questions and just add it to this run-on sentence of a fake chiaroscuro painting that's got all this looming like a 9/11 dust plume above a small but defiant man in tan, blue elbows, a bright light from heaven beaming down, shining off a spartan White Helmet.

That is a nice painting, bound to win awards, hearts, and some weaker minds with little effort. But we should be more interested in reality here, and some 95% of that canvas is filled with horrors that are partly or even mostly invented. Correcting this painting, to me, is a higher priority than attacking that little man in the lower right corner, giving people undue reason to paint you in as one of the swooping demons.

Worse yet, however many claims are untrue, most of them involve genuine deaths and unnecessary suffering inflicted on innocents, including women, children and babies. When and if the "Assad regime" is NOT to blame for this … who is? The White Helmets would be keeping that from us in however many cases they shared in falsifying the blame. That is - we can't be certain how widely they engage in such lies, but where they do they also tend to cover for genuine crimes by their foreign-backed "moderate" Islamist partners.

With that, I step back out of the White Helmets discussion for now.