“60 Minutes” Doesn’t Do Justice to its Bashar al-Assad Coverage

By: Marion DS Dreyfus                     

                

Occasionally, the weekly news magazine “60 Minutes” which has been running for decades every Sunday evening gets it right.

 

Sometimes the topics are well-chosen, igniting deeper investigation of a current hot trend or event. And sometimes, the topics are not necessarily trending, but are meditations on areas that easily accommodate further examination, such as Survivors of the Holocaust, maestros of note, child prodigies, or some tweaky new foodstuff or culinary virtuoso.

On July 11^th, the weekly program chose to examine the ‘civil war’—if you will—of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator, 19^th president, as he relentlessly wages battle against the internal oppositions to his fisted rule.

 

The 20 minutes was reasonable, and the scrutiny of al-Assad’s despotic crushing of his opposition forces is well-worth examination. Assad is allied with America’s rival, Russia, in competition with another quasi frenemy, Turkey,

Syria’s close ally and funding support (to the tune of some $9 Billion/year, technical support, and even combat troops), is our prime foe, Iran.

Bashar’s long-running squelching of assertive internal rebels, beginning in part after the Arab Spring in 2011 arising in Iran and thereafter ‘migrating’ to those in Syria opposed to the tyrannical reign of the Alawite Assad—a minority religious party in a majoritarian non-Alawite population– certainly merits attention, as the Syrians have been managed brutally since the death of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s equally despotic father, who was Syria’s 18^th president, ruling secularly but bloodily from his coup in 1971 thru his death in 2000–from a successful if brutal coup d’etat –when Bashar took the reins.

 

An approximate 380,000 Syrians have “died” since the civil war began 10 years ago, now joined by other Middle Eastern states and nations concerned with the threat posed by the broad-scale death meted out by the surprisingly sanguinary Bashar.

 

What the TV package failed to mention was any of the evils of the father, whose imprint as leader of the Baath Party was notable for so many years. His name, synonymous with harsh rule over his own people, was in fact entirely omitted.

 

Second, omitted entirely was the biographical item of Bashar’s strong educational background, as he helms the Arab Socialist Syrian branch of the Baath party. Bashar, at the time not slated in any way for the helm in Damascus—his elder brother Bassel was the heir apparent–attended  the University of Damascus, graduating in 1988 with a degree in ophthalmology. He continued his studies after prudent military training, eventually attaining the rank of  colonel in the prestigious Syrian Republican Guard, done to burnish his standing among the Syrian intelligence community, once his elder brother, Bassel, died in a car accident, removing him from potential control when Hafez died.. Then Harvard Divinity School—of all things.

Bashar was only 34 when he assumed control. A special legislation was passed at the time, lowering the acceptable lower age limit from 40 to 34, to accommodate Bashar’s age at his ascension.

Unlike all neighboring Muslim-affiliate nations, Syria is exceptional in being ruled by its Alewite Shi’ia minority of about 10% of the Syrian populace,according to the Britannica, holding tendentiously to authoritarian dominance not dissimilar to the way Nationalist party politicians maintained stern control in South Africa despite being greatly outnumbered by South African blacks of a different religious affiliation during the period of Africaans vamed apartjeid, before the African National Congress came into power.(Afrikaners constituted a bare 5.2% of the total S African populace, per Britannica.)

Most germane where Westerners are concerned, al-Assad, coming to power when he was just a bookish 34, and with little preparation for the mantle of rulership, has been able to inveigle the West into a benevolent image in our media because he is secular, is a fashionable dresser, and his entire clan and offspring are always well turned out in Savile Row suitings for the men, French couture for the women. Nary a burkha or flowing linen khamis to be seen.

Bashar cut a dashing –almost British—figure among the berobed rulers of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and all the kaftaned mullahs, imams and emirs encircling Syria. We convinced ourselves, for too long, that this slim, svelte, bilingual medical eye doctor and his elegant family were what we wanted them to be. Forward-thinking. Democratic. Not so different from what we knew or thought we were comfortable with.

 

Events proved our illusions 180 degrees off.

And his Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. That didn’t last very long, did it?

The West fancied him a reformer because he had the right accoutrements, wore the right cravat and Italian leather footwear. His look was fashion-forward and en-vogue.

Magazine editors and photogs fawned over Bashar’s Westernized wife, tall, attractive Asma al-Assad, for a time the cover-page darling of the fashionistas. She could be a Brryn Mawr alumna, inheritor of a Homecoming Queen tiara.

For a time, Asma’s sleek Westernized simpatico and immaculate style deflected attention away from the Socialistic stratagems and death toll synchronous with the Assad managerial reign. His suppressed minorities  did not benefit from his silken international persona. They fought hard, earning their chaps as resilient resistant forces.

To a scandalous degree, in fact. American magazines were embarrassed that they had been so charmed by the Western phantasma veneer that they had convinced themselves this was a different leader, one actually interested in democratic values and ideals. If not quite one man/one vote Betsy-Ross fervor.

None of this was indicated even in passing in the “60 Minutes” piece. Instead, we were doused with grotesque but true images, the horrifying emaciated bodies of thousands of Syria’s own citizens, naked men and children gassed by Assad, indiscriminately–all without the needed context to make sense of what these pallid dead resulted from.

 

News readers will recall with shame the bruited line by President Barack Obama, who famously drew a ‘line in the sand,’ over which Assad was never supposed to tread, in widespread lethal gassing of children and other innocents.

The shame attended to the stunning retrenchment of the promised retaliation when Syria did, repeatedly, casually offend by sieges of bloodshed, torture and gassings, and other war crimes well documented globally. President Obama, humiliatingly, did nothing at all, teaching the world’s malefactors that the United States does not stand by its vaunted democratic promises and ideals. Our somber threats were seen to be edentulous—toothless.

It was the signal inverse of “virtue signaling.”

An expensive ‘lesson’ for the additional thousands tortured, jailed, starved and unrelentingly savaged.

We fooled ourselves with our rose-quartz-colored specs.

But none of this backstory, important to an understanding of why the Syrian civil war has been permitted to stretch for so long, was hinted at.

Twenty minutes is not so long, one can say. But in television minutes, it is almost elephantine, where interviews and coverage lasts 3 to 5 minutes on average.

 

Enough time, then, in those 20 invaluable minutes, in other words, to pack in a bridge or two of critical context.

 

Tick, tick,tick…