Want the Truth About What’s Going on in Syria? Listen to Father Daniël Maes

First published July 2, 2017

The gentleman giving the talk in the video below is Father Daniël Maes, a Flemish priest who lives in Syria and who has said that news coverage of the conflict there is “the biggest media lie of our time.” Father Maes, who spoke in Belgium on June 3, lives and serves God in the 1400-year-old Mar Yakub Monastery, located in the village of Qara, some 60 miles northeast of Damascus.

The martyr celebration he speaks of at the beginning of the talk commemorates the deaths of 21 Arab nationalists (both Syrian and Lebanese) who were executed by Turkish authorities on May 6, 1916 for their resistance against the Ottoman Empire. The Arab nationalists, long suffering under Ottoman rule, had supported Britain and France in World War I though later were betrayed–by both, but by the French in particular–in a series of events leading up to the signing of the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement (an agreement which set up the two European countries as the primary colonial powers in the region, giving the British control over Palestine and establishing the French as the overlords in Syria and Lebanon.

Thus when Father Maes says, “I was a little bit ashamed. I think: ‘I am from the West’,” he is presumably referring to this history, although I would qualify that statement by pointing out that the actions of Britain and France today in backing US goals for regime change are if anything even more ignoble than their treacherous behavior of a century ago.

In his talk, Father Maes also makes a prediction–call it a prophecy if you will–that the war in Syria will take the world from a unipolar to a multi-polar world order.

He also makes reference to a soup kitchen set up by Mother Agnés-Mariam in the city of Aleppo and which serves 25,000 hot meals per day five days a week. You may remember Mother Agnés. I did a series of articles on her back in 2013 and 2014 after she released a 50-page report on the August 21, 2013 chemical attack in Ghouta.

The report provided evidence that some of the videos uploaded to the Internet immediately after the attack were staged and faked. But for her efforts, Mother Agnés found herself under attack by liberals like Jeremy Scahill and Owen Jones, both of whom refused to appear at a conference she was scheduled to speak at in London. This was in November of 2013.

I wrote an article about it at the time, which I entitled Mother Agnes and the Self Destruction of the Political Left, and which I reproduce below. I wonder how Scahill and Jones would feel if they knew the woman whose name they besmirched four years ago is now serving food to 25,000 hungry people a day in a war zone?

God works in mysterious ways, and this is certainly an example of it. Jones, Scahill and all the other “liberal interventionists” who attacked Mother Agnés should be ashamed of themselves.

As for Father Maes, I first put up a post about him back in January of this year. At that time he told an interviewer, “Do you not know that the media coverage on Syria is the biggest media lie of our time? They have sold pure nonsense about Assad: It was actually the rebels who plundered and killed.”

And in the talk in the video above, he notes that the Syrian Army has recently been making “more and more and more and more progress,” and he expresses hope for an end to the conflict soon.

“We hope that with the Russians and Iran, and of course the Syrian Army and the Hezbollah, that they will finally take out all the terrorists.”

You can play this 14-minute video at 1.25 speed, and skip forward. There is good information here.

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Richard Edmondson

Richard Edmondson is an author, novelist, poet, and journalist whose writings often focus on Middle East issues, the Zionist lobby, and religion. His latest novel is The Memoirs of Saint John: When the Sandstone Crumbles, a story about an archaeological team doing a dig in Syria and set amidst the current conflict in the country.

In 2014 Richard attended an International Conference on Combating Terrorism and Religious Extremism, held in Damascus. The book is part two in the Memoirs of Saint John series.

Two other books by Richard are Rising Up: Class Warfare in America from the Streets to the Airwaves, relating his experiences founding and operating an unlicensed or “pirate” FM radio station in San Francisco in the 1990s, as well as a volume of poetry entitled American Bus Stop: Essay and Poems on Hope and Homelessness.

Richard is cognizant of the words of the early Christian writer Tertullian, who in the second century-basically prognosticating the fall of the Roman Empire-wrote: “We have made merry amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday exhibition.”

richardedmondson.net