Cotler’s campaigns for foreign regime change or intervention almost always march in lock-step with neoconservative U.S. foreign policy. His “humanitarian” branding is but a thin veneer of hypocrisy to conceal his establishment policies — policies that almost always serve the interests of Israel.
On July 22, 2018, Israel organized and facilitated an exceptional evacuation of White Helmet operatives from southern Syria, claiming the operatives were at risk from an advancing Syrian Arab Army. A number of NATO member states backed the move, calling on Israel to bring their intelligence assets to safety.
The White Helmets have been discredited and exposed as a British-government-incubated project by a number of independent geopolitical analysts, including Scott Ritter, Philip Giraldi, John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Eva Bartlett, Graham Porter, Rick Sterling , Cory Morningstar and many more.
This journalist’s extensive work has shown that the U.K. Intelligence-manufactured group of pseudo “humanitarians” — financed by the majority of member states within the U.S.-led interventionist alliance waging war against Syria — is nothing more than an auxiliary of the Al Qaeda generic offshoots in Syria. The White Helmet image has been professionally polished by a vast network of PR agencies, billionaire philanthropists, and media outlets aligned with their respective government objectives to overthrow the Syrian government and reduce Syria to a “failed state,” as they succeeded in doing with Libya.
Israel has a history of supporting terrorism in Syria since the start of the U.S. coalition war against the nation officially began in 2011. Israel has offered medical treatment to the various militant groups previously occupying areas of southern Syria. Stories abound of Israeli troops providing covering fire for groups dominated by Al Qaeda affiliates or rebrands as they came under attack from the Syrian Arab Army legitimately reclaiming territory lost to internationally-backed armed groups.
As journalist Sharmine Narwani pointed out in her article “Are Al Qaeda affiliates fighting alongside U.S. rebels in Syria’s south?”
If forced to choose, Israel prefers the presence of terrorist groups to Iranian influence […] Israel is so heavily [in]vested in keeping Syria and its allies away from its borders, it has actively bolstered al-Qaeda and other extremists in Syria’s southern theater.”
Israel’s evacuation of the White Helmets was an extension of its terrorist-supporting operations in southern Syria — and a response to a cry for help from a U.S. ally that has also supported proxy terrorism in Syria for the last eight years. Certainly Israel would not lift a finger to help any entity opposed to its existence in the Middle East, regardless of the pressure brought to bear by its allies in the U.S. or the U.K. It must also be noted that Israel and NATO member states did not offer the same humanitarian assistance to ordinary Syrian refugees gathered at the borders with Jordan and in Israeli annexed territory.
The following video footage of the Israel forces enabling the White Helmet evacuation process was published on Twitter by former Israeli security affairs expert Shai Ben-Ari:
During my time in the southern region of Syria, I visited numerous abandoned White Helmet centers located, as they always seemed to be, next to armed group centers or in shared complexes, usually former schools, hospitals or industrial buildings that had been converted into military headquarters and munitions factories.
I followed the route taken before me by the White Helmets as they exited Syria into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights before being transported to Jordan for their onward journey to asylum in the U.K., Canada, France or Germany. Locals in the area told me that a significant number of leaders and fighters from armed groups had been evacuated alongside the White Helmets with no opposition from Israel. White Helmets Syria
A White Helmets center in Daraa Al Balad, Syria. Photo | Vanessa Beeley
On September 20, 2018, I managed to enter a still-operating White Helmet center in Daraa Al Balad, south of Damascus, and interview White Helmet members as they continued to work in areas still under the control of armed groups during ongoing Russian-brokered reconciliation talks. One of the White Helmets, Abu Mohanad Al Mahamid, told me:
There are some [armed] factions connected with Israel; those factions were gathered by Israel in Quneitra and were told that you will [they would] leave with the White Helmets. By the way, the number of White Helmets in the southern area is 635, but those who left were 800. This means that there are [armed] factions who work with Mossad and they were extracted alongside the White Helmets… Not all those who left were White Helmets; there were people who left from Quneitra. There were terrorists; some left from the Yarmouk Basin.”
When asked to clarify who the terrorists from Yarmouk Basin were, Al Mahamid confirmed that they were ISIS fighters. White Helmets Syria
White Helmets leader Abu Mohanad Al Mahamid in Daraa Al Balad talks to Vanessa Beeley on September 20, 2018. Photo | Vanessa Beeley
During the dramatic evacuation of the White Helmets, former U.K. Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford responded to a statement issued by U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Ford raised a number of questions regarding the extradition of the White Helmets, perhaps one of the most pertinent being this:
Might the British government have been afraid of this particular group being caught and interrogated, revealing perhaps the truth about alleged chemical weapons incidents?”
In December of 2018, Jordanian Member of Parliament Tareq Khoury demanded that the “dregs of White Helmets” still in Jordan be extradited as traitors to their homeland to face justice inside Syria.
“It is known they are traitors,” he said, adding:
Treason is a shameful and disgraceful act. Whoever betrays his homeland and his people will not spare the homeland of others. There are many stories throughout history in which traitors are eliminated by their operators when their dirty missions against their homelands are finished… I urge the Jordanian government to hand over those remaining [White Helmets] to the Sryian state to try them for betraying their homeland.”
Who orchestrated this exceptional rescue?
When the pedigree of those behind the White Helmet evacuation is more closely examined, Israel’s outsized role in the promotion and protection of the internationally financed group becomes more even more apparent.
Rewind to the hatching of the White Helmet “rescue” plan. On July 24, 2018, The Globe and Mail ran a story headlined: “How Canada’s woman in Istanbul began the daring rescue of the White Helmets.” The article outlines how White Helmets leader Raed Saleh approached Robin Wettlaufer, Canada’s Istanbul-based special envoy to Syria, for help.
Saleh has a history of being refused entry to the U.S. He was turned back at Dulles Airport in 2016 because of his suspected ties to extremist groups in Syria. This inconvenient fact was wiped from his immigration slate by former Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry and Saleh was subsequently allowed to enter the United States in September 2016. Kerry met Saleh during a closed-door session at the U.N., where the then-secretary of state had convened a meeting with members of the Syrian opposition, including members of armed groups. Incidentally, it was during these talks that Kerry famously admitted to the Obama administration’s support for ISIS in Syria in leaked audio published by the New York Times.
According to the Globe and Mail, Canada was being “hailed for its leadership” of the White Helmet rescue mission. Chrystia Freeland, Canadian foreign minister and former Globe and Mail editor, used a July NATO summit in Brussels to issue a plea on behalf of the White Helmets, which persuaded both Germany and Britain to accept a number of the high-profile “refugees.”
Former MI6 intelligence operative and creator of the White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, praised Canada’s initiative and singled out Wettlauger for praise. “Robin has been absolutely extraordinary; …the drive, the galvanization came from Canada,” Le Mesurier told the Globe and Mail.
As time passed, another individual was revealed to have been at the forefront of the Canada-led campaign. In October 2018, the Globe and Mail ran another story identifying Irwin Cotler’s role in the operation.
Renowned international human-rights lawyer Irwin Cotler is nominating Syria’s famed White Helmets, a group of volunteer humanitarian workers Canada helped rescue from the war-torn country, for the Nobel Peace Prize 2019.”
Cotler, the former Liberal minister of justice and attorney general for Canada, was a crucial element in the White Helmets rescue bid and was called upon to broker an agreement for the mission with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Why is Irwin Cotler so invested in the White Helmets?
Cotler’s history and connections reveal a high-profile global player who has consistently defended Israel’s appalling human-rights record in Palestine and is a tireless promoter of the responsibility to protect doctrine or R2P.
R2P is one of the most enterprising propaganda initiatives of the global powers aligned with U.S. supremacy and neo-colonialism. It effectively provides the moral justification to invade or attack any country whose government is deemed repressive toward its people.
Of course, those who decide what countries are repressive are the same ones with a history of militarily subjugating sovereign nations, plundering their resources, and in most cases ultimately reducing the quality of life for those same “repressed people.” This, on top of the years or even decades of bloodshed that leave behind depleted uranium and psychological trauma that will affect those “repressed people” for generations once the campaign has succeeded in reducing these nations to failed states. Irwin Cotler RWCHR
Irwin Cotler is the chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. Photo | RWCHR
The R2P doctrine has become one of the most insidious instruments used by global hegemons to manufacture consent for the myriad forever-wars of various intensities that are currently plaguing most regions of the world. It sells the “humanitarian value” of war and obfuscates hidden interests that are the true driver of modern-day colonization projects.
Cotler has hung the R2P Sword of Damocles over the heads of both Syria and Libya. In 2016 he accused Canada of “defaulting” on its responsibility to intervene in Syria, reinforcing the hyperbole used to facilitate another “humanitarian” war:
That doctrine [R2P] says that whenever there is a situation of war crimes and crimes against humanity and, God forbid, genocide, and the country in which it takes place is the author of that criminality, there is a responsibility to intervene and protect the innocent civilians. And I think we have defaulted on that — not just Canada, the international community — with respect to Syria.”
In 2011, Cotler argued that intervention in Libya to effectively bring down President Muammar Qaddafi would be a “test case for the UN Security Council and its implementation of the R2P doctrine.” History has since revealed that many of those “mass atrocities” so vehemently condemned by Cotler were little more than narratives designed to manufacture consent for the wholesale destruction of Libya by NATO member states.
The reality of Cotler’s campaigns for foreign regime change or intervention is that they almost always march in lock-step with neoconservative U.S. foreign policy. His “humanitarian” branding is but a thin veneer of hypocrisy that attempts to conceal his establishment policies — policies that almost always serve the interests of Israel.
Canadian author and journalist Yves Engler has waged a long-time campaign against Cotler’s crypto-neocolonialism. When former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin nominated Cotler for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, alongside Cotler’s own nomination of the White Helmets, Engler wrote an article titled “Canada’s Dershowitz, apologist for Israeli war crimes, nominated for Peace prize.” Irwin Cotler Israel Syria
Irwin Cotler speaks at the 2014 Stand Strong for Israel Rally in Washington. Photo | Flickr
In the article Engler lays out a convincing argument that Cotler is a serial apologist for Israel’s genocidal policies towards the Palstinian people. Engler reveals that Cotler was a long-time unofficial advisor to the former Israeli military chief of staff, General Moshe Ya’alon. Ya’alon is on the record saying that Israel “has a right to every part of the land of Israel.” In 2002, Ya’alon told a conference of rabbis in Jerusalem: “The Palestinian threat harbors cancer-like attributes that have to be severed and fought to the bitter end.”
Cotler’s own daughter, attorney Michal Cotler-Wunsh, was included in a joint list of Israel’s Resilience and Telem Party candidates headed by former Chiefs of Staff Benny Gantz and Moshe Ya’alon. Cotler-Wunsh was “born in Jerusalem, served in the Israeli military and obtained law degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.” The Cotler family connections to extreme right-wing elements of the Israeli ruling elite could not be stronger or better defined. Bakr family Israeli airstrike feature photo
The Bakr boys, four brothers hit by an Israeli airstrike while playing soccer in Gaza in 2014. Khalil Hamra | AP
To launch the Telem Party campaign, Gantz released a video celebrating his role in the massacre of 2,200 Palestinians during the 2014 “mowing the lawn” bombing campaign in Gaza. For Gantz, “parts of Gaza [being] sent back to the Stone Age” was a victory for “peace” in the region. A “peace” that only Israel would benefit from. In his article, Engler points out that Gantz faces a war-crimes case in the Netherlands for his participation in the 2014 campaign that claimed the lives of civilians in Gaza and reduced much of the besieged enclave to rubble, destroying infrastructure and ensuring living conditions were reduced to sub-third-world status.
In his staunch defense of Israel, Cotler has described illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank as “disputed territories” and justified the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon that left 1,200 mostly civilians dead. He has consistently attempted to derail investigations into Israeli war crimes — savagely attacking Richard Goldstone, who led the UN investigation of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gazain 2008 and 2009.