Say Hello To The Best Parody Account On Twitter
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Satire has a rich and respected anti-establishment history and its usefulness in getting the public laughing at the emperor’s naked willy has been used to punch up at power structures around the world for centuries. In modern times we’re seeing establishment hacks and sell-out comedians attempting to use it to prop up the American power elites, but it just doesn’t work when you’re punching down, which is why The Daily Show’s eleven remaining viewers are instead now watching Trevor Noah nod along as Adam Schiff explains the perils of President Trump undermining his own intelligence agencies. But out among the unwashed masses, the authentic tradition of biting anti-establishment satire lives on.
I’m calling it right now: @AmenaShaladi is the greatest parody account in Twitter history. Begun earlier this month in response to the infuriating Bana Alabed deep state propaganda operation, “Amena Shaladi” is not only consistently hilarious and loyal to its source material, but is also extremely politically relevant in the way it thumbs its nose at something that is sorely in need of relentless ridicule.
For those who are not familiar with Bana Alabed, you’re in for a double treat today, because this is one of the clearest indications that the corporate media is being used by America’s unelected power establishment to manufacture consent for regime change in Syria. Attributed to a seven year-old girl who was purportedly living in East Aleppo and then moved to Turkey when the region was recaptured by Syrian and coalition forces, the Bana Alabed account features regular tweets by a very photogenic child decrying the evils of Assad and Putin and imploring the leaders of the US and other NATO countries to pwease pwease pwease come to Syria and stop them. Think of the children!
If you think this is just some obscure little internet phenomenon and that nobody would be stupid enough to pay attention to a Twitter account featuring calls for military intervention that are plainly written by an adult, think again. Bana has been featured on corporate media specials many times since her Twitter account was started, particularly by CNN. Watch the beginning of this clip where Jake Tapper reports, with a straight face, that Bana has written Donald Trump a cute little letter in cute, sloppy child’s handwriting promising him she’ll be his best friend if he advances a more interventionist foreign policy in Syria.
CNN has even “interviewed” Bana, showing the child incrementally reciting memorized syllables that she does not understand decrying the Idlib gas attack (itself almost certainly a false flag of some sort) and making sweeping proclamations about terrorism, national dynamics and military interventionism while the host somehow looks on with a serious expression on her face.
And when I say that Bana does not understand the sounds she is being made to recite, I mean she does not understand even the simplest English sentences, let alone the complex scripted ones she recited syllable-by-syllable for CNN. Look at this video shot sometime after her arrival in Istanbul where she doesn’t understand a simple question about what food she likes to eat, so she begins reciting a scripted line she’d been fed earlier about saving the children in Syria:
Man, that did not go well! Never send a kindergartener to do a CIA spook’s job, am I right?
So CNN had a seven year-old Syrian child come on and share her scripted opinions on military conflicts and regional political dynamics while the host nodded somberly like this was a real thing, and now they’ve got a clip of a Bambi-eyed little girl telling you to invade Syria that they can pull up whenever they want to bully a guest who advocates a non-interventionist approach. Watch CNN host Kate Bolduan flip out in huffy indignation when Congressman Thomas Massie decides to question the official narrative instead of promising he’ll do what the cute little kid wants and help launch another regime change invasion of a sovereign nation.
Are you starting to see how sorely this thing needs to be mocked and ridiculed? Well luckily people have been doing that for months, though not with the style and consistency of Amena Shaladi. Here’s a hilarious fake Bana Alabed tweet that some naughty troll cooked up which went so viral that establishment liberal hero J.K. Rowling (with whom Bana shares a literary agency) had to post a screenshot of it letting everyone know it wasn’t real.
Not that such a tweet would be unbelievable. In their rush to get the war drums beating the propagandists behind the Bana Alabed account released this (since deleted but archived) gem:
Yikes.
The Bana Alabed Twitter account says that it is “managed” by Bana’s mother, so the most innocent possible scenario we’re looking at here is that a politically active Syrian woman who opposes her country’s leadership is using her daughter to manipulate the citizenry of English-speaking nations into demanding that their governments espouse a more aggressive military role against Assad, and that the corporate media is deliberately spreading her deceit to help manufacture consent for another war just like it did with Iraq. That’s the best-case, most innocent scenario possible. The least innocent is that the whole thing is a top-to-bottom constructed psy-op created by powers who would benefit from seizing Syria, which occupies a crucial location in the world’s fossil fuel battles.
Fulfilling its perpetual role in gaslighting the American public into accepting blatant absurdities as fact, the CIA-funded Washington Post published an article condemning skepticism about Bana Alabed, arguing that the mature themes and decent English in Bana’s tweets are not cause for suspicion because the account openly says that her mother Fatemah manages it. It then goes on to say that Bana is being harassed and trolled by people who doubt the authenticity of the account, which contradicts the stated theory that the account is being run by Bana’s mother. You can’t have it both ways, WaPo; either people are bullying an innocent little kid on Twitter or her mom’s running the operation. You don’t get to have the sympathy of your bullying-a-child narrative and relieve us of our suspicion by telling us the account is run by a grown adult who is plainly crafty enough to handle herself.
If it is indeed Bana’s mother writing her tweets, this is still creepy and wrong because it means that she is deliberately writing them in a childlike way so as to mislead her audience (some 370,000 followers in addition to the corporate media appearances) into thinking that they are reading the writings of a child. Note the difference between the tweets on Bana’s account and the mature tone of those on the Fatimah Alabed account. Combine this with the way CNN has been reporting that the tweets are the child’s as well as recording the child speaking with authority about the subject matter she purportedly tweets about, and you’ve got a full-fledged mass media psy-op.
The Amena Shaladi Twitter account parodies the Bana Alabed account brilliantly, with the “four years old” character giving an exaggerated expression of the way Bana’s tweets mix baby talk with extremely mature pro-establishment political ideas. Check it out:
How delightfully naughty is that?? We need more of this. These manipulations are getting more and more ridiculous, and the best medicine is laughter. Let’s all start pointing and laughing at these assholes. By drawing attention to how funny this crap is, we can inoculate people from its influence. America’s unelected deep state power structure wants to get its talons into Syria so very badly, but their greed is making them stupid and ridiculous. Let’s make fun of them.
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