Maram Susli

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Maram Susli
Maram Susli-2.jpg
Personal information
Born1987 (age 33–34)[citation needed]
Damascus, Syria
Websitesyriangirlpartisan.blogspot.com
YouTube information
Channel
Subscribers92,500[1]
(May 2021)
Total views3,311,034[1]
(May 2021)

Maram Susli (Arabic: مرام سوسلي), also known as Mimi al-Laham, PartisanGirl, Syrian Girl and Syrian Sister,[2] is a Syrian Australian YouTube content creator, conspiracy theorist, 9/11 Truther, and political commentator who prepares videos on the Syrian Civil War, United States foreign policy in the Middle East, conspiracy theories, and the Gamergate controversy.[3]

She is a contributor to New Eastern Outlook[4] and the conspiracy-theory website InfoWars.[5]

She has defended Syrian government and Bashar al-Assad[6] and criticised ISIS and Syrian rebels.[7]

Susli is active on social media using the handle "@partisangirl" on Twitter.[8]

Early life and activities[]

Susli was born in Damascus; her family moved to Australia when she was a child "because her mother was a big fan of Neighbours".[3][7] She studied chemistry at the University of Western Australia and has a science degree in biophysics and chemistry.[9][7]

Susli's series of video and social media commentaries on her YouTube channel had over 30,000 subscribers and close to 2.5 million views in 2014.[10]

Interviews and opinions[]

Susli began writing and speaking on the Syrian Civil War in 2012.[10] Susli, who was born in Damascus but now lives in Australia, said she speaks out against Syrian rebels, Isis and the United States after becoming dismayed at seeing her country destroyed.[11] One of her YouTube videos, If Syria Disarms Chemical Weapons We Lose the War, was viewed 44,720 times by October 2014.[10] In an RT interview with Abby Martin in 2013 (as Mimi al Laham), Susli said that it would be a "grave mistake" for Assad to renounce chemical weapons.[12]

In an interview with Alex Jones on InfoWars, following the Ghouta chemical attack of August 2013, she implied the rebels were responsible for the massacre. Susli said the Syrian government was a corrupt dictatorship and that there was "a legitimate reason for people to want to create ... change". She stated that the US and NATO used the anger of the Syrian people to serve their own agendas.[9][13]

In a 2014 Vice interview she said she wanted Syria to "remain secular, united and strong" and did not "tolerate foreigners destroying our way of life, forcing us to live a certain way. Whether it’s ISIS or the US government".[10]

In an interview with The Daily Beast in 2014, Susli said that she does not support President Bashar al-Assad or associates of the Syrian Ba'athist party. According to the website she said this "[d]espite her trolling over Assad's enemies, despite her appearances on Assad-friendly media outlets, and despite her connections to pro-Assad hackers."[3] In one video she said groups like the "New World Order" have targeted Assad’s Syria because it does not allow genetically modified crops and lacks "a Rothschild central bank".[3] According to The Daily Beast Susli said the Houla massacre in 2012 was the work of British intelligence.[3]

According to The Daily Beast, Susli has a positive opinion of Hezbollah. Over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she said "I don’t even believe in a two-state solution," instead suggesting there should be "a one-state solution".[3] In Susli's opinion, the New World Order opposes the Syrian government.[2] She has said that the Freemasons and the Illuminati collaborate with the governments of the United States and Israel, as well as NATO, in international events; that Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) are a single front organisation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); that 9/11 was an inside job;[3] that ebola is possibly part of the United States biological weapons program; and that the United States Department of Defense secretly manipulated the Gamergate controversy.[3] Via her Twitter account in June 2021, she linked to an article suggesting 9/11 was the responsibility of "Zionists".[14]

In 2014, News Corp Australia Network said Susli was a "self-described News Personality" whose Facebook page is "filled with video posts on the current conflict, criticising IS and Syrian rebels".[15] She has denied the allegations of atrocities and war crimes against the Assad government.[5][16][3][2] "People are dying, and I have a duty as a human being and as someone of Syrian origin to expose the truth about why", Susli told MailOnline in 2014.[17]

In 2017, along with Theodore Postol, Susli rejected claims that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in 2017 at Khan Shaykhun.[5] In a YouTube video, she referred to evidence posted by Postol, suggesting that Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, alleged to have killed 74 people, was not the work of the Assad government.[5][16] While interviewing Seymour Hersh for Prospect magazine, Steve Bloomfield said that Postol "spoke about how he relies for his work on Syria on ... Susli". Hersh replied that "He talked to her once on one thing".[18] In an article for Alex Jones' InfoWars website, Susli said the White Helmets, the first responder group, had been responsible for the Khan Shaykhun attack.[5] Postol's reliance on Susli's reputed expertise has been found to be seriously flawed by Cheryl Rofer, a chemical weapons expert consulted by Bellingcat.[19]

After the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, England in March 2018, Susli's Twitter account posted 2,300 times over a 12-day period, accessed by 61 million users.[20] Analysts from the UK government briefed selected journalists that they had concluded Susli's twitter account (@partisangirl) was "suspicious and part of a broader disinformation campaign".[8] The Guardian newspaper then described her account as being a "Russian bot", but subsequently changed its article by substituting "account" for "bot".[20] Susli, in response, said: "I am not a robot; I am a human being."[8] A fact check by Channel 4 concluded that Susli is a "real individual", remarking that Twitter had issued her account with a verification tick confirming the account is authentic and that the claim that her account is a bot "controlled directly by the Kremlin, appears to be false".[8]

Susli has appeared as a guest on far-right and neo-Nazi podcasts and media networks.[9] She has spoken on a podcast run by Holocaust denier Ryan Dawson (using her Mimi al-Laham pseudonym, she appeared with Ted Postol),[5][21] on podcasts hosted by the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke (discussing Zionism),[5][9] and has been interviewed by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer for the YouTube channel of his National Policy Institute, a white supremacist group.[22]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b "About SyrianGirlpartisan". YouTube.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c "The Best English-speaking Friend Assad Could". Haaretz. 19 October 2014. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i Schachtman, Noah; Kennedy, Michael (17 October 2014). "The Kardashian Look-Alike Trolling for Assad". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 25 October 2018. It's little wonder that Susli found her way into [Alex] Jones' orbit as conspiracies lie at the heart of her worldview, if her comments on social media are any indication. According to her, 9/11 was an 'inside job.' al Qaeda and ISIS, by her telling, don’t exist in the form they’ve been presented to the global public. First off, they're one in the same. Second, they’re a CIA front—hence the use of 'ALCIAda,' a favorite portmanteau.
  4. ^ "How Syrians Talk About Assad: Zaina Erhaim vs. Partisan Girl". Al Bawaba. Retrieved 1 September 2021.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g Monbiot, George (15 November 2017). "A lesson from Syria: it's crucial not to fuel far-right conspiracy theories". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 May 2019. The story was then embellished on Infowars – the notorious far-right conspiracy forum. The Infowars article claimed that the attack was staged by the Syrian first responder group, the White Helmets. This is a reiteration of a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory, casting these rescuers in the role of perpetrators. It suggested that the victims were people who had been kidnapped by al-Qaida from a nearby city, brought to Khan Shaykhun and murdered, perhaps with the help of the UK and French governments, 'to lay blame on the Syrian government'. The author of this article was Mimi Al-Laham, also known as Maram Susli.
  6. ^ "'Partisan Girl' & the Online Battle for Syria". Al Bawaba. Al Bawaba. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Australian blogger Syrian Girl posts views on ISIS, US airstrikes, Ebola". news.com.au. 22 October 2014. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
  8. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Williams, Martin (24 April 2018). "FactCheck: How Twitter users were wrongly labelled as Russian bots after a government briefing". Channel 4 News. London. Retrieved 27 July 2019.
  9. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Hilsman, Patrick (29 December 2016). "Down the Alt-Right's Syrian Rabbit Hole". Pulse. Retrieved 17 September 2020. The Assad regime had a relationship with the American far-right long before Susli's appearances on InfoWars. ... [Speaking to Alex Jones, Susli said:] 'I’m not gonna come here and deny that the government wasn’t a dictatorship, it wasn’t corrupt, that, you know, that people weren’t angry with it. I’m not gonna say that there wasn’t a legitimate reason for people to want to create that change but the fact is that was totally exploited and even pre planned by the foreign agendas, the US, NATO, basically the global elite as you call them'. ... [Regarding the Ghouta chemical attack she said:] 'It’s absolutely undeniable that little children died in Damascus three days ago and that the images are shocking and anyone cannot deny that ... and I also don’t want to implicate the rebels as a whole…. I don’t want to implicate them directly because I’m sure some of them have families that live in that area and I believe that they themselves are pasties to a global game that they are cannon fodder for and the powers that be have managed to convince them that they are going to get armed that they are going to get no fly zones… they want to divide Syria up into mini states and they wanna crush any rogue state'.
  10. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Valenzuela, Natalie (13 October 2014). "Meet the YouTube Sensation Who Predicts Syria's Future". Vice. Retrieved 1 September 2021.
  11. ^ url=https://metro.co.uk/2014/10/22/meet-syrian-girl-the-internet-sensation-who-has-been-dubbed-syrias-kim-kardashian-4916583/
  12. ^ Ahmad, Muhammad Idrees (13 March 2017). "For Russian TV, Syria isn't just a foreign country — it's a parallel universe". The Washington Post. Retrieved 23 August 2019.
  13. ^ Higgins, Eliot (20 August 2014). "Attempts to Blame the Syrian Opposition for the August 21st Sarin Attacks Continue One Year On". bellingcat. Retrieved 1 August 2019. Maram has expressed the view that the Syrian government was not responsible for the August 21st Sarin attacks
  14. ^ Silkoff, Shira (29 June 2021). "Former Democratic Congresswoman claims Jews caused 9/11 on Twitter". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 5 September 2021.
  15. ^ "Aussie internet sensation takes on IS". PerthNow. 22 October 2014. Retrieved 1 September 2021.
  16. ^ Jump up to: a b Ellis, Emma Fray (31 May 2017). "To Make Your Conspiracy Theory Legit, Just Find an 'Expert'". Wired. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  17. ^ "Australian blogger Syrian Girl posts views on ISIS, US airstrikes, Ebola". NewsComAu. 22 October 2014. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
  18. ^ Bloomfield, Steve (17 July 2018). "Whatever happened to Seymour Hersh?". Prospect. Retrieved 23 May 2019.
  19. ^ Higgins, Eliot (4 April 2019). "Tulsi Gabbard's Reports on Chemical Attacks in Syria - A Self-Contradictory Error Filled Mess". Bellingcat. Retrieved 30 May 2021.
  20. ^ Jump up to: a b Stewart, Heather (19 April 2018). "Russia spread fake news via Twitter bots after Salisbury poisoning – analysis". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 May 2019.
  21. ^ Ahmad, Muhammad Idrees (5 May 2017). "Chomsky and the Syria revisionists: Regime whitewashing". The New Arab. Retrieved 5 September 2021.
  22. ^ Yurieff, Kaya (11 June 2019). "Prominent white supremacists are still on YouTube in wake of ban". CNN. Retrieved 13 January 2021.

External links[]

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