'Assad Speech: Lost in Translation'

"... In drawing an analogy with the performance of surgery on a wounded patient, the Syrian leader was clearly alluding to the surgical – as opposed to random or chaotic – nature of the violence that his regime was compelled to resort to, in order to treat a body-politic infiltrated by hostile external forces. How this was misconstrued to mean that he was justifying brutal massacres and repression of his people, defies the most elemental logic.

The message could not possibly have been lost in translation considering that terrorism and the need for a security solution to root it out were leitmotifs in Assad’s speech. Nor could the discrepancy between original intent and interpretation be attributed to a misunderstanding on the part of the media. No, this was nothing less than a deliberate misinterpretation of an otherwise unequivocally straightforward defense of the regime’s war against the foreign sponsored terrorists and insurrectionists.
In that sense, the relationship between the Syrian regime and the information warlords, is not merely a case of what French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, would call “mésentente” (political disagreement) which presupposes “two speakers who either use the same words but in different senses, or with the same word do not designate the same thing as referent.”..."