How is that the pictures and the facts seem to be so divorced from each when it comes to Israel?
When an explosion on a Gaza beach killed several Palestinians earlier this month, the international media didn't pause to think, research or ask questions about the incident.
As a picture of a Palestinian girl grieving over the corpse of a dead relative spread around the world and onto the front pages of newspapers like The New York Times, there was little doubt as to who was to blame for her suffering and, by extension, that of all Palestinians: the Israeli "occupiers" whose brutality had once again taken the lives of Arab innocents.
How is that the pictures and the facts seem to be so divorced from each when it comes to Israel?
When an explosion on a Gaza beach killed several Palestinians earlier this month, the international media didn't pause to think, research or ask questions about the incident.
As a picture of a Palestinian girl grieving over the corpse of a dead relative spread around the world and onto the front pages of newspapers like The New York Times, there was little doubt as to who was to blame for her suffering and, by extension, that of all Palestinians: the Israeli "occupiers" whose brutality had once again taken the lives of Arab innocents.
The only problem with this story, like so many others that have come out of this conflict, is that its basic premise wasn't true. Shell fragments from some of those wounded in the incident who were treated in Israeli hospitals, along with other factors, showed that the Israel Defense Forces were not responsible.
Does all of this sound familiar? It should. The Gaza beach story was just the latest rerun of the same scenario we've all seen before.
It was the same when a Palestinian boy named Mohammed al- Durra was supposedly slain by Israeli army snipers in the arms of his father at the beginning of the second intifada in the fall of 2000 when, in fact, he was killed by Palestinian gunfire.
And the same scenario was played out in the spring of 2000 when many in the media bought into a lie about a massacre of Arab civilians in Jenin during an Israeli army counteroffensive following a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings. Even the United Nations eventually had to accept that this was false, too.
Why does this keep happening? How is that the pictures and the facts seem to be so divorced from each when it comes to Israel? For a credible answer to these questions, there's no better place to look than a book that was published by Encounter late last year to little fanfare: The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy by journalist Stephanie Gutmann.
As Gutmann reports, in the age of the 24/7 news cycle of Internet and all-news cable television, the stakes involved in this issue have never been higher.
In her introduction, Gutmann asserts, "I wrote this book because apparently people need to be reminded that pictures do lie -- The second intifada was explained to the public through a series of images -- images that didn't bring us the truth."
The classic example of this was a celebrated New York Times error in which the paper printed an Associated Press photo that it said depicted an Israeli soldier brutalizing a bloody Palestinian youth on the Temple Mount. As the Times discovered, the youth in extremis was actually an American Jew who had been attacked by Arabs. The soldier, whom Times readers were told was beating him up, was really an Israeli police officer who had rescued him from a mob bent on lynching him.
Gutmann relates that one European reporter confessed to her that he wouldn't report a story of a boy suicide bomber who had been captured before he could explode his bomb because he felt "the Israelis were trying to exploit" it. The exploitation of a child whom the Palestinians attempted to use as a human sacrifice didn't seem to bother him.
Gutmann closes on a hopeful note when she predicts that blogs and alternate media sources are undermining the "imperial media" monopoly and bringing accountability to a profession that desperately needs it.
It's the story that the journalistic elite would rather just go away. In the aftermath of Reuters' admission that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated two war images from Lebanon after bloggers smoked out his crude Photoshop alterations and all 920 of his Reuters photos were pulled, evidence of far more troubling photo staging and media deception in the Middle East continues to pour in.
Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) calls it "fauxtography."
One of Hajj's photos was an iconic image of a dusty dead child with a clean blue pacifier clipped to his shirt, paraded by a corpse handler at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Qana, Lebanon. Mainstream journalists have sneered at bloggers' suspicions, first raised at EU Referendum ( eureferendum.blogspost.com), that some of the gruesome photos from that scene may have been staged. Washington Post photographer Michael Robinson-Chavez, who was at Qana, huffed: "Everyone was dead, many of them children. Nothing was set up." But last week, a German television station aired damning video footage from the scene showing a lead propaganda director (dubbed the "Green Helmet Guy") positioning a young boy's corpse, yanking it from an ambulance, placing it on two different stretchers for the cameras, and pushing bystanders out of the way for clearer shots.
This Lebanese version of horror film director Wes Craven was identified by the Associated Press in a softball profile as "Salam Daher," who told the reporter, "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life." To clear-eyed readers, that's an inculpatory statement, not an exculpatory one. How many more "jobs" has Daher overseen? And how many more media stage managers like Daher are out there?
Not all photographers overseas have their heads in the sand. Last week, Middle East-based photographer Bryan Denton, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, revealed on the professional photography website Light Stalkers (lightstalkers.org) that he had observed routine staging of photos — and even corpse-digging — by Lebanese stringers:
"I have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in people[']s arms." Denton noted that he had witnessed the photo choreography at numerous protests and evacuations, as well as at an Israeli airstrike location in Chiyeh, Lebanon. Denton followed up with a second post reporting that respected photographer friends of his Lebanon informed him that "this was not an isolated incident" and that "this has been something [I]'ve noticed happening here, more than any other place [I]ve worked previously."
Which is probably why bloggers have noticed so many copious examples of phony-looking scenes — from countless pristine stuffed animals lying in the foreground of destroyed buildings ( slublog.com/archives/2006/08/the_passion_of.html), to artfully placed Korans amid scenes of destruction, to a snow-white wedding dress on a mannequin standing in the middle of a street surrounded by piles of rubble, to intact cars photographed on Lebanese roadsides and dubiously labeled as being struck by Israeli missiles (see hotair.com/archives/2006/08/14/
Miscaptioning (which always makes Israel look worse, never Hezbollah, go figure) adds another dimension of fauxto deception. One Associated Press image of an anguished father carrying his dead 5-year-old daughter into a Gaza City hospital last week blamed the death on an Israeli airstrike. Charles Johnson found a correction of the caption revealing that the girl had been killed in a swingset accident. I found a Reuters photo of an 18-month-old girl with two broken legs that was pulled by the wire service in late July after being included among a photo set of hospital patients injured in an Israeli air raid. In truth, the girl had been admitted for a "routine hospitalisation."
Then there was the New York Times' misrepresentation of a half-naked young man sprawled Pieta-like, appearing dead, amid Tyre rubble. The original Times' website photo caption? "The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst-hit areas, bodies were still buried under the rubble..." Turned out the "dead" man was a "rescue worker" who was supposedly "injured" (with his baseball cap tucked neatly in his arm as he closed his eyes and flung his head back) and had been photographed in several other scenes running around the bombing site.
Isolated incidents? In a rare moment of candor, CNN's Anderson Cooper revealed the routine mechanics of Hezbollywood propaganda tours last week: "I was in Beirut, and they took me on this sort of guided tour of the Hezbollah-controlled territories in southern Lebanon that were heavily bombed..they clearly want the story of civilian casualties out. That is their - what they're heavily pushing, to the point where on this tour I was on, they were just making stuff up. They had six ambulances lined up in a row and said, OK, you know, they brought reporters there, they said you can talk to the ambulance drivers. And then one by one, they told the ambulances to turn on their sirens and to zoom off, and people taking that picture would be reporting, I guess, the idea that these ambulances were zooming off to treat civilian casualties, when in fact, these ambulances were literally going back and forth down the street just for people to take pictures of them."
"Just making stuff up." Remember that.
Meanwhile, the media ostriches carry on. Joe Elbert, Washington Post assistant managing editor for photography, told ombudsman Deborah Howell smugly: "We don't use tools to change reality." Newsflash: You are the tools being used.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES OF TERRORISTS: THEIR CULTURE OF DEATH
By Debra Rae http://www.newswithviews.com/Rae/debra8.htm
“We Hate Canada”
Recent investigation unveiled a series of Internet postings by wives of a group of suspected jihad terrorists. Submissions are characterized by disdain for the American military, Muslim men who refuse to leave for jihad, Muslim politicians, democratic rule, nurturing motherhood, and Jews. Mind you, these were not posted in Iran or Syria, but rather in Canada. When asked about this, her homeland, the alleged wife of Ahmad’s second-in-command, Nada Farooq, responded with: “Who cares? We hate Canada.”
So much for “no-place-like-home” sentimentality.
Even so, the Rev. Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral fame joins the ranks of those making broad appeal for Christian-Muslim unity. For that very reason, Muslim clergymen have been invited to open Congress in prayer; and even the White House observes Ramadan. Nevertheless, ethno-religious multiculturalism in politically-correct America, Canada, England, and Europe is not reciprocated by the Muslim community at large. Never mind that America commemorated Islam with an EID first-class holiday postage stamp. Right about the same time, self-proclaimed Muslim purists took down New York’s Twin Towers.
Ill fated, albeit well intended bridge building efforts ignore clear tenets of Islam, for the Koran expressly forbids taking Jews and Christians as friends and protectors. Instead, wherever Muslims find them, the Dar al Hob (House of Infidels) along with People of the Book (Jews and Christians) must be seized and subsequently slain (Sura 4:89; 5:14). French filmmaker Pierre Rehov’s upcoming release, Suicide Killers, is based on his interviews with families of suicide bombers. Rehov marveled that seemingly normal people with very nice manners aspire to become Allah’s sword to smite the necks of infidels (apparently himself included).
Forget June Cleaver. These women mean business.
The American Military ”Filth”
On her Internet posting, the wife of a suspected jihad terrorist besmirched the American military as “the filth of the earth” and “the uncivilized destroyer of humanity.” This is precisely how Michael Moore portrayed American troops in Fahrenheit 911.
Our troops’ presence is viewed as a hindrance to the global charge for which she and her husband are willing to die—that being, “one Arab nation with an eternal mission.” A seemingly lofty goal, but consider implications of the Islamic Grand Design, as delineated by former Iranian President Akbar (meaning “the greatest”) Hashemi Rafsanjani. First, Muslim nations must unite in a coalition led by Iran and Syria. Then, the West must be driven out of the Middle East in order to “liberate” Palestine; and—finally—the faithful will supplant the Judeo-Christian world order with an Islamic one. The latter can be accomplished in any of three ways: conversion, coercion, or copious copulation to ensure their commanding presence.
Jihad meaning “struggle [against infidels]” is spurred on by belief that all of Israel is on Islamic sacred land, and this land must be retaken by force as a Palestinian-Arab state. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the word “Arab” comes from a primary root word meaning “to lie in wait” or “to engage and meddle with.” These lie in opportunistic wait for the “many men made for hell” that they might “find, seize, fight, beleaguer, and slay” them (Sura 7:179; 9:5).
These who follow Mohammed’s example claim descent from Ishmael. To the radical Muslim, it was Ishmael, not Isaac who received Abraham’s blessing. Jamal Abdel Hamid Yussif admits: “Our people love death.” Furthermore, he adds, “our goal is to die for the sake of God; and if we live, we want to humiliate Jews and trample on their necks.” This aligns with the reference to carnality in an amplified version of a Bible—that being, to “the lower, Ishmael nature” characterized by enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, disputes, dissentions, and factions (Galatians 5:20-21). Scripture further calls Ishmael “a wild ass of a man.” Even today, “his hand is against every man, and every man’s hand is against him” (Gen. 16: 12). Nevertheless, Abraham dearly loved Ishmael; and God granted favor to his twelve sons and a daughter, who became princes and progenitors of many tribes (Gen. 17:18; 25:17).
Sounds to me as if the pot is calling the kettle black.
Deliverance by Death or Divorce
One wife of a jihad-ist threatened that if her husband ever refused a clear opportunity to leave for jihad, she would insist upon divorce, as is granted when a Muslim husband converts to Christianity.
This is big talk for a Muslim woman. The decidedly man-centric Muslim culture insists that Allah made men superior to women. A Muslim scholar equates “the [objective] evidence of two women” with “the [subjective] witness of one man.” In fact, Muslim courts even refuse testimony from women and award them no more than 1/3 of their fathers’ estates. Only recently were Kuwaiti women granted the right to vote. Even then, most of them favored male candidates.
Called “toys” by the prophet himself, virgins can be forced by their fathers to wed; and marriages generally are arranged. Sex is the man’s right, not the woman’s. Furthermore, the Koran admonishes men to beat their wives if they fail to obey. To a Western woman, it is understandable why a Muslim wife might willingly send her husband to war—even martyrdom—and, if that doesn’t work, find a way to divorce him honorably. However, when a husband dies, the father’s uncle, not the mother, wins custody of the children.
Having gone undercover in the Palestinian areas, French filmmaker Pierre Rehov outlines many conditions conducive to this “desperate housewives” mindset—namely, cultural oppression, lack of freedom, brainwashing, organized poverty, placing the “moon god” in charge of daily life, total separation between men and women, and sexual repression.
Giving women no power whatsoever, and placing men in charge of family honor, which is mainly connected to their women’s behavior, is a tall order indeed—especially for a “toy” presumed unfit to raise her own children!
Opportunistic Political Correctness
An Internet posting of the wife of a suspected terrorist insists that “all Muslim politicians are corrupt,” adding that there’s “no one out there willing to rule the country by the laws of Allah. Rather they fight to rule the country by the laws of democracy.”
You’ll hear no counter from me regarding the corruption of politics—Muslim or otherwise! Case in point: the former female Prime Minister of Pakistan ostensibly quoted the Koran in delineating three key Islamic principles. The first she identified as “consultation”; however, asking for advice or options does not align with the fact that fighting (not consulting) is prescribed for Muslims, and Allah has granted “a grade higher” to those who do so (Sura 2:216; 4:95).
Next, the former Prime Minister boasted of the Muslim’s commitment to “consensus.” Contrary to Islamic vision, Hegelian dialectics (consensus) undermines the notion of fixed rights or wrongs. The goal of Islam is to impose Islamic religious law by force, if necessary. You see, all people are said to be born Muslim. Those who have yet to bow the knee to Allah must submit—if only by the sword. With no questioning of God or the Koran allowed, and no room for interpretation, consensus cannot possibly be an Islamic value.
Finally, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister credits Islam for embracing “independent judgment.” For their free thinking, Muslim converts to Christianity face prison, even death. Clearly, Islamic law and independent judgment are no bedfellows. It may be true that non-Muslims are permitted to live, but only under Islamic domination.
For the former Prime Minister’s claims to ring true, only one scenario applies. Called the Mecca Approach, a conciliatory stance (in this case, championing consultation, consensus, and independent judgment) is sanctioned in Islam. This applies primarily when Muslims perceive themselves to be in the minority. A popular Arab saying goes like this: “When your enemy is strong, kiss his hand and pray that it will be broken some day.” The takiya right allows a Muslim to “fake peace” when one is proven to be weak.
That Islam leads to democracy or “rule of the people” as the former Prime Minister purports is unfeasible. When Muslims are in the majority, and their enemy is judged to be weak, the Medina Approach endorses war-mongering to elevate to the status of divine law the religion and culture of 7th C Arabia and, in so doing, to impose decidedly non-democratic cultural imperialism. The so-called faithful equate human history to Muslim history, which they believe is destined to culminate in theocratic tyranny under the rule of Mohammed, perceived as a sort of cultural chauvinist and philosopher-king.
All Muslims accept that Islam one day will prevail on earth. The primary difference between moderates and extremists is when this Utopian state will take form, whether in one’s lifetime or not. Extremists fully expect imminent fulfillment of Islam’s presumed prophetic destiny to rule the world.
Down with Democracy
All the while Muslim politicians point to “democracy,” wives of would-be martyrs blog against Western democracy. A prominent Islamic scholar rightly calls Islam “a revolt against the modern world.” Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood purposes to restore the bygone greatness of 7th century Arabia. Muslim guides to living (the Koran, Hadith, and Medina) all assign to Islam every piece of ground that the foot of a Muslim has stepped on. Therefore, it is deemed holy and must be redeemed. Until Muslims obtain each inch of land they insist Allah has given them, they will continue to wage successive jihad with characteristically opportunistic stealth (remember the Mecca and Medina Approaches).
Since the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s concurrent rise to power, the Islamic faith has grown steadily. By 2020, America will likely be home to over 25 million Muslims. By 2025, the number of Muslims globally is expected to jump to two billion, fully one-third of the world’s entire population. Already, Muslims make up a majority in some seventy of 188 nations, and Islam has become the fastest growing religion in Europe. In the whole of Russia, one out of three is Muslim. Surprising to some, seventy percent of the population in Dearborn, Michigan is Muslim. Since Islam claims dibs on every piece of ground that any Muslim has trod upon, it is no wonder that Islam expert Dr. Robert Morey tags this phenomenon “an Islamic invasion.”
Stunningly, the heart if not the soul of extremists is largely in the United States, where radicals have set up many of their fund-raising and political headquarters. This allegation is not mine; it was given in testimony to the Near East and South Asia Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (19 March 1996). Make no mistake. Radical Wahhabis from the Saudi Arabian desert have financed some ninety percent of mosques and Islamic schools in America.
Monster Mothering
Frightening, isn’t it, when one considers that ten to fifteen percent of Muslims worldwide are of the militant Islamic strain.
It’s disconcerting enough when outspoken wives of terrorists long for Allah “to make Jewish women widows and their children orphans.” It’s even more unsettling when an HAMAS candidate elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council, Mariam Farhat, wishes she had 100 sons to sacrifice as martyrs. Three of her sons have already paid the ultimate price. In celebration, Farhat handed out halva and chocolates to her friends. She has three more to go (maybe then her own life added to theirs).
Astonishingly, Rehov found that one’s son being a suicide bomber is a greater source of pride for some Muslim mothers than if he had become an engineer, doctor, or recipient of the Nobel Prize. Being awarded the title shaheed (or saint) is the highest hope a Muslim mother has for her offspring. John Ashcroft put it well when he identified Islam as a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for Him. In contrast, Christianity is a faith in which God sent His Son to die for you.
Sadly, Rehov describes a suicide bomber’s personality profile as being a kid between 15 and 25 with inferiority complexes, lack of developed personality, and sexual frustration. Pounded with religious indoctrination, these youngsters constantly battle against their own death anxiety, but nonetheless are spurred on by the single delusional second of absolute power they hope to experience at the portal of death. Beyond that, testosterone-driven teen-aged boys are promised eternal “pampering” from at least seventy beautiful, naked girls.
Before being sent out to clear a mine field, Iranian children were given keys to heaven to tuck into their pockets to assure them that, after accomplishing their holy task, they would be able to open the door to paradise. These kids are well prepared to “drink the Kool-Aid,” so to speak, in that their religious teachers have taught them well that death in the service of Islam will ensure their immediate placement of honor in heaven.
Isolationism, exclusivity, psychological conditioning, exploitation, and excessive devotion to human leaders earmark cults, tragedies from which include eerily ritualistic mass suicides of the People’s Temple Sect, Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate Cult, and the doomsday Uganda Suicide Cult. Similar psychopathology characterizes the Muslim mother of a human bomb, when exclaiming, “Thank God my son is dead!” And who could forget the networks’ playing (and then replaying) a segment in which Palestinian children celebrated with glee the monstrous attack on America one fateful September morning?
Anti-Semitic Hatred
The plight of roaming Palestinians with no place to call “home” can tug on the strings of one’s heart. Jesus Himself had no place to rest His head. Though a “pilgrim and sojourner,” He was by no means an underdog.
Contrary to what many presume, the true underdog in today’s geo-political arena may not be displaced refugees of so-called Occupied Palestine. If size is a factor, as surely it is, consider this: Israel’s land mass is roughly that of Iowa. By comparison, her more than 140 million enemies cover a surrounding land mass exceeding that of the entire United States!
If bullying factors in, and it does, these enemies refer to the Jews as “despised and rejected apes” (Sura 7:16). Taking a Jew as one’s friend is joining the ranks of the disdained. Accordingly, in 1981 the Mecca Declaration released Islamic jihad against Israel. Thereafter in 1988, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa or religious edict calling on Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world where they can be found.
Let me be very clear. Contrary to prevailing thought, Islamic interests cannot be appeased by yielding territory and reducing the size of Israel. The issue is not the size, but rather the very existence of Israel. HAMAS’ founding document proclaims the war to be open “until Israel ceases to exist … and the last Jew in the world is eliminated.”
Among extremist Muslim “Daughters of the Night” are wives of terrorists feverishly spreading hate through cyberspace while their husbands and sons add legs to it anywhere in the world where their enemies can be found.
My earnest prayer for these misguided and very lost souls is that they and their families might abandon hate and instead come to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:17ff). Commitment to this Prince of Peace yields spiritual transformation. In my view, heart conversion to Jesus Christ is the one and only answer to the four thousand year old blood feud that rages even today between Ishmael and Isaac, the Arabs and the Jews.
As the End of Time approaches, we all shall see that the Israelis or Jews will be villified and chastised more and more. Finally the war will begin and God will defeat Gog and allies supernaturally. Until that time, there will be anti-semitism, destruction, hate for the chosen of God. I wish it to be otherwise but it is the Lord's plan and there is a purpose in it. In the end, the Arabs and others that did not believe will find that they are/were wrong and they shall suffer greatly for it. Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem for it is said that those who do will prosper. The Lord will curse those that curse her.