The Fauxto That Wasn't
MEDIA | Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 5:00:45 pm PST
In the midst of a liveblogging session on the conflict in Gaza, the Muqata raised the alarm about a possible fauxtograph: The Muqata: Day 12 of the War, Wednesday, January 7, 2009.
The picture he noticed was filed by AP photographer Adel Hana in Gaza:
An explosion is seen after an Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from Gaza City, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2009.
The debris certainly does look odd; the pieces seem too large. The photo is also being discussed at Snapped Shot, where several commenters said the hills in the background seem out of place for the region (Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza).
It’s always good to question and criticize photos such as this, because as we’ve learned, occasionally an outright fake will come through the wires.
But in this case the picture is indisputably genuine—because here’s the same explosion photographed from the opposite point of view at about the same time, with the same flying debris and at least one of the same buildings, by a different photographer: Nikola Solic for Reuters.
Debris flies up as a bomb explodes after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip January 3, 2009.
That looks like a hell of an explosion (a 500 lb. bomb or larger), so it’s not surprising that two media photogs would immediately focus their cameras on it.
Nope. No fauxtography this time.
LGF on Dennis Prager
BLOGOSPHERE | Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:25:36 am PST
I’ll be calling in to the Dennis Prager radio show at 9:30 this morning; you can listen over the web at the KRLA 870 website.
A Soldier's Mother on the UN School Incident
MIDDLE EAST | Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:12:29 am PST
A heartfelt and insightful post on the Gaza UN school incident, at A Soldier’s Mother: The Images they Show...
This is the point none of the media will make:
Yesterday, mortars were fired FROM the school In Jebalya. This was a direct and intentional attack on Israel, on Israel’s soldiers and population. Mortars are explosions. They are loud. You can’t pretend you didn’t hear them.Many months ago, I went to a ceremony on a base where Elie had completed his basic training. Part of the ceremony included Elie’s group showing their parents what they had learned. After the awards and the talking, some of the soldiers ran to the armored personnel vehicles, while others, including Elie sat on the ground and watched. An officer came near me, as I stood watching with my youngest daughter. He told me to sit down with the girl “on your lap.” So, we sat down, as the soldiers were doing. As another officer was explaining to the crowd about the types of explosives that would be fired, where they would be targeting (the hill a few kilometers in the distance), etc. I saw the soldiers stick their fingers in their ears.
I thought to myself - they’ve been doing this - they know. So I told my daughter to do the same...quickly. She did, and so did I. Except - then I couldn’t hear the explanation and so I uncovered my ears. Now, I’ve lived in Israel more than 15 years, but there is still sometimes a delay factor in my Hebrew comprehension. Now they are going to fire...took me too long and so, I heard and felt the BOOM as the cannons fired.
Everyone in that building yesterday KNEW that the school was being used as a launching ground...and yet, apparently not one of those thought it would be a smart thing to leave. That seems strange to me, unnatural. I was once in Jerusalem, walking with my two daughters when something “exploded” ahead of me. Everyone around me stopped, as I did. It was a bus hitting something that went flying in the air and crashed loudly into something else. People began to move and yet I stood there, unsure what to do. It should be both human instinct and parental instinct to move away from danger.
And the people who now mourn the “innocents” who died in yesterday’s attack on the United Nations school don’t question why people remained in the building from which these weapons were fired. They don’t question that this defies human instinct and certainly what should have been every parent’s first reaction.
Deported Hamas Terrorist Now an LA Times Columnist
MEDIA | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 8:05:22 pm PST
Leading Hamas terrorist Mousa Abu Marzook, deported from the United States in 1997, gets back into the US via a column in the Los Angeles Times: Hamas speaks.
Vile. Evil. Disgusting. Foul. Take your pick. There is something deeply wrong with our mainstream media.
Contact the Los Angeles Times and tell them what you think about giving a voice to genocidal mass murderers.
Hamas Steals Humanitarian Supplies, Then Sells Them for Profit
MIDDLE EAST | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 5:45:39 pm PST
Report: Hamas stealing aid supplies to sell to residents.
A number of reports from the Strip paint a picture of very difficult humanitarian conditions, not least because of Hamas itself. The suspicion is that the group’s operatives have seized control of any supplies passing through the crossings – including those sent by Israel and international organizations.
Reports say Hamas takes a cut out of all aid that arrives, including flour and medicine. Supplies intended to be distributed without gain among the population are seized by the group and sold to the residents, at a profit to the Hamas government.
One such incident was recorded Monday, when a convoy of trucks carrying supplies through the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened fire upon and seized by Hamas gunmen. Similar incidents occurred with trucks carrying fuel.
France 2 Apologizes for Using Phony Gaza Attack Video
MEDIA | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 5:15:39 pm PST
France’s public TV station France 2 (perpetrator of the Mohammed Al-Dura hoax) was taken in by that footage from an accidental explosion of a truck full of rockets at a Hamas rally, and yesterday they retracted their report and apologized: French TV apologises over footage mix-up.
PARIS: France’s public broadcaster was forced to apologise to viewers yesterday after it mistakenly used amateur footage shot in 2005 to illustrate a report on the current Gaza conflict.
France 2 television on Monday broadcast part of an amateur video presented in a voiceover commentary as showing the fallout from an Israeli air strike on a civilian area in Gaza on January 1.
Dating from September 2005, the video, which has been widely circulated on the Internet, actually shows civilians wounded in the accidental explosion of a pick-up truck loaded with Hamas rockets at a rally in Jabaliya refugee camp.
Alerted by the French website LePost.fr, France 2 admitted its mistake yesterday and made a formal apology to viewers in its midday news broadcast.
“It is an error on our behalf. There was an internal malfunction in the checking of information,” a France 2 executive told AFP.
The France 2 article (in French) is here: Vidéo intox de Gaza sur France 2: ‘Ça a gueulé dans la rédaction’.
All over the world, the mainstream media is suffering from these kinds of “internal malfunctions in the checking of information.”
(Hat tip: zombie.)
Norwegian Doctor in Gaza Supported 9/11 Attacks
MIDDLE EAST | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 3:58:57 pm PST
Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor in Gaza, is all over the mainstream media, claiming that Israel is indiscriminately and purposely murdering civilians. He’s given interviews to the BBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, the Independent, Sky News, and the New York Times, among others.
And in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, this supposedly impartial Norwegian doctor (actually a radical Marxist member of Norway’s Red party) expressed support for the hijackers.
In an interview with the Norwegian daily, Dagbladet, shortly after the attacks, Gilbert stated:
“The attack on New York was not surprising, after the policy that has led the West in recent decades. I am upset over the terrorist attack, but am equally upset over the suffering which the United States has created. It is in this context that the 5000 dead people must be seen. If the U.S. government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, then there is also a moral right to attack the United States with the weapons they had to create. Dead civilians are the same whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.”
When asked by Dagbladet if he supported the terrorist attack on the U.S., he replied:
“Terror is a bad weapon, but the answer is yes, within the context I have mentioned.”
Of course, not a single mainstream media report on the creep mentions any of this.
We Got Mail!
WEIRD | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 11:12:41 am PST
The conflict in Gaza has really stirred up the wackos, and they’re pouring their fury into illiterate emails sent to little old me. Here are the latest two messages sent through our contact form by Hamas supporters and Jew-haters; first, from St. Louis, Missouri, with the descriptive title “Assholes...” and the phony but almost humorous return address “americandickheads@yahoo.com:”
You dickheads are shameless... 555+ Palestenian, mostly innocent, killed, and what 5 Israeli’s killed by chance... genocide ongoing in Gaza at the hands of the putrid and horrific Zionist criminals, and you pricks have the NERVE to marginalize and BLAME THE PALESTENIANS for their own deaths?
Then we have a love note sent from Dubai, with the title, ‘Shame on little green “Hitlers”:’
You people are truely sick! It is sicking to see how the little green “Hitlers” are enjoying the Jewish massacare of the Palestinians.
UN Schools Notorious for Shielding Terrorists
MIDDLE EAST | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:55:46 am PST
As the world screams about the UN school incident in Gaza, here’s a reminder of what goes on at these places: EXCLUSIVE-Gaza headmaster was Islamic Jihad ‘rocket-maker’.
RAFAH, Gaza Strip, May 5 (Reuters) - By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.
The Israeli air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.
In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq’s work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.
But militant leaders allied to the enclave’s ruling Hamas group hailed him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad’s “engineering unit” — its bomb makers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death.
(Hat tip: Diamond Bullet.)
UN School Used by Terrorists As a Weapons Dump
MIDDLE EAST | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:52:12 am PST
The UN and the mainstream media are wailing and accusing Israel of war crimes (yes, again) after the IDF returned fire at a UN school from which Palestinians were firing mortars.
The explosives and booby traps installed in the school by Hamas then blew up, killing dozens of people.
And the world blames Israel.
30 reported killed in blast at UN school.
At least thirty people were reportedly killed and 53 wounded in an explosion in a UN-run school in the town of Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip, according to Palestinians. The IDF issued a statement saying the school grounds were used by terrorists to fire mortar shells at the troops.
The infantrymen returned mortar shell fire into the school grounds, the army said. Defense officials told The Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school triggered the secondary explosions which killed scores of Palestinians on the site.
In 2007, the IAF actually filmed some of these terrorists at a Gaza school, firing mortars into Israel. The media don’t seem to care.
Emerson: Why Does The New York Times Love Hamas?
MEDIA | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:35:23 am PST
Steve Emerson asks: Why Does The New York Times Love Hamas?
In the past week, the Fourth Estate’s Hamas cheerleaders have stripped away any pretense of being honest or neutral, with the New York Times continuing to take the side of the terrorist group in one of the most shameful journalistic episodes I have ever seen. In following the Times coverage for the past six months and checking external sources of information, one can see a clear pattern of propagandistic reporting favoring Hamas that selectively suppressed or willfully misrepresented information.
It’s bizarre and disgusting to see much of America’s media making excuses for a bloodthirsty, openly genocidal death cult. Something is deeply wrong with journalism in this country.
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