The Washington Post’s front page this morning:
In the photo, a Palestinian stringer for BBC cradles his son, who was reportedly killed during Operation Pillar of Defense. The corresponding story briefly mentions the Hamas rocket attacks, but focuses mainly on Israel’s “intense air offensive” that could “paralyze the Gaza Strip” and result in “all-out conflict.”
Innocent casualties of war are a tragedy, and this is especially true when they are children.
But what the Washington Post doesn’t emphasize in its corresponding story is that the Israeli military launched this operation specifically because its citizens in the south, including children, live under constant threat from Hamas rocket fire — hundreds can rain down in a single day. These attacks regularly result in injuries and deaths, and recently forced more than a million Israelis into bomb shelters. While these stories may get a blurb on page three or four, they are rarely given front page coverage.
There are terrible casualties on both sides; three Israeli civilians were killed this morning by Hamas missile attacks. The difference is that Hamas aims for civilians, and Israel does not. And the Washington Post’s front page seems almost intended to give readers the impression that the Israeli military randomly decided to go into Gaza this week because it felt like killing children.
At the Spectator, David Blackburn writes:
The Post’s front page reinforces the fact that Israel has a public relations problem when it retaliates in Gaza; a fact that friends of Israel ought to accept.
My colleague Douglas Murray is right to assert that the western media often applies a double standard when reporting Israeli and Palestinian casualties: the suffering of Israeli citizens is not given the coverage it deserves. This bias skews the tragic human story of Israel and Palestine to benefit Hamas, an organisation whose bloodcurdling charter makes clear that it has no interest in a peaceful solution to the problem. Other terrorist groups based in the Gaza Strip also benefit, which provides further complication.
There is a deep-seated media double-standard here. And while it can sometimes be subtle, it certainly shapes the coverage of the conflict.
Very clever of the WaPo. n nA father cradling his dead son. n nFurthermore, they found a 'white' looking victim, surrounded by sympathetic dark skinned 'natives'. n n nSee? The Israelis are enemies of all the sons of man! n nShades of Rachel Corrie? n nIntentional or accidental racial play? n nI report, you decide.
The AP reported this morning on the Arab civilians who were killed, but did not write a word about the Israeli civilians who were killed, or about Hamas setting up launch sites near mosques and kindergartens. According to the AP. the violence started when Israel for no apparent reason decided to kill a Hamas leader; more than 65 rockets "fell on" Israel after that. I guess no one launched them, they must have just rolled off a high shelf. Not a word, though, about the 120 rockets in the day preceding Israel's killing the Hamas leader, or the 1,000's of rockets before that one.
Why does the WaPo hate Jews and Israel? n n
They're very typical of the liberal, Washington elite. Many of the Jews who move to Washington are on the make, and they want to leave behind their heritage. They seek to assimilate and succeed in the larger society. Most of the liberal elite is not Jewish, however, and they continue to see the Arab-Israeli conflict through the prism of the liberalism and internationalism. Such people are basically anti-war and find "tribal" identification to be anachronistic. They also buy into the narrative that Jews are interlopers in the Middle East, and are causing all the trouble by not giving their land"back to" the Palestinians. Some of it is just anti-semitism, of which a refined form has taken hold among the elite, and some of it is just the liberal bias. (The two often overlap.) Don't forget the Post has been owned by a family partly of Jewish ancestry which has never identified as Jewish. Such apostates are among the most likely to reject any sympathy for Israel, although some articles by Katherine Graham's daughter, Lally Weymouth, over the years have seemed a bit more sympathetic. The general trend of the Post has always been hostile to israel and biased both in reporting and editorials.
Thanks.
I forget exactly what the Geneva Convention says — and yes, Hamas isn't a signing party to it, but still — it has language both about not using religious shrines and civilian/children buildings for military purposes *and* the legitimacy of considering the same as military targets when they are.
Some have reported that that photo is from Syria 2 months ago. Someone needs to verify that.
if this is indded true, it shows the deep hatred that western intelligentsia has for israel. WaPO and NYT are only the forward vaguards of these anti-semites.
Everything looks too clean — I think the photo was staged and wonder if there really is a dead child in that bundle. Let us not forget the time that the Boston Globe ran porno on page B-3 when a Boston City Councilor presented a porno video as evidence of American atrocities in Iraq. Newspapers believe what they want to believe — and I think they got duped here. n nIsrael is using rockets, which explode. This raises a lot of dirt and dust, and a child would have had to die from (a) shrapnel or similar slicing/stabbing injuries, concussion from the blast, or being crushed from something falling on the child. An infant doesn't have a lot of blood but the first and third would almost certainly have made the child's body bloody, and the second would have at least had spinal fluid coming out of the ears. n nAbsent a lot of first responder training and a lot of self discipline, a parent is going to instinctively hold an infant to his/her/its chest. That means that all the dirt, dust, blood and whatnot will be all over his sweater, which it isn't. You don't care about getting dirty in a situation like this, not if it is someone whom you love, and who dug the child out of the rubble, anyway? n nEven if this picture was taken in the hospital, even if the child's body was washed and wrapped in clean cloth for burial, even if the father had taken a shower and changed into clean clothes — which a disraught parent isn't going to, his fingers would be banged up and/or bandaged from having clawed through the rubble after the child. I'm looking at my own fingers right now and I am just doing routine wall plaster repair — do we see any broken fingernails? n nAll of them have clean and non-torn clothing. Everyone's hair looks too neat. Even if the other guys are just EMS or hospital workers and weren't anywhere near the explosion, the frantic attempt to rescue and save lives shows on people afterwards. Everyone is too neat.
One other thing — and it may not be a minor point in the propaganda war — I don't think it is a good idea to have one name for the operation in English and a different one in Hebrew. That is opening yourself up to propaganda about how you might have two stories about what is going on as well…
fair???? when a front page photo is shown to tug at people's hearts? where are the photos of the Israeli vicitims???? God- you must really be a self hating jew- if,indded, you are jewish!
Please. n nHe's as Jewish as Achmadinejad. Probably even same ethnicity.
They denounced the propagandistic picture that has its own "thousand words" story. And look, there the picture is. The Washington Post traditionally and habitually implies that civilian casualties are intentional and represents Palestinian combatants killed as "Palestinia" dead, i.e. civilians. Would HillelA suffer his family to be intermittently shot at by some guy with a grievance from the garage in the next lot. Maybe so.
I think whoever named the Operation has a sense of humor. n nThe recently departed terrorist went out in a Pillar of Smoke, no?
The picture certainly is not. One picture is worth the thousand(s of) words in the story. Maybe more since the majority do not read the stories. Your concept of fairness is as consistently flawes as your world view.
Fourth, the hole in the roof may have been deliberately put there by a firefighter. n nWhen you have a fire in a building, you have a lot of superheated and quite toxic gasses — Carbon Monoxide being only one –and these gasses are heated way beyond their ignition point, and the only reason they aren't burning is that there is no oxygen. They are hot enough to cook your lungs with one breath, and toxic enough to kill you (i.e. "smoke inhalation"). You need to vent them and are helped by the fact that hot air rises — you put a hole in the roof and vent them out — even though this helps the fire burn better, you aren't looking at a possible backdraft (which are real and quite terrifying) and you can knock the fire down with a hose or even buckets of water. n nFifth. notice how the windows are boarded up. If your house had just been hit and you had just rushed your infant son to the hospital, where he died, would you really be bothering to board up the windows of your burnt-up residence? And I know it is dry over in that part of the world, but if you have enough water to put a fire out (which they clearly did here) it is going to take a while — and I am thinking at least a couple of days if not weeks here — for things to dry out like they are in these photos. n nSix, compare this to the picture of the Bengazi compound building. Note how that building had visible concentrations of soot and flash/burn patterns — in this case the fire appears to have gradually gone from lower right to upper left — note the burn patterns in the paint on the upper left of the second picture. n nFurthermore, it is entirely possible that the fire spread from the room shown in the third picture to the one in the second one — and again, the hole in the roof was not put there by Israel but by some Palestinian firefighters who knew what they were doing and appear to have knocked down this fire in the nick of time before it really got going. n nCompare the lighting in the third picture to that of the second, it looks like sunlight is uniformly coming down from above, as if there was no ceiling, roof or anything else still there. That would be consistent with a fire that started in the third pictured room, and someone having vented the second room so they could go in and stop it there. n nFolks, I really don't think this fire happened yesterday — and I think this was a "traditional" fire. I say this as a former volunteer firefigher who has seen more than a few of those and I think what someone did was find a building that had burned in the past and decided to use it for the claim of an Israeli attack on a child. I don't exactly know what Israel is using for weaponry, but anything I can think of — high explosive, white phosphorus or napalm — wouldn't have done what we see here. (The latter two would have done a h*** of a lot *MORE* damage and I do not believe we would be seeing the same damage/burn patterns.) n nAlana, this is like when the Amherst Police tried to allege that some drunken UM student broke a cop's gun with a beer bottle. The APD had Glocks which are made of high strength composites far stronger than human bone — any force that would destroy a holstered Glock would have broken most of the bones in the officer wearing it, hence it couldn't have happened (and to this day I regret not asking them how they managed to get the clip out of a weapon that badly damaged — they would have had a hard time explaining that one). n nSo too here — this simply does not add up, there simply are too many things not consistent with what we are supposed to be seeing here….. n
I had to cut this in half, and reading the first part (below) will make the above make more sense. n nI will add that I have seen what happens when a 9mm bullet goes through the wall into an adjacent apartment (great way to start a Monday morning being called down for that) and not only do high-speed projectiles tend to make round holes when they punch through things, they tend to keep going for a while. n nThat is what I was saying about kinetic energy — something at terminal velocity if not under power (i.e. rocket) that has enough kinetic energy to punch a hole through a roof is going to keep going until its energy is expended, and that means something else gets damaged too.
Its a biblical reference from Exodus.
Which is in the Christian Bible too (I *think* — I know Exodus itself is, quoting Exodus 22.2 getting me in no small amount of trouble a few years back). It is the Judeo/Christian culture, we are all in this together, and sometimes I wonder if Israel fully understands that. n nAnyone have the actual Exodus cite on 'Pillar of Cloud'?
Cloud by day, fire by night. n nStill, the fact is that these forced retirements of terrorists are marked pillars of smoke.
Oh, I remember that now — leading Moses across the desert, right?
I think Israel understands the Judeo-Christian concept (and it's a useful concept: that's usually the religion I say I am). it's the American Jews who are overly suspicious of evangelical Christians who are strongly pro-Israel. n nbtw, Ed, to be completely accurate, Exodus is NOT in the "Christian" bible, it's in the Jewish scriptures, aka the Old Testament. in fact it's part of the Torah, the first five books of the bible and the Jews' holy scripture. the whole shebang OT and NT is known as The Bible, but Exodus is most definitely from the Jewish part.
the picture can't be ignored whether we like it or not….. n nand not reading the story and pretending that the WaPo is pulling for Hamas is just bs and willful blindness.
Willfull blindness is reading the story and pretending tht WaPo is anything other than a willingly gullible, irresponsible, unprofessional and incompetent dupe.
y'know I was saying sorta the same stuff when Fred Hiatt signed Jennifer Rubin. n nI'm in favor of the Israeli strikes into Gaza and I don't see, in the story, that the Post is taking any stand against them. n nany real judgment of what Israel is up to has to wait as we don't know what their objectives are and whether they have some intellignece of things in Gaza that will propel them to send in ground troops… or how this thing will turn out.
There's a difference between the reporting, which I have followed for years, and which seems slanted against Israel, and the editorial board, and the fact they have employed a few pro-Israel bloggers and columnists over the years. For every Rubin and Krauthammer they have had, there have been probably two or three as many who were hostile. This has been going on for years: Colman McCarthy, William Raspberry, even Nicholas von Hoffman, if you go back far enough. n nI don't even have to read the story. The picture is enough. It was deliberate, and one-sided, and will have far more impact then a more balanced article. n nIf you want to know what Israel is up to you might look for Lee Smith's article today on the Weekly Standard website. This is probably an important part of the campaign against Iran since the weapons now coming from Gaza are pretty much all made in Iran, and fired by militias trained by the Iranians. The first stage was the destruction of the factory in Sudan, this is the next stage.
BD— the picture simply had to be run…. that's just how newpaper journalism works. n nsaying that you refused to read the story …and still claiming that you know enough merely from the picture…is less than optimal. n nthe reportage of late has been anti-Netanyahu not really anti-Israel. ….
Right-o. With thousands of Israelis blown away and maimed during the "spontaneous" intifada a decade ago, how many similar "iconic" photos did WaPo run ? On its front page and above the fold? n nIn any case, Empress Trudy is right to ask about authenticity in this case. It's not indifference or callousness; it's a healthy and justifiable doubt whenever perfectly posed "iconic" images, the kind one would base bronze statues on, appear. The Green Helmet Guy dragging babies' corpses back and forth for the cameras, the Photoshopped photos, the walking corpses and dozens of other frauds the MSM eagerly gobbled-up makes a presumption of fraud the most reasonable position. Me, I'm going to reserve judgment on this one until someone bothers to document the incident. So sorry. n nAnti-Netanyahu, not anti-Israel, you say? Hahahaha! Kind of like anti-Zionist, not antisemitic?
Abe, pardon my ignorance but i don't remember hearing of THOUSANDS of Israelis blown away. n nthe way I heard it was that 1,000 were killed which was about 25% of the total who were killed. n n—– n n nand yeah anti-Netanyahu sure ain't anti-Israel….and more than anti-Obama means you're anti-American. n nstop being foolish about that. n n
No, it can't be ignored. But if the whole damn thing is a hoax — as I strongly suspect — it shouldn't be either. n nThat building is real. The WaPo needs to be asked for details and someone needs to check them — if I am right that it actually burned a couple months ago if not a couple years ago, then the WaPo is going to have an awful lot to answer for. There are way too many things here that do not add up — and if this is military propaganda that they are stupid enough to fall for, they need to be held accountable for that.
Ed, when it's proven out as a hoax, I'll gladly bow in your direction. nTill then, I'll scoff just a little.
Point out the flaws in my argument. n nHave you ever been inside a burning building? I have. nHave you ever been in a burnt building after the fire is out? I have. nHave you ever gotten someone out of a wrecked automobile? I have. nHave you ever tried to save a life and fail, with the person dying in front of you? I have. n nHave you seen any of the *other* pictures of the buildings hit with Israeli ordinance? The whole damn building has fallen flat, or at least the part where the bomb hit has — and we are supposed to believe that an Israeli bomb (the smallest of which have 60-80 lbs of high explosives) fell through the roof and went off, without knocking the shelving unit over? Really…. n nThere are way too many things that are inconsistent with reality. Facts matter…
all due respect Ed, but you don't have an argument, you've some questions …. to which you're providing speculative answers….from which you're concluding that the story isn't consistent with some picture and from what is very much not "indisputable visual evidence" (sorry it's Sunday) you're jumping to a conclusion….that most anyone would suspect arises from an inclination not not accept the truth of the story . n nNow, I don't fault you for thinking the worst about the crap that routines spews forth from Hamas, and everything from them must be discounted or dismissed….. n nbut maybe you can tell us why the kid's father and the BBC are lying.
"Remember the Maine"? Ever hear the expression "You give me the pictures, I'll give you the war." n nHave you seen any of the pictures of buildings hit by Israeli ordinance? They aren't still standing — and this one has a shelving unit that wasn't knocked over? n nWhy are they lying? It's called "propaganda" — and media both being biased and not bright enough to realize they are being deceived.
Ed, I do remember and I DO completely agree that stuff put out by Palestinian propaganda organs is completely untrustworthy. n n nand that does not validate what you're doing . Questions are good and fine and darn well necessary…but they can't simply be turned into conclusions and you can't simply discount that the BBC knows the father and trusts him and accepts the story……unless you have some real evidence. n nproduce some and, as i said, I'll gladly bow to you.
really? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I don't remember any weeping and gnashing of teeth over the 3-month-old Fogel baby, who was slaughtered like an animal by Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank. where was the world's outrage then? is it just Palestinian children who are special and beloved? do Israeli children not count?
there was FAR more world-wide outrage then. you're unbalanced.
WaPo now acts as WaPa, the Washington Palestinian news outlet; I recognized this sadly transformation long ago, canceled my subscription and never touch it.
HillelA, Obama already won the election. You can stop shilling for the Jew-haters now.
The mass media deliberate goal is to hurt and undermine IL and Jews in general. The American Jews have their head deep in sand. There is plenty of sand/deserts in the Muslim countries.
"The American Jews have their head deep in sand." n nas witnessed by 70% of them voting for Obama.
Why is it that Conservative Christians support Israel far more than American Jews do?
they're less educated and prone to ignoring nuance.
Your Imperial Majesty, thank you for the link to the always informative israelmatzav. n nWhat does it say that we need to rely on upaid amateur bloggers to do what reporters are paid to do, but are too incompetent, lazy or biased to do — uncover the truth? And that the bloggers often do it better and faster?