James DeMeo's OBRL-News Blog

Dear -----,

War is hellish, and too many people have been killed in them over
centuries. But with respect to the Israeli-Lebanese clash, there
have been a large number of fake photos from the Muslim side claiming
atrocity and big damages, large civilian deaths, etc, which have been
shown to be bogus -- but all of which appeared without critical
scrutiny in NYT, Time Mag., BBC, CNN, sent out by Reuters, AP, and
other organizations. Fox has made many mentions of this material,
many mentions, so I don't know what you are speaking about. Hannity
and others have been hammering away on this matter for at least a
week. They had as guests the bloggers on who made the discovery of
the numerous photo-fakes. And while there have been repeated
withdrawals of photos by the wire services, along with protestations
of innocence, and a very few firings of photographers who made the
fakes for those same news organizations, rarely does any of that
appear in their own programs or publications such that their readers
learn the extent of the deception. And so, like you, they remain
basically ignorant, and when they hear about it from someone like me,
there is a tendency to disbelieve.

So BBC and CNN remove photos from their webpages but without comment,
no info is told to the public "this was a staged photo", or "the
journalist fabricated a story and now we correct it". The
controversy is mainly "contained" within the conservative news and
bloggers, so liberals who refuse to expand out from their favored NYT
and BBC remain fully ignorant. So to track it with accuracy you MUST
expand your sources, as the liberal organizations aren't generally
reporting either the discovered fraud, or their own retractions.

I certainly don't have time to post out but a small fraction of such
material, and only do so when there is sufficient repeating and
evidence to show it is a real thing, and I feel people might benefit
to know about it. Michelle Malkin's website and Little Green
Footballs blog appear most on top of it, so I refer you to do a
search of their Archive since at least August 1st.
http://www.michellemalkin.com/
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/

I'm sure you've seen some of the phoney photos, as they were all over
the MSM: The "downed and burning Israeli jet" on the front of Time
Mag, which in fact was a burning garbage dump in the distance with no
jet whatsoever. But that was the least damaging of the photo-fakes.
The worst ones are regarding the claims to have bombed civilian
targets deliberately, with massive civilian deaths. If one building
is destroyed, however, it winds up being photographed from a dozen
different angles, and described as different locations. Bad enough
that Hezbollah moves rocket-launchers into residential neighborhoods,
knowing the Israelis will target them for destruction and inevitably
destroy some civilian homes, no matter how careful they might try to
be. Bad enough that Hezbollah kills Lebanese who dare to resist such
practices, and that the Lebanese military does NOTHING to stop this
use of their populations as human shields. There was also the
photo-shots of Beirut with smoke added in to claim nearly the entire
city was bombed out, when in fact it has been only a tiny area where
Hezbollah made their headquarters. Others: A wailing woman sits on
the ruins of her bombed-out (Hezbollah headquarters?) house, but the
same woman also sat on another bombed-out house weeks earlier
(actress working for Hezbollah? Every fortress or headquarters
building a "home"?), dead men in one photo claimed to be pulled from
rubble are seen walking around later on in subsequent photos,
indicating even the photographers were in on the propaganda. Or the
same "green helmet" rescue-worker guys showing off corpses of
children appear again and again, holding up the same sad corpses to
different journalists, the staged photos of ambulance activity,
phoney claims of Israel bombing a funeral procession, of people
running away over a bridge which turns out to be a crowd who "ran"
only when the cameras were turned on, cropped photos of jihadis
shooting at the Israelis where crowds of laughing children standing
right behind them are cut away from the published versions (which is
how Muslim children wind up being killed in pitched battles),
inflated numbers of dead, photoshop alterations of people in photos,
faked missiles from Israeli jets, children's toys used as photo-props
in destroyed Hezbollah military buildings, perfectly alive civilians
climbing into and around a totally burned out truck and lying down in
obviously-faked positions and then being photographed as "civilians
killed by Israeli air strike" -- but of course not a single bit of
clothing or hair is burned nor are they dismembered nor is blood seen
as would happen in such an event. And on it goes, except we see the
liberal-left supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas in the USA and Europe
acting as propaganda agents and spreading those lies far and wide.
Add to it, the refusal to publish authentic photos of Hezbollah
missile launchers and troops using Lebanese residential neighborhoods
as human shields, or the big damages and deaths in Israel which is
subjected to daily rocket attacks deliberately aimed at civilian
targets. Those photos get little exposure.

Qana does indeed appear to have been largely faked, the building
collapsing hours after the closest air strike which did not even hit
the building, with many staged photos there as well, and with the
body-count inflated by 200% (as clarified later by the Lebanese
hospital where the dead were transported). The Left-liberal media
are lapping up such stories without critical review, in my opinion
because of hardly-concealed Jew-hatred within their ranks.

Like it or not, the liberal-left politic in America and Europe has
been largely taken over by Stalinists. No genuine liberal person
should support them, nor be so naive about the outright propaganda
which characterizes their media outlets.

James

// posted by James DeMeo @ Thursday, August 10, 2006