Tuesday, August 22, 2006

21-Aug-06: Lies, damn lies and images

One of our favorite columnists, Andrew Bolt of the Herald-Sun in Melbourne, points us to the photo at the top on a Hizbollah website, Moqavemat. (If you can't get to the online page, here's a backup copy.) The caption says it depicts an Israeli naval vessel being struck by a Lebanese terrorists missile off Lebanon in July.

The picture right below it comes from the Defence Industry Daily website and shows the sinking of the decommissioned Australian destroyer-escort HMAS Torrens off Western Australia in 1998.

Some people will think the two pictures look similar. Even identical. Ah, but as Nasrullah would say, that is to miss the point.

There's a serious message here. Hizbollah and other sowers of jihadist terror respect few things, but the power of the image to mould public opinion is something they appreciate enormously. For them, ends justify means. If appropriating an unrelated picture and adding a nonsense caption contributes to an aura of victory, to restored pride, to the naming of babies, then what does it matter if it's counterfeit and based on lies?

These, after all, are people who murder their own daughters and call it 'saving the honour of the family'. They even have a religious category for it: Taqayyah - basically the strategic telling of an untruth. It's difficult to come to even a superficial understanding of Shi'ite Islam - and therefore of Hezbollah - without giving that concept some attention. It explains a great deal about Green Helmet and Hizbullah's war propaganda machine.

Unfortunately, though, it explains very little about the silly, superficial and inaccurate nonsense that AP, Reuters and AFP and other news channels have peddled this past month under Hizbullah influence.

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