9-Mar-13: The viral power of a lying image and the editors who make it all happen

Front page news all over the world
in November 2012: Source

For most people, much of what is reported as news is confusing unless simplified and accompanied by illustrations. 

News of the Arab/Israel conflict - so often beset with conflicting versions of reality - is especially confusing for many reasons, including the fact that many of the people reporting it have only the most tenuous grasp on the history of the protagonists or of the languages in which the events happen and in which each side tells its own story to its own people.

There’s an expression we all know: that a picture is worth a thousand words. The problem is very few people have the patience to read or listen to the thousand words. And those with the motivation and agenda to drive their message forwards via pictures are very often able to get away with tremendous distortions of reality. In a fast moving, competitive news industry, far too few editors do what we expect them to do – check the imagery and validate the reality that it seems to be representing before showing it to their audiences.

Sydney Morning Herald

The thousand words represented by the picture too often turn out to be a thousand malicious, distorting, lying words.

In this post, we have pasted numerous versions of a powerful, painful image from November 2012. It shows a man called Jihad Masharawi who works for the BBC in its Arabic department. He is holding a child – sometimes wrapped up in a white shroud, sometimes in other poses. There are many photos of Jihad on the web from that month. His face displays the grief of a father. A shooting war is going on in the background. Thousands of rockets have been fired by the terrorist forces of the Gaza Strip at Israelis. The terrorists never claimed to be firing them either at the Israeli army or at strategic Israeli sites like power stations or roads. They were being fired wherever Israelis could be found and hit, and damn the consequences (our words, not theirs).

According to the news reports that came along with the images, Jihad said his home in Gaza had been hit and his infant son Omar was killed, as were other people. In some versions, the people who did the hitting were simply "the Jews". In others, it was the IDF. The analytic blog Powerline expressed deep suspicion at the time about how this story was being reported and tried to learn more:

BBC

Paul Danahar is the BBC Middle East Bureau Chief and Masharawi’s colleague. He spent much of the day at Masharawi’s house on the day on the day Masharawi’s son was killed, tweeting a photo of the hole in the roof of Masharawi’s house. The house wasn’t bombed. There is no way Pexton’s Post colleagues verified that Israelis bombed Masharawi’s house. Pexton is in fantasy land on this point. In his Twitter feed, Danahar describes the munition that did the damage as a “shell.” I tweeted Danahar to ask him on what basis he identified the munition as Israeli. I doubt that it was. I think it is more likely to have been a Hamas rocket that failed to hit its intended target in Israel. (As I recall, something like 10 percent of the Hamas rockets landed in Gaza.) Danahar failed to respond to my tweet. [Powerlineblog]

Aljazeera

Now flash forward four months. We’re in March 2013, and the memories of the intense and frightening battles of November are receding into the background. The Elder of Ziyon blog, that followed this story closely from the start, reported Friday that "UN verifies that BBC reporter's son was killed by Hamas". The Jewish publication Algemeiner carried a similar report on its website yesterday.

The UN Human Rights Council released an advanced version of its report on Israel’s November conflict with Gaza terrorists this week. The report is unusually fair to Israel, and disputes several claims made by Western media against Israel during Operation Pillar of Defense. Most significantly the report says that in all likelihood the 11-month-old child of a BBC employee Jihad Misharawi was killed during Operation Pillar of Defense by Hamas rocket fire rather than by Israel, the side initially blamed in reports by the BBC and several other media outlets covering the conflict. The UNHRC report says: “On 14 November, a woman, her 11-month-old infant, and an 18-year-old adult in Al-Zaitoun were killed by what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel.⁶⁹"

If you click on footnote 69, it says the incident was monitored by the OHCHR and they believe the attack came from a Hamas rocket. 

Rockets intended to hit Israelis and fired by Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza routinely ‘fall short’ as we have noted here many times. See for instance "18-Nov-12: Fell short? Not just the Hamas rockets but the ethics of the journalists covering them"; "8-Sep-12: Familiar routine: rocket and mortar attacks during Sabbath"; 2-May-12: Terrorists' rocket falls short, crashes near security fence" and many more similar reports here.

From the Spanish news site 20 Minutos

Even if (to be ridiculously cautious about this) no one can say with utter certainty that it was a Hamas rocket - as distinct from an IDF rocket - that killed Jihad's baby, we can say with complete certainty that the matter is in doubt - at least. 

But people who watched news reports in some of the world's most influential channels and via some of the most credible newspapers this past November know nothing of that doubt. For them, Israel stands behind the death of yet another innocent child. And there is no room for doubt because, if there were, the news sources would have surely said so.

Except that it's a lie. 

And lies like this one have real consequences. They are part of a phenomenon increasingly recognized as cognitive warfare. For instances when the protagonists persuade you that a little girl of 3 called Raja Abu Shaban was killed by Israelis when they know it was untrue [source], and then much later admit something entirely different happened. 

And when an unarmed and terrified boy of twelve appears to come under sustained point-blank gunfire by Israeli forces for three-quarters of an hour until one of them finally manages to hit him and kill him [source], except that a video shows him alive after he "died".

The Sun (UK)

You would have to be made of rock not to feel devastated by the death of a baby and the grief of the father. The fact that the father is parading his grief in front of photographers over and again does not change that. (And that's before we speculate as to who stage managed this, and what the father was instructed to do.) 

But after we pause to share the pain of a family whose child is now certainly dead, we are left to think about the cynical manipulation of the imagery of grief and of death in the cause of a war prosecuted by terrorists.

And about the reporters, photographers, sub-editors and editors, working for major international media companies and government-controlled corporations, without whose incompetence (at one end of the scale) and agenda-driven political passion (at the other) these outrageous acts of journalistic sabotage could never happen.

29-Dec-12: How did Israel fight back against Hamas with such painstaking accuracy and still get so beaten up?

From the Fox News website - click to view

Paul Alster, writing on the Fox News website, asks a question that - had it been asked - would have done credit to the news teams of the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and/or the New York Times who, though they have their people scattered all over the Middle East, somehow are unable to formulate things quite this way:

A single Syrian missile strike on a bakery near Hama killed more than 60 innocent civilians last week, so how did Israel manage to fire more than 1,500 high powered missiles into densely-populated Gaza in November, with the total loss of 161 lives, of which 90 have been acknowledged by Hamas itself as active combatants?

About that bakery attack, and numerous other bakery attacks, we posted our thoughts just four days ago [see "25-Dec-12: Know your barbarians"]

Alster's answer, certainly worth your click, starts this way:

The numbers speak for themselves, but very little credit has so far been given by foreign governments, NGOs, and the international media for the care taken by the Israeli military to avoid collateral damage during its recent vicious engagement with Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. [more]

Framing an article this way does not mean Israel should be compared in any way to the loathsome, blood-soaked Syrian armed forces. Most thinking people aware of the realities of the Middle East know that. On the other hand, individuals with an ideological predisposition to kicking out at Israel at every opportunity will see things differently; the facts tend to be less urgent for them.

Case in point #1: the faded rock singer Roger Waters whose glory days included his being a lead member of the Pink Floyd band. He plays a different style of gig these days, including an appearance last month at the UN's annual Israel-bashing "observance" of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People [pictures here]. In his own words, Waters appeared there "representing global civil society" (no less); called for greater understanding of the Hamas side of the argument; demanded action against Israel's "illegal apartheid regime"; and warned his audience never to assume that "I support the launching of missiles into Israel". The video below captures some of the highlights of Waters' November 29 performance:



Case in point #2: Colonel Richard Kemp, a thinking person's senior soldier, served in the British military from 1977 to 2005 rising to the role of Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan and completing 14 operational tours of duty around the globe. When asked about Israel's conduct vis a vis civilians in Gaza in 2008, he famously said

"based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: during operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in the combat zones than any other army in the history of warfare". [Wikipedia] 

A little less famously, he explained:

"of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes..." [Wikipedia] 

And this explanation by Kemp after the November 2012 Pillar of Defence battle conducted by Israel against the Hamas forces. Concerning the bias of certain media outlets when it comes to reporting on Israel and its military, he said:

"It was clear to me that there was a great deal of propaganda that was being generated against Israel, and then being exploited by people who didn't understand military matters and didn't want to question it, it suited their agenda to vilify Israel... People ask me why I have a pro-IDF point of view. I consider myself as having an objective view of what's happening over here. The IDF does not need me to defend them; they have proven it over the years... It's the dispassionate military perspective that I bring." [more]

The British Parliament

Case in point #3: certain political figures in the British parliament. This snippet comes from a report published Thursday:

According to the online [UK] parliamentary archive, 21 EDMs (formal motions submitted for debate in the House of Commons, although not necessarily discussed) relating to Israel have been put forward since the 2012-2013 session began. In contrast, just two refer to the situation in Syria... [more]

In other words, the situation in Syria where the mass killing of tens of thousands of Syrians during 2011 and 2012 by the forces of the vicious second-generation dictator fighting for his political and personal survival against a mass revolt continues unabated right up to this very minute, gets less then ten percent of the attention that these British parliamentarians devote to kicking at Israel.

We can think of several kinds of reason why politicians might engage in such egregiously partisan conduct. But then so can most of our readers, so we'll end the post here.

23-Dec-12: Journalists, the right to live, and other human rights

Gaza's media center, November 2012 [Image Source]

Here's the AP report of a widely publicized assault (the Jerusalem Post called it "a scathing attack") on Israel's moral standing made three days ago by the New York-based Human Rights Watch organization.

Group: Israel broke law by targeting media in Gaza

JERUSALEM (AP) — Human Rights Watch says Israeli army attacks on journalists and media facilities in the Gaza Strip during last month’s military operation violated the laws of war. Two Palestinian cameramen were killed and at least 10 media personnel were wounded in the offensive, which was launched after weeks of rocket attacks on Israel. The Israeli government says each of the targets was a legitimate military objective. A statement released Thursday by the New York-based rights group says it found no indications that these targets were valid military objectives. Sarah Leah Whitson, the Mideast director at HRW, says that “just because Israel says a journalist was a fighter or a TV station was a command center does not make it so.” The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the report. [Source]

As director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division and the person leveling these charges [full text here], Sarah Leah Whitson lays serious claim to the description about her on the HRW site: she's a general expert on "Middle East and North Africa issues", though - like the organization itself - she has not been free of controversy. (We will not dwell here on the serious allegations made against her; they are adequately detailed in her Wikipedia entry and in some trenchant, well-argued critiques published by NGO Monitor this week as well as in January 2012.)

For all the impressive human rights work it does, HRW has some exceedingly bitter critics. In a major and very critical op ed in the New York Times, Robert L. Bernstein, the man who created HRW, wrote this about the organization he brought into existence:

As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state...  Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. [more]

Sarah Leah Whitson was HRW's key Middle East person when Bernstein wrote those words.

Bernstein then proceeded in that 2009 essay to make some prophetic references to HRW allegations about Israel engaging in allegedly illegal forms of warfare:

Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism... [Yet] Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region... How does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes... Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

He ended his 2009 words with a warning to HRW that unless it returned to "its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it", HRW's "credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished".

Which brings us to December 2012 when news sources throughout the world seized on Ms Whitson's well-formed words:

Just because Israel says a journalist was a fighter or a TV station was a command center does not make it so.

And also to the apt rejoinder offered by Anne Herzberg, legal adviser to the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor:

Just because HRW claims something is a war crime does not make it so.

We don't claim to have the depth of experience of Ms Whitson or HRW. But we do say our experience in losing a greatly-loved daughter to a bestial act of Islamist terror in 2001 has made us more sensitive than many people to nuances. We tend to pay attention to little-reported aspects of news events that somehow don't get that much coverage or attention by the likes of HRW.

For instance, here's a photo of a particular Arab journalist with a little-known back-story:

Portrait 1: Female reporter presents the evening news from Ramallah

The image in Portrait 1 is a screenshot taken from a video recording of an evening news report originating in the Ramallah studio of a station called Istiqlal that went to air some years ago. The young woman, a reporter/presenter, was relatively new to the job at the time the picture was taken. Even so, she evidently showed journalistic promise because management at the television station at the time assigned her to the role of presenting the evening news.

Now some speculation: what if this woman had been (let's just imagine) intercepted by IDF soldiers or by an Israeli Border Guard patrol while she was peaceably en route to the nearby city of Jerusalem?

We're betting that Sarah Leah Whitson and her HRW Irregulars would have screamed bloody murder at the temerity of the Israelis. The young woman is, after all, clearly a working journalist with all the privileges and protections that come with the job.

Portrait 2: A female journalist conducts a live interview
for a Hamas television program (2012)

Portrait 3: Same female journalist fronts a weekly TV show
on the Al-Quds (Hamas) satellite channel (2012)

The woman in Portraits 2 and 3 above is a regular on the Al-Quds television channel owned and operated by Hamas. Its shows are beamed throughout the world to wherever there are Arabic-speaking audiences interested in the distinctive programming they offer. It has a truly global footprint and a large influence among a very specific international audience.

The woman is the central figure in a weekly television program devoted to surveying issues of interest to one of the deprived underclasses in Palestinian society. On it, she interviews guests, demonstrates cooking recipes, and summarizes and interprets recent events. The fact that an entire program aired during peak evening hours (and on Friday nights, no less) is given over to a woman suggests the prominent role she has in the tele-journalism field.

Now some more speculation: imagine for a moment that this household-name TV personality decided to carry out some research in, say, East Jerusalem. And say that the Israeli authorities, for reasons best known to them, detained her on the way for questioning; that they refused to let her go because of some dusty old and forgotten breaches of the law allegedly committed a decade or so earlier. How long do we think it would take for the righteous indignation of Human Rights Watch to boil over and traverse the oceans? Or for their furious demands to be laid at the feet of the government of Israel insisting that the inherent rights of journalists and reporters - and international legal norms - be respected, forthwith?

So now we're back in the real world. The name of the woman in all the photos above is Ahlam Tamimi.

Tamimi read the TV evening news in a Ramallah studio on Thursday evening, August 9, 2001. That is when Portrait 1 was taken. She started the program with the lead news item of the day: a horrific news report about a human bomb who had exploded inside a central Jerusalem restaurant that afternoon, killing many people, most of them children, all of them Jews. Portrait 1 shows her reading the actual report on camera.

The slight smile of pleasure that can just be made out on her lips is probably no accident. She herself, personally, planned the bombing. She ensured with the other planners that the explosive material was adequate to the task. She accompanied the bomb (who was a newly-pious young man with a fully-loaded guitar case on his back) through the IDF military checkpoints and into Jerusalem by bus and taxi. She then walked with him through the streets of Israel's bustling capital city until they reached the Sbarro restaurant where, fifteen minutes after she left him there (giving her time to safely escape to freedom), he exploded the deadly materials packed into that guitar case. He killed our teenage daughter Malki and fourteen other innocents. A sixteenth victim remains unconscious to this day.

Tamimi's journalistic career resumed a year ago. Then, as part of a deal transacted between Israel and the Hamas regime in Gaza, she was released from prison far earlier than should have been the case (she had been sentenced to sixteen life terms with a strong recommendation by the judges that no reduction should ever be considered) and flew to the land of her birth, Jordan, and to complete and unfettered freedom. There she was hired by Hamas to become the presenter of a new weekly program called Breezes of the Free, focusing on the convicted terrorists, many of them murderers of Jewish children, still in Israeli prisons and their goals, hopes and plans.

Especially their plans.

Tamimi, now living free as a bird, newly-married and with a global platform for spreading her hateful, murderous views, is famously proud of the killings for which she was convicted in an Israeli court. She has no regrets; quite the opposite, and has said so as clearly as a person ever can. [Please read one of our numerous posts about this evil person: "17-Nov-11: A monster walks the streets and she has many accomplices"]

For these and other reasons, we wonder - when we read the words of HRW, and especially of Sarah Leah Whitson - whether such critics comprehend the nature of terrorism. Do they see how the people who fire the rockets at homes, schools and buses will use everything at their disposal - every possible thing, no limits - to carry out their satanic plans?

The notion that journalists ought to be treated in some privileged way by reason of the work they do - leaving them exempt from suspicion unless there is a compelling reason to think otherwise - is an interesting one. But we're left to wonder whether at HRW they know or care how this works in a war carried out by terrorists and in accordance with the principles of Islamism.

Victims like our daughter suffered the permanent, irreparable violation by the terrorists of the most fundamental of their human rights - the right to live. Had the perpetrators (and that includes Tamimi) been stopped in time, or if they (and this includes Tamimi) were prevented from inciting others daily to do the same awful thing again in the future, lives would surely be saved.

If HRW's recent condemnation fails to take that reality into account, then - in the words of their distinguished founder, Robert L. Bernstein -  they have lost their critical perspective and the role they claim is simply illegitimate and should be ignored.

16-Nov-12: Snapshotting the turbulence

Gaza Thursday

We are well into the third day of this latest phase in an ongoing war. A brief review of what has happened in the past 24 hours.

• The IDF executed 340 strikes against a range of Gazan targets since Operation Pillar of Defense began on Wednesday. TOI says there were 70 strikes against Hamas targets last night (Thursday), a response to the firing of long-range missiles (two, it seems) on the Tel Aviv area yesterday evening.
• From Gaza, they say sixteen Palestinian Arabs have been killed and about 200 injured. The Gazan side does not make a meaningful distinction between terrorist combatants and the civilians in whose midst they operate.
• As of early this morning and since fighting began on Wednesday evening, 305 rockets had crashed into Israeli territory. 130 were intercepted in mid-air by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.
• Three people were killed in a Kiryat Malachi apartment yesterday morning. Those injured include an 8-month-old infant, whose condition is serious. 
• Right across Israel, Magen David Adom - the country's major first-responder organization, treated 54 Israelis for injuries during Thursday.
• In a significant turning point, air raid sirens were sounded throughout metropolitan Tel-Aviv in the early evening of Thursday. Our television screens were filled with images of thousands running to find whatever shelter was available, or throwing themselves onto the ground and covering their heads with their hands; that's what the civil defence authorities have suggested we do if no proper bomb shelter is close by. The arrival of the bitter realities of a war that has been mainly conducted on Israel's periphery has practical implications for what happens next.
• Those sirens were followed by explosive booms. The authorities are, for understandable reasons, remaining vague about what was hit. We are at war, after all. But the IDF has said, and evidently means, that no Gazan rockets landed near Tel Aviv. Perhaps this means they crashed crashed into the sea.
• Last night, the government and the IDF authorized the call up of 30,000 reservists. There's widespread speculation that this a step before launching a ground-based attack on Hamas in Gaza in order to do what can be done less well, less effectively, from the air.
• Hisham Kandil, the prime minister of the Moslem Brotherhood government in Egypt, is said to be going to Gaza some time today, and there are reports on the television news here that PM Netanyahu has announced Israel will temporarily discontinue its attacks on Gaza while he is in the area. Reports are saying that the Egyptian is coming "to show solidarity with the residents of Gaza" and to meet with the Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh - along with the entire Hamas leadership - has not been seen since Wednesday. None of them attended yesterday's funeral of their military 'chief-of staff' Jabari.
• There have already been many rocket attacks on Israelis this morning. Soon after dawn this morning, a home in the Sha'ar Hanegev region took a direct hit. 
• After that, rockets were fired at Be'er Sheba, Sderot and in the Sha'ar Hanegev region. 
• The parking lot of a residential apartment building in  Ashdod was hit just after 7:00 am. All Israeli schools within a 40-kilometer radius of Gaza are closed.
• Times of Israel says "hundreds of soldiers from the Paratroops, Golani and Givati Brigades, as well as Armored Corps units, have been transferred to the Gaza border area for training exercises — apparently, in preparation for a possible ground incursion. Rumors that IDF soldiers had entered the Gaza Strip, or were about to, circulated briefly in the early hours of Friday morning, but they have not been substantiated."

More later.