I am beginning to think there are two kinds of people.
(Besides those who think there are two kinds of people and those who do not.)
People who will acknowledge the truth (or more precisely confirmable facts) even when it does not help their cause or argument.
And those who will lie or deny or manipulate or bury the truth (confirmable facts – and here also images) in order to advance their cause/argument.
How many people in Gaza have been killed during the recent military action by Israel? How many are civilians? We all know the answer right? Because it is on the news right? I mean of course we can trust Associated Press and BBC and NPR right? (That last question is not sarcasm. I generally do trust them unless I have reason to believe otherwise.) And we have seen the photos and the videos right?
Out of morbid curiosity where do they get their information? Where do the photos and videos come from?
Stephanie Gutmann reminds us that it is Hamas and Hamas appointees who are providing nearly all of the information for these reports. Now Israel has not had a chance to check/confirm/deny (a) how many Palestinians have been killed or (b) how many are civilians/women/children. But she reminds us of what happened in 2002 at the Jenin refugee camp.
Palestinians, this time from the Fatah side of the street, immediately started to play to the international media. Several outlets, including Al-Jazeera for instance, quoted one Dr. Abu-Rali, director of a Jenin hospital, who said that “the western wing of [his] hospital was shelled and destroyed,” making for “casualties in the thousands.”
Nasser al-Kidwa, a Palestinian representative to the United Nations, told CNN: “There’s almost a massacre now taking place in Jenin. Helicopter gunships are throwing missiles at one square kilometer packed with almost 15,000 people in a refugee camp. . . . Just look at the TV and watch, watch what the Israel forces are doing. . . . This is a war crime, clear war crime, witnessed by the whole world, preventing ambulances, preventing people from being buried. I mean this is an all-out assault against the whole population.”
“All my nine children are buried under the ruins,” a resident of Jenin named Abu Ali told the Le Nouvel Observateur, a French weekly magazine. The weekly apparently did not do any checking; it dutifully reported Ali’s story of losing his children in a piece titled “The Survivors Tell Their Stories.” Newspapers in the U.K. went into a positive frenzy, running pieces like the Independent’s “The Camp that Became a Slaughterhouse.”
Finally, in August 2002, the U.N. sent a team to investigate charges of a massacre. The U.N. — no friend of Israel — found no evidence of a massacre, and it supported IDF claims that about 45 Palestinians had died, mostly men aged 18 to 45. It confirmed only three children and four women. Abu Ali’s nine children were not among them. “Fifty-two Palestinian deaths had been confirmed by the hospital in Jenin by the end of May 2002. . . . A senior Palestinian Authority official alleged in mid-April that some 500 were killed, a figure that has not been substantiated in the light of the evidence that has emerged,” the U.N. report said.
You can read the whole thing here at National Review Online. You do not have to register.
(By the way – it turns out there is no “west wing” of the hospital in question and it was not shelled/bombed at all.)
The United Nations is most obviously not on Israel’s side. Amnesty International is not exactly pro-Israeli – and they also found no evidence of a massacre.
You do believe all the reports/images that Hamas provides right?
*Important note/clarification – Of course no one celebrates civilian casualties. And of course we want to see Israel minimize these as much as humanly possible given the circumstances (and the circumstances are that Israel is trying to wipe out an organization that has attacked her civilian population for years and also that Hamas routinely sets up in/on/under/among civilians). The point is not “civilian deaths are no big deal” but rather “is Israel really causing as much mayhem misery and destruction as we are being asked to believe?”*
Yeah but you know – what about all those pictures of dead children?
Stephenie Gutmann also cites Jeffrey Goldberg who has something to say about this:
One more thing, speaking of pornography — we’ve all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It’s a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn’t matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.
Read the whole thing at Atlantic.Com (you know the Atlantic that bastion of right-wing conservatism). You do not have to register.
Next time you see a photo/video – look a little closer at precisely where it came from and who provided it. Heck – look at the details and ask yourself if they make sense given what you supposed to be looking at.
Little Green Footballs (among others) has done a powerful job of tracking image/video staging and manipulation in this situation. There are several posts but perhaps a good place to start is http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/32402_Is_CNN_Going_to_Ignore_a_Staged_Video.
And if you dig a little you can see all the reports/images/videos that counter claims by Hamas and its supporters. But do not expect to see these on BBC.
