JohnHuang2 on the "Civil War"

From FreeRepublic.com JohnHuang2's latest essay:

Have a happy civil war!

Right now, the one question on everyone's lips seems to be, 'Will there be a ceasefire?' The more relevant question is: Can there be peace? If history is any guide, the answer is yes, but only when a clear winner emerges. At any rate, far from a lull in the fighting, the conflict continued to rage this past week, escalating into some of the fiercest battles since the fighting began, with each side vowing to fight to the finish. Even amid rising calls for an immediate halt to hostilities, each side pounded the other side, trading blow for blow, hit for hit. punch for punch, counterpunch for counterpunch.

But enough about Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont. By the way, do you know how far to the left this guy is? For starters, he denounced Bush's tax cuts. He denounced Bush's marriage Amendment. He denounced Bush on global warming. He denounced Bush's stance on stem cell research. He condemns proposed drilling in Alaska. He's for racial quotas. He's anti-gun. He's pro-abort. But enough about Joe Lieberman.

As for Ned Lamont, the pride of the nutroots, he's with Lieberman on abortion, guns, quotas, abortion, global warming, gay rights, abortion, taxes, stem cell research, not drilling for oil. But Lieberman agrees with Bush on one issue -- Iraq. Which makes Lieberman Bush's 'lap dog.' Nothing epitomizes how utterly deranged the Democrat Party has become than the just-concluded Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary race in Connecticut. The Hezbollah wing of the Democrat Party is bound and determined to finish off what remains of the Democrat Party. And it isn't exactly helpful these days to be 'Joooooish' in a party that has a teenage crush on Hezbollah.

(To be fair, most Democrats will concede Jews are people, too . . . people who need to be purged, people who need to be drummed out of the party . . . those kinda people.)

With Hezbo 'fighters' getting their brains knocked out of their rear-ends by those "Zionist Pigs," the Connecticut primary gave Hezbollahcrats a juicy shot at taking down a "Zionist Pig" of their own. Democrats call this a very good start. For peace.

Illustrating the trouble Lieberman was in with the party's psychotic base, in June Lieberman led cable guy Lamont by 15 percentage points, 55%-40%. Then Lieberman is caught red-handed by his party making statements deemed pro-American. Statements like 'Osama is the enemy, not Wal-Mart or Bush.' Couldn't have been slips of the tongue. And there was that image of Lieberman puckering up and kissing pResident Evil. And, of course, the nagging suspicion he watches Fox News. So, the race becomes a toss-up.

Then a Lamont blogger, projecting the party's image of tolerance, posted a doctored photo of Lieberman in blackface. Democrats were appalled. Lieberman's a BLACK JEW?! Or is it Reuters? The blogger, Jane Hamsher, tried to whitewash the whole thing. But the damage to Lieberman was done.

The way things are going with Democrats, Lieberman would've been better off saying he kissed another man because he's gay or puckered up to Arafat's wife, Suha. A Cindy Sheehan rant about 'Jews causing all of the world's wars!', and he'd have won in a landslide.

With Lamont, Democrats return to their roots. Lamont loved his nearly all-white country club, the Round Hill (though, in fairness, he recently dropped his 16-year membership in the racist club to show he's more progressive than Lieberman who never belonged to a racist club.) Lamont told the New York Times he had just discovered the club wasn't 'diverse' enough (although, by 'diversity' and 'people of color,' Lamont probably means white guys in blackface.)

In a true sign he's a man of the people, Lamont's net worth is valued to be somewhere between $90 million and $300 gazillion. The struggling Greenwich proletarian's chief accomplishment in life is being J.P. Morgan & Co. honcho Thomas Lamont's great-grandson.

As for the war in Iraq, Ned Lamont was so distraught at the idea of 'war profiteers' that he decided to become one, buying up to $50,000 in Halliburton stock via one of the more than a dozen accounts handled for him by Goldman Sachs.

Summing up, a war profiteer is the big cheese of the 'peace movement' which also calls itself a 'populist movement' which picked a zillionaire upper class patrician because upper class patricians are where you go for someone in touch with the people. It's a sign that Democrats really learned their lesson from 2004 that they go from John Kerry, who mooched off his wife, to Lamont who mooched off his ancestors.

On issues, after warrantless searches for Bush scandals turned up nothing, Democrats, showing their usual flair for winners, are back to propping up that same dead horse -- the war in Iraq. It proved such a huge success for president Kerry.

Along these lines, the Washington Post noted on Sunday how the 'peace' libbies, who are "driven by their intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph" with Ned Lamont, which is nearly two years after being on the brink of claiming their most significant triumph with John Kerry, which was two years after being on the brink of claiming their most significant triumph with Tom Dashcle. So, four years ago, Democrats went over the brink, the GOP won the Senate back that November (2002) and John Kerry became a footnote in French history two years later. Now, with Ned Lamont to take them over the brink, the 'peace Democrats' can focus on losing decisively to Lieberman in November.

In the meantime, what does the growing civil war between the Shiite and Sunni Democrats in Connecticut and elsewhere mean? If you listen to the mythological talking points of the party grandees, Lamont's win has national implications which can be extrapolated to the entire party but DON'T CALL US THE PEACE PARTY since Lamont's win in one small state can't be extrapolated to the entire party.

E.J. Dionne said on Hardball that he thinks the headline from all this should be, Connecticut Voters Send a Message to Bush and Republicans better start worrying in the Fall. I doubt that's the message you can glean from a closed Democrat primary in a state not widely known for its unswerving devotion to Republicans -- a state where Bush, in a three-way matchup, would lose decisively to Mullah Omar and mad cow disease.

Political scientist Larry Sabato, who "scientifically" predicted Kerry would beat Bush, noted that Lamont's win is terrible news for Republicans. "The real question is what happens with Bush and Iraq through November." Bush may not even get on the ballot! So, let's do the liberal math: Democrats eating their own + split on the war + returning to McGovern roots + shouting match + beating each other up all the way to November = bad news for Republicans. Breaks my heart.

Karl Rove couldn't have planned this any better. Have a happy civil war, libbies.

"NBC Today" Fake Shot

Newsbusters busts NBC's Today Show for this report by Richard Engel on the results of Israel's attacks in Lebanon. NBC shows a picture of an ambulance with a hole in it's roof as "proof" that Israel is attacking ambulances. The problem is that the hole, which is right in the middle of the Red Cross on the roof, could not possibly be the result of a hit by any weapon.

A shell or missile that size hitting the ambulance would not leave the rest of the vehicle intact. All that you would see would be twisted wreckage and a debris field. A more reasonable explanation for the hole is the removal of the emergency light or siren which also explains why the hole is centered precisely on the cross.

Click on the link for the story and pictures.

I called the NBC Today show and spoke to a representative asking for the name of the person who is responsible for authenticating the material that goes out on the air. The representative replied that they do not give out names of anyone on the show. When asked, replied that he did not know of anyone who actually fact checks these things.

Write Your Own “True Story”

From the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler we get:

LC & IB Ace, in honor of MSNBC running with every bit of anecdotal blather without bothering to as much as ask questions (it’s called “professional journalism”, so don’t you DARE question it!), is inviting you all to write up stories of your own, stories that you’ve presumably “heard from somebody” even though it doesn’t really matter if you have or if you just made them up on the spot. Ace, in the time-honored tradition of “professional journalism” and the enormously high ethical standards of the MSM, won’t fact-check them in the least.

We sorta liked the MSNBC “true story” that he posted as an example of the professional MSM standard of printing anything they like to print, except for the fact that the Lebanese telling it were rank amateurs, so we offer up the new an improved version with our additions in italics:

The Horiz family told me they walked for two days as Israel shelled their village, dodging shells and shrapnel for 48 hours straight while IDF death commandos sniped at the weak from every rooftop and every tree, thinning the ranks and doing unspeakable things to the poor unfortunates that weren’t lucky enough to die at first.

“My three-year-old son didn’t have any shoes,” said the father, “they got blown off along with the lower part of his legs, so he had to hump to this place on the two bleeding stumps, pausing every five minutes to staunch the hemorrhage with a burning stick while I fended off packs of ravenous wolves with my bare hands.”

Abeer Baz walked here, too, through 8 feet high piles of snow in a zero visibility blizzard.

“They bombed my neighbor’s house and we had to leave,” she said. “We’d been bombed out of our own house a week earlier and were all living in a crumpled shoe box underneath his staircase, where we had to subsist on a diet of the cockroaches that had been killed by the nerve gas the IAF bombed us with every 30 seconds.”

Just hours after she gave birth to her baby six days ago, Baz walked 10 miles to get here, dragging the infant behind her by the still-attached umbilical cord, left on since the midwife had been raped, bayonetted and eaten by IDF commandos before she could cut it.

In the emergency room, we found 70-year-old Latifa Nasr. Dr. Nabil Harquosa said an Israeli shell destroyed her house, her entire neighborhood, a daycare center and the Hezbollah baby milk factory down the street.

“She stayed from last night until tonight under the destruction,” said Harquosa.

There, much better. You have to leave this stuff to the professionals, you know.

AISH Summary of Media Fraud

Click on the link for an interesting summary of MSM Hezbolla propaganda from the war.

"Green Helmet" Directs An Atrocity Movie

In another dramatic "catch" Charles Johnson of LGF links to a German video showing openly how "Green Helmet" does a "take two," directing video crews to continue filming while he REMOVES a dead boy from an ambulance, places him on a second stretcher, displays him to the cameras and then loads him into the ambulance for a second time.

Kudos to the German TV station for exposing this sick sham.

Click on the link and scroll down.

UPDATE:

"Sandmonkey" asks his Grand mother about this quaint Middle East custom parading the dead:

*This conversation took place today between me and my grandmother*

Me: Hey Granny, I have a question for you.

GM: Yes, sweetie, what is it?

Me: Well, ok. Do you remember if the Newspapers used to show the pictures of egyptians who died on the hands of Israel in the 50's and 60's?

GM: What?

Me: Like, you know how when you open the newspapers you always see those pictrues of israeli casulaties. Did we used to do that when they killed our people?

GM: No. Now that you mention it, we never did that. We would have thousands who died on their hands in Sinai and they would never publish a single charred or bloody body. Why do you ask that?

Me:Well, ok. Do you rememebr the Qana massacare. You know the building that the israelis bombed and killed all of those babies in? And they had this guy, with the green hemlet carying the little dead girl and crying and stuff?

GM: Yeah. That was awful.

Me: Well, for the past week or two american and israeli websites have been focusing on that guy. The reason for it was that there is a number of photographs of him carrying that little dead girl, and they are all taken by different photographers with different time stamps. One at 10 am, one at 12 pm, one at 1 pm, one at 4 pm.

GM: Of the same girl? Howcome?

Me: Well, there are 2 explanations of that: One is that the different photographers had different time settings on their cameras. The other explanation is that he was using the little dead girl as a prop while posing for the cameras?

GM: Oh God. Like fake acting with the child?

Me: Yes. something like that. But I chose to believe the first explanation at first. That this is nothing but a misunderstanding with digital timers, until I saw this video this morning.

GM: Why? What was in it?

Me: Well, the video showed that guy putting the little girl on a stretcher inside the ambulance, and then looks at the camera and points to the guy to continue filming. He then comes back, wears his green helmet, they pull the girl out of the ambulence..

GM: No…

Me: and he then moves her to another stretcher, tells everybody to back out of the shot and shows the dead girl's face for the camera.

GM (grief stricken): Oh No..

Me: And watching that made me wonder. Don't we have, in our culture, in our religion, the concept of the sanctity of the dead (7ormat el Mowt)? I mean, I udnerstand that those were killed by isarelis and that those people just want to show the world what the isarelis do, but don't we have respect for the dead? Don't we make sure, when someone dies and we wash them up, that no one, but those who wash him/her, get to see the body?

GM: No, you are right. You are a hundred percet right. The dead have sanctity. They always did. We never showed the dead bodies of our people like that back in the 60's and 50's. It wasn't even a question.

Me: Then what happend? When did this become Ok?

GM: I don't know. It's the media. This new media. That's what they like. That's what makes them happy.

Click HERE to read the rest...

UPDATE:

Jeff Goldstein's take on Green Helmet Guy

How Much Does It Cost to Buy Global TV News?

Have you ever had an "aha!" moment. To me, the following article from Little Green Footballs was such an "aha" moment. It explains why most of the global news is slanted, biased, corrupted ... whatever you want to call it. There is not a conspiracy among a vast array of news sources. All it takes is a single souce who distributes its poisoned message to every news outlet in the world.

Another way of looking at it is that video images that provide our understanding of what is going on in the world via TV is really the province of two agencies: the AP and Reuters. Despite the proliferation of cable TV and alternative news sources like Fox, we are all being fed from the same fetid faucet when it comes to TV reports from around the globe.

Read on:

An LGF reader who worked for Associated Press TV News sent me the following article explaining how APTN works, and suggesting a reason why their coverage of the Middle East is so overwhelmingly biased against Israel:

How Much Does It Cost to Buy Global TV News?

The vast majority of the TV news pictures you see are produced by two TV news companies. Presented here is a case for how a large amount of money has been used to inject a clear bias into the heart of the global TV news gathering system. That this happens is not at question, whether it is by accident or design is harder to tell.

You may not realize it, but if you watch any TV news broadcast on any station anywhere in the world, there is a better than even chance you will view pictures from APTN. BBC, Fox, Sky, CNN and every major broadcaster subscribes to and uses APTN pictures. While the method by which they operate is interesting, it is the extra service this US owned and UK based company offers to Arab states that is really interesting.

Click on the link to read the rest...
(Charles Johnson of LGF was the one who exposed the photoshopped pictures put out by Reuters and demonstrated that the "memos" shown by Dan Rather were typed on a computer using Microsoft Word, not on a manual typewriter. He was primarily responsible for bringing Rather down.)

Is The Secret Service Paying Hillary's Mortgage?

I have not confirmed the following e-mail for accuracy, but I would not put it past the Clintons.

Subject: Hillary's N.Y. Mortgage Charge to Secret Sevice

You really should be sitting down when you read this one.

Gold Star Mothers is an organization made up of women whose sons were killed in military combat during service in the United States armed forces.

Recently a delegation of New York State Gold Star Mothers made a trip to Washington, DC, to discuss various concerns with their elected representatives.

According to published reports, there was only one politician who refused to meet with these ladies.

Can you guess which politician that might be?

Was it New York Senator Charles Schumer? Nope, he met with them.

Try again.

Do you know anyone serving in the Senate who has never showed anything but contempt for our military?

Do you happen to know the name of any politician in Washington who's husband once wrote of his loathing for the military? Now you're getting warm!

You got it!

None other than the Queen herself, Hillary Rotten Clinton. She refused repeated requests to meet with the Gold Star Mothers.

Now, please don't tell me you're surprised. This woman wants to be President of the United States --- and there is a huge percentage of voters who are eager to help her achieve that goal.

May you sleep in peace always...and please...hug or thank a Veteran for that privilege.

Think about this one !!

Don't forget, our girl, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as a New York Senator, now comes under this fancy congressional Retirement and Staffing Plan.

It's common knowledge that, in order for her to establish NYS residency, they purchased a million+ dollar house in upscale Chappaqua, NY.

Makes sense.

Now, they are entitled to Secret Service protection for life.

Still makes sense.

Here is where it becomes interesting. The mortgage payments hover at about $10,000 per month. BUT, an extra residency had to be built within the acreage in order to house the Secret Service agents.

The Clinton's now charge the Secret Service $10,000 monthly rent for the use of said Secret Service residence and that rent is just about equal to their mortgage payment, ......meaning that we, the tax payers, are paying the Clinton's mortgage, their transportation, their safety and security, their 12 man staff, and it's all perfectly legal.

Sincerely, Cdr. Hamilton McWhorter USN (ret)

The first step towards defeating the terrorists: stop blaming ourselves

Gerard Baker in the Timesonline.uk:

THERE’S A familiar ritual each time an operation to thwart a putative terrorist incident dominates the news. After the public’s initial expressions of relief and shuddering contemplation of what might have been, a rising chorus of sceptics takes over, with a string of questions and hypotheses.

Was it really a serious terrorist plot, or only a bunch of misguided, alienated Muslim kids larking about with a chemistry set and a mobile phone? Sometimes, unfortunately, as with this summer’s ludicrously overplayed Miami “plot” to blow up buildings in Chicago, in which the plotters had got as far as purchasing some boots but not much else, overzealous authorities bring this sort of suspicion on themselves. But you can guarantee that every incident now, whatever the evidence, will be treated with such derisive doubt. If the police had got to the 9/11 hijackers or the 7/7 bombers in time, a sizeable chunk of respectable opinion would have dismissed them as idealistic young men with no real capacity or intent to cause harm.

The scepticism is then embellished by the conspiracy-as-diversion theory. How convenient, cluck the doubters, with rolled eyes and theatrical sarcasm, just as the Government’s got some new bonfire of civil liberties planned; or just as President Bush’s poll numbers are collapsing; or just as Israel is stepping up its ground attacks in southern Lebanon.

Then, of course, whether real or imaginary or government-authored, the cynics will say the plot inevitably has its roots in our own culpability. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq, if Tony Blair weren’t George Bush’s agent of oil-fuelled imperialism, if Israel weren’t killing innocents in Lebanon, this wouldn’t have happened.

It is a neatly comprehensive schema of cynicism. If the plot turns out to be a damp squib, or the police have made some ghastly error, the sceptics will triumphantly claim that it was deliberately overdone to scare us. If the plot is real, or God forbid, as with 9/11 or 7/7 it isn’t foiled in time, then they can switch seamlessly to the claim that we’ve only ourselves to blame.

In this internally pure worldview, the consistent theme is denial— denial of the reality of the mortal threat we face, denial of the reasons we face it. The villain for these people is not the jihadist, with his agenda of destroying our very way of life. It is, as it has always been, that malign continuum of institutions of our own authority that begins with the aggressive police officer and goes all the way up via the credulous media and craven officials to No 10 and the White House.

It’s too early to say with any confidence yet, but it looks as though yesterday’s plot to blow up US-bound aircraft from the UK was closer to the 9/11 tragedy than the Miami-Chicago farce. If the police and intelligence authorities have succeeded in foiling such a murderous plan, the correct response is one of immense gratitude to them, pride in our security institutions and continued vigilance against future plots.

But we should also remember that our continuing existence lies not just in inconvenient security measures and uncomfortably intrusive intelligence activities, but in a grand global strategy. Success requires, in addition to the tiresome banalities of long check-in queues and tighter limits on hand luggage, a commitment, whatever the costs, to eradicate the deep global political causes that threaten us.

And for this it just won’t do to claim it’s all about bad US foreign policy. It is repetitive but necessary to point out that we didn’t start this war when we invaded Iraq. The attacks on 9/11 were planned not only before we invaded, but during a time when the US was expending extraordinary effort to try to forge a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

And if our actions have radicalised the jihadists we should remember that they are animated at least as much by our ridding Afghanistan of their spiritual brethren, the Taleban, as they are by whatever crimes the US may have committed in Baghdad.

The same applies to Israel and Lebanon. Not only is the current war the direct result of Hezbollah’s aggression, its deeper causes lie in the continued determination of Israel’s enemies, increasingly emboldened by Tehran, to liquidate the Jewish state.

Read the whole thing.

Mike Wallace Interviews Iranian President, Calls Him "Impressive"

Little Green Footballs:

Old news anchors never die. They just get loonier and loonier:

“You’ll find him an interesting man,” the 88-year-old Wallace said. “I expected more of a firebrand. I don’t think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels ... about the American administration and the Zionist state. He comes across as more rational than I had expected.”

People who exterminate other people can appear to be very rational. It takes an 88 year old multi-millionaire idiot to never doubt it - and put some lipstick on that pig.

And from Roger Simon::

You don't have to be Marshall McLuhan to know that the medium is at least to some degree the message. When someone appears on television, he or she is transformed by the camera to something other than they are. Of course this is true of other media, but television and film take it to another level. In a sense they sexualize their subjects while simultaneously adding charisma and denuding them of threat. Everything is reduced to a kind of pre-teen erotic banality in the great Larry Kingness of it all. Just being on is all.

That is why when Mike Wallace - in a monumental act of narcissism - comes out of retirement at 88 to interview Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he is performing a hugely pernicious act by elevating the mad semi-mullah to the "peerage of Sixty Minutes", practically no matter what Ahmadinjad says or does. And this is no garden variety serial killer the likes of whom appear frequently on such shows and are likely to spend most of their lives in jail. This is the leader of a nation who has or is about to have nuclear weapons while denying the Holocaust and promising to wipe Israel off the map (and who knows what else). The argument that we "learn" from watching Ahmadinejad is of limited importance (and dubious validity) compared to the status awarded him. Thanks to Wallace he becomes yet one more player in the Grand American Media game, right up there with Oprah, Madonna and O'Reilly. Disgusting.

Red Cross Helps Hezbolla Terrorists Escape

From Little Green Footballs:

Red Cross workers helped wounded Hezbollah fighters on a makeshift bridge at the Litani River in Lebanon on Wednesday.

Al Qaida Plot to Blow Up Airliners

As I woke up this morning, all the news was about a plot to blow up airliners flying from Britain to the US.



I wonder what Senator Lamont's solution will be.

For a complete roundup go to Michelle Malkin. Pajamas Media says the airlines targeted were United, American & Continental.
Jeff Goldstein has some pithy comments.

While Villanous Company exposes the "facist plot" on the part of the Bush/Blair Axis.

"Had this plot been carried out, the loss of life to innocent civilians would have been on an unprecedented scale, British Home Secretary John Reid said.

Well, technically they would have been dead, yes. But at least they would have died knowing their precious civil liberties were intact!

And EU Referendum has this comment:

This is your enemy people, and he lives in our midst. But he takes his solace, his funding and justification from events in Iraq, in Palestine and in southern Lebanon. These are the people, members of the "religion of peace", who regard death as a commodity, to be exploited, people who have no morals, no scruples and no mercy. And there is only one thing you can do with people like this – you root them out and, where necessary, kill them.

Well Put. Porretto Has A Way With Words

America is the sole beacon of hope remaining to this world. At this point in history, if you're a decent human being -- i.e., one who wants others to be free and happy and wants nothing from others except to be left alone -- you belong here. There's no other country where a man can take a genuinely free breath. As for our domestic leftists, who work themselves into frenzy after frenzy over Abu Ghraib, Valerie Plame, and federal access to library records and telco pen registers, but can't get excited about Communist tyrants, Islamic baby killers, mass graves, poison gas projectiles, the hangings of homosexuals, or the stonings of rape victims, if your Curmudgeon could wave a magic wand, he'd strip the lot of them of their citizenships and exile them today. To North Korea.

"The Masters of Dead Child Porn"

Vanderleun in American Digest:

The Palestinians, and by extension their rollicking sidekicks around the Muslim world, are the masters of dead-child porn. Looking at the recent releases from this sick culture is like watching a very unfunny Monty Python clip from the Holy Grail movie where the cart is pulled through the city with the chant, "Bring out your dead!"

And the dead are brought out -- once they are determined to be photo-op worthy. The Killed-Kids of the Palestinians film series, like all standard porn films or magazines, almost never varies in its presentation. What you see is almost always dead children presented to the world on a platter like some grim roasted entree to be grabbed up and consumed by the ever-voracious cameras of the media and played in an endless looping celebration of carnage to a world hungry to note the offering and think, deep down, "Well, it is all happening far away and should stop, but at least, thank God, it's not my kid."

Of course, it is "not my kid." But only because the "brave warriors" of Islam couldn't get their hands on him or her. They would actually have much prefered it if it was your kid, but absent that they are more than happy to use some of their own. It's allowed, you see, because it is in the service of the Palestinian "cause," or of global jihad, or because Allah, the compassionate and merciful, says it is okay. Its right there in the book. You could look it up.

...

I feel this not so much because of the platters of dead babies being served up in Gaza and Lebanon, but rather because I know it for what it is -- the cynical attempt by a weak and cowardly cadre of killers to manipulate my compassion gland that is just as base and unrelenting as the attempts of pornographers across the internet to manipulate my lust. The main difference being that the Terrorists are getting better at their game and you don't have to swear you're 18 to see their creations. Most major media outlets around the world are only to happy to beam them into your brain 24/7.

Read the whole thing ... it's a work of art.

"The Masters of Dead Child Porn"

Vanderleun in American Digest:

The Palestinians, and by extension their rollicking sidekicks around the Muslim world, are the masters of dead-child porn. Looking at the recent releases from this sick culture is like watching a very unfunny Monty Python clip from the Holy Grail movie where the cart is pulled through the city with the chant, "Bring out your dead!"

And the dead are brought out -- once they are determined to be photo-op worthy. The Killed-Kids of the Palestinians film series, like all standard porn films or magazines, almost never varies in its presentation. What you see is almost always dead children presented to the world on a platter like some grim roasted entree to be grabbed up and consumed by the ever-voracious cameras of the media and played in an endless looping celebration of carnage to a world hungry to note the offering and think, deep down, "Well, it is all happening far away and should stop, but at least, thank God, it's not my kid."

Of course, it is "not my kid." But only because the "brave warriors" of Islam couldn't get their hands on him or her. They would actually have much prefered it if it was your kid, but absent that they are more than happy to use some of their own. It's allowed, you see, because it is in the service of the Palestinian "cause," or of global jihad, or because Allah, the compassionate and merciful, says it is okay. Its right there in the book. You could look it up.

...

I feel this not so much because of the platters of dead babies being served up in Gaza and Lebanon, but rather because I know it for what it is -- the cynical attempt by a weak and cowardly cadre of killers to manipulate my compassion gland that is just as base and unrelenting as the attempts of pornographers across the internet to manipulate my lust. The main difference being that the Terrorists are getting better at their game and you don't have to swear you're 18 to see their creations. Most major media outlets around the world are only to happy to beam them into your brain 24/7.

Read the whole thing ... it's a work of art.

I'm Ready for My Closeup, Mr. De MIlle.

Four Catagories of Reporting Fraud

From Zombietime.com:

Reuters Commits Four Types of Fraud

An overview of the photo hoaxes committed by Reuters, discovered so far


The recent discovery that the Reuters news agency released a digitally manipulated photograph as an authentic image of the bombing in Beirut has drawn attention to the important topic of bias in the media. But lost in the frenzy over one particular image is an even more devastating fact: that over the last week Reuters has been caught red-handed in an astonishing variety of journalistic frauds in the photo coverage of the war in Lebanon.

This page serves as an overview of the various types of hoaxes, lies and other deceptions perpetrated by Reuters in recent days, since the details of the scandal are getting overwhelmed by a torrent of shallow mainstream media coverage that can easily confuse or mislead the viewer. Almost all of the investigative work has been done by cutting-edge blogs, but the proliferation of exposés might overwhelm the casual Web-surfer, who might be getting the various related scandals mixed up. In this essay I hope to straighten it all out.

Great reporting and analysis. Read the whole thing.

Israeli Mood Change ... This Time May Be Different

From Arutz Sheva:

So many people are asking "When will it all end?" But the answer is so simple. It will not end until Ramat Aviv is attacked massively by rockets and missiles.

How do we know Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz are still playing games? When the newspaper headlines read: "In heavy fighting today 6 terrorists were killed." When it says, "In heavy fighting today, 10,000 of the enemy were killed," then we will know that Israel has stopped playing.

In the meantime, however, even the Israel of today is not the same country as the Israel of a month ago. The metamorphosis in the media illustrates it better than anything else. Sure, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass are still cheering for a Hizbullah victory, but suddenly, they are almost alone. The bulk of the Israeli media writers are suddenly militant and patriotic. Yesterday's leftist lemmings are suddenly demanding a more serious ground invasion of Lebanon, and urging that Israel resist calls for a ceasefire. Ultra-leftists like Yaron London are suddenly warmongers.

Perhaps one of the best illustrations of all this is the change in the "ultras" of Israel's literary Left. Far-leftist writers like Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and even David Grossman, are suddenly patriots. Sure they whine about civilian collateral damage in Lebanon and urge an immediate ceasefire that would leave the Hizbullah rockets on the borders, but in a large ad in the Hebrew press, they also declare that broad Israeli military attacks on Lebanon are fully justified. What next - Michael Lerner urging people to beware of the dangers of LSD?

Read the whole thing...

Special Report: Maj. Gen. McCoy responds to Washington Post

Read what General McCoy has to say to the Washington Post after they distort the news from Iraq:

After spending almost three days traveling with and being interviewed by one of the co-writers of a very poorly written article (“Much Undone in Rebuilding Iraq, Audit says”, Washington Post, August 2, 2006), I’m astounded at how distorted a good story can become and what agenda drives a paper to see only the bad side to the reconstruction effort here in Iraq. Instead of distorting the facts, let’s get to the truth.

Read the whole thing ... then remember the staged and doctored pictures from Lebanon.

Photofakery Not Just a Reuters Problem

AP Beirut photo faces questions

Woman appears 'mourning destruction of her home' in two photographs allegedly taken two weeks apart in different locations; foreign media remains largely hostile to Israel

A woman has made two appearances in photographs used by the Associated Press and Reuters, allegedly wailing over the destruction of her Beirut home. US bloggers have however noticed that photographs were taken two weeks apart from each other, according to times stamps on the images, and that the photographs were taken in different locations.

"Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home owner in Beirut, or something isn't quite right," noted the author of the Drinking From Home blog.

Michelle Malin Takes No Prisoners As She Goes After "The Reuterization of war journalism"

"What's the big deal over a little faked smoke?" That seems to be the prevailing attitude among media pooh-bahs irked by bloggers who exposed the crude Photoshoppery of a Reuters photographer over the weekend. The cameraman, prolific Lebanese stringer and chronicler of Hizballah Adnan Hajj, was fired.

But the black cloud of truth-distorting photo fakery, jihadi-sympathizing news staging and sloppy photo captioning in the Middle East hangs over American journalism thicker than anything Hajj could conjure.
...

Watch now for braying, rationalizing and messenger-shooting from the journalistic elite. You will hear them complain about the bloodthirsty blog mob. You will see MSM editors rally around Reuters and dismiss this debacle as a lone event. Adnan Hajj, the new international Jayson Blair/Mike Barnicle/Janet Cooke/Mary Mapes/Walter Duranty, will end up with a book contract and a job at Al Jazeera. Media veterans will hope that their professional apathy will snuff out probing questions like baking soda on a pan fire. After all, it's "old news" already.

In a sense, they are right. Whether from sloppiness, laziness, incompetence or ideological bias, American journalists have played dupes or worse to jihadi propagandists for decades. Just a few weeks ago, a New York Times photography editor raved over her photographer Joao Silva's image of an al-Sadr army sniper posing in a window firing at U.S. troops. "Incredible courage," she panted. It's not clear whether she was talking about the photographer or the terrorist. The Associated Press has failed to respond to my repeated questions about one of its Iraqi stringers, Bilal Hussein, who was detained by the U.S. military in April after being captured in a Ramadi building with a cache of weapons, according to my sources. Hussein was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photography team.

From the fake "massacre" in Jenin, to the false accusations against Israel in the shooting of Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, to the dissemination of "Pallywood" terrorist video productions, to the false labeling of executed Shiite fishermen in a Haditha sports stadium as victims of U.S. Marines, the Reuterization of war journalism goes far beyond Reuters.

Lawsuits Make Us Less Safe

John Stossel points out that tort lawyers are enriching themselves but depriving us of products that would save our lives:

Imagine if an evil business routinely deprived us of products that would help us live longer with less pain and more comfort. We'd be outraged, and lawyers would line up to sue. Yet something similar happens today, thanks to lawsuit abuse. Makers of all kinds of products are afraid to sell them to us because one lawsuit could ruin them.

Personal-injury lawyers claim they make America safer, but that's a myth. It's easy to see who benefits from those big damage awards we read about. Less obvious -- but just as real -- are the things we'd all like to have but never will get because of this climate of fear. Here are a few examples.

Monsanto once developed a substitute for asbestos -- a new fire-resistant form of insulation that might save thousands of lives. But Monsanto decided not to sell it for fear of liability. Richard F. Mahoney, the CEO at the time, said, "There may well have been a safe, effective asbestos replacement on the market, and now there isn't."

Why do we have to worry about shortages of flu vaccine? Because only a handful of companies still make it. And why is that? Because when you vaccinate millions of people, some get sick and sue. Between 1980 and 1986, personal-injury lawyers demanded billions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers. That scared many American drug companies out of the business.

Read the rest...

Advice Journalists Won't Be Taking

Ben Shapiro writes an open letter to the MSM in Townhall.com:

Dear mainstream media,

I understand why you report as you do in both the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and the larger war on terror. You believe journalism requires a sort of elegant moral relativism, that telling "both sides of the story" is a necessary prerequisite to "objective" journalism. You don't believe that there can be an objective right or wrong; if you were reporting World War II today, you'd feel obligated to speak to front-line Japanese and Nazi soldiers and discuss the Allies' disproportionate response to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Poland.

Since you don't believe in right and wrong, you also don't believe in a bright-line distinction between truth and falsehood. Terrorists are just as believable as American and Israeli officials. Everyone has an equally valid perspective on the truth. Of course, it doesn't hurt that terrorists are more than willing to fabricate juicy stories you can print on page one. "Terrorist Kills Civilians" simply doesn't have the same shock value as "American Soldiers Murder Family," even if the second headline is a complete and utter canard. It's easier to win a Pulitzer when you use the fertile imagination of terrorists as reliable sources.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to offer some advice.

Read the whole thing...

NY Times Fake Photos by Tyler Hicks

Gateway Pundit busts NY Times photog Tyler Hicks with staged photos of "dead" civilians. Click on the link for the series of pictures.


Image 6- The "dead" man is sweating and holding his hat by his side!

The Anti-Semitism of Human Rights Watch

I have a good friend, a Jewish gentleman of impeccable gentility, a learned man, and a devoted Liberal who believes all the right things that good Liberals believe, and supports all the right causes that Liberals support. I am absolutely sure that among those things and causes that he supports is Human Rights Watch.

So it is with sadness that I must tell him that HRW is now an enemy of Israel.

How so? From the New York Sun, a relatively new, conservative, New York paper that supports Israel, as do the vast majority of conservative groups and organizations.

Human Rights Watch, whose executive director, Kenneth Roth, has written a letter to the editor of The New York Sun replying to the article that appeared July 25 by Avi Bell accusing Human Rights Watch of bias. If readers weren't convinced of Human Rights Watch's anti-Israel bias after reading Mr. Bell's article, Mr. Roth's letter to the editor makes it an open-and-shut case.

Read the whole thing including links to all letters and articles.

Death is a Commodity

EU Referendum is a European who blew the whistle on the Reuters photo fakes. But “photoshopped” photos are not the main problem with news from the Middle East. The problem is that it’s news that is produced mostly by Arabs who are ideologically on the other side and edited by Westerners who are either on the other side or who have dismissed the concept that they should be communicating the truth. Instead, they have decided that the pictures that tell the most dramatic story should carry the story line.

And of course if you combine these two factors what you get is the defeat of the West in its battle with Islamofascism. At least in pictures.

But the proximate cause of my jaundiced demeanour, which is now bubbling over into anger, was an interview on the programme with the vacuous Shane Richmond. His underlying premise was exactly the same as he had articulated in his own blog:

…is the child dead? was the child killed by Israeli bombs? If so, the picture illustrates the story. If the picture does not alter the truth of the story, we're not being disingenuous. And the truth of the story is this: Israeli bombs killed several civilians in Qana, many of whom were children.

I got from his other comments what I though was a softening of the line, in that there was a half-admission that the photographs had been staged. But his central message remains, that it does not matter as long as the result accurately represents the reality that children died as a result of the bombing.

What that means, therefore, is that Richmond is asserting that publishing pictures of Hezbolla agents, parading the bodies of dead children in front of complicit photo-journalists for propaganda purposes, is perfectly acceptable as long as the result also matches what his paper wants to convey.

And that is why the crowing of the blogsphere is potentially dangerous. Not for nothing, more than a week after the first doubts about Qana have emerged, is the BBC prepared to entertain the issue. Although it has addressed the Qana issue, it was a brief exposition and the main focus was on "Reutersgate", which is reflected in the minimal publicity given to the issue in the wider media. If this goes on, then Reuters will become the fall-guy for a problem that, as my colleague rightly points out, is far wider and more serious than doctoring a few photographs.

At the root is that death – or pictures of death - have become a commodity. For Hezbolla, they can be traded for political leverage, for the photo-journalists – those who are not working for Hezbolla – a good "snap" of a dead baby brings the prospect of financial reward, fame and even awards. And, at the top of the heap are the editors and the likes of Shane Richmond, in their air-conditioned offices, thousands of miles away from the action, who see the "pics" merely as illustrations for their productions.

These people have become so degraded, so devoid of humanity and so divorced from civilised mores that pictures of death are assessed on their artistic merit, their emotional power and relevance. Their source and method of procurement are quite irrelevant as long as they are "suitable for purpose". One can almost imagine a scene where pictures are swapped like cigarette cards of old… "I'll give you two dead girls for your dead baby, and throw in a dead old man to make up the balance".

It is that amoral, soulless commercialisation of the images of death that gives Hezbolla its propaganda power. As long as it knows that the Western media is in the market for this commodity, and it suits its own propaganda purposes, it will ensure a continued supply. And that is another reason why Qana is so important. In that benighted Lebanese village, death was a tradable commodity in an obscene marketplace. And the media did not seem to think that there was anything wrong.

Dennis Prager on the Left, Jews, Mel Gibson and Muslims Who Kill Jews

This could have been titled "Jews shot in Seattle, ADL angry at Mel Gibson."

He begins (read the whole thing):

On July 28, 2006, a Muslim entered the building of the Seattle Jewish Federation and shot every Jew he saw, murdering one woman and wounding five others.

On the same day, Mel Gibson was arrested on DUI charges and while intoxicated let loose with anti-Semitic invective at the Jewish police officer who arrested him.

Question: Which story has most troubled the Left?

The answer is known to any American who can hear or read.

So, the real question is: Why? Why has the shooting and murder of Jews elicited less angst from the Left than the anti-Semitic statements made by Mel Gibson when drunk?

The answers are very troubling. As Time magazine said about global warming (but never about Islamic terror), "Be worried, very worried."

We should be worried about this: The liberal world fears -- and much of it loathes -- fundamentalist Christians considerably more than it does fundamentalist Muslims.

This is as true of most Jewish liberals -- even though conservative Christians are Israel's and the Jews' most loyal supporters and even though Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates much of the Muslim world -- as it is of most other liberals, certainly including the mainstream media.

That is why Jewish writer Zev Chafets wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "On the same day Gibson got into trouble in Malibu, a fellow named Naveed Afzal Haq brought a pistol to the Jewish Federation office in Seattle and shot six women, killing one. Two days later, this personal jihad -- one of the most gory anti-Jewish crimes in American history -- got second billing on the ADL website, under "Mel Gibson's Apology for Tirade 'Insufficient.' " (For the record, the ADL later announced it had accepted Mel Gibson's apology.)

Mark Steyn: The nuclearization of ancient pathologies

Mark Steyn, in the Jerusalem Post titles his piece: The state as a rootless transient.

But he makes the point that ancient anti-Semitic bigotry is breaking out like a cancer that has metastasized and is now in the process of killing the victim. But in this case, the victim could be all of Western civilization because the cancer now has nuclear weapons.

Read the whole thing…

Hizballah hits U.N.: Where's the outrage?

Michelle Malkin asks:

Geoffrey at Beyond Wallacia points out that a Hizballah rocket attack wounded three United Nations peacekeepers at the UNIFIL base in southern Lebanon yesterday:

Three Chinese soldiers in the United Nations peacekeeping force were lightly wounded on Sunday when a mortar round fired by Hizbollah hit their base in southern Lebanon, a spokesman for the UNIFIL force said.
"A mortar round from Hizbollah impacted inside the headquarters of the Chinese contingent in the al-Hinneyeh area," the spokesman said.


No condemnation from the U.N. yet. No indignant Euroweenies bemoaning deliberate targeting of civilians by Hizballah. But of course not. Don't you know Kofi Annan considers terrorist mortar rounds and rocket strikes on its peacekepping bases friendly fire?

Ed Driscoll Puts "Reutergate" In Perspective

Money quote:

When you're a news anchor, you're not just putting your arguments on the line -- you're putting yourself on the line. Dan Rather has a problem with that. For journalists of his generation, admitting an error means admitting that you've violated people's trust. For bloggers, admitting an error means you've missed something, and now you're going to set it right.

What people in the legacy media need to ask themselves is, which approach is more likely to retain credibility over time? I think I know the answer.

Does Reuters? Given the post-9/11 track record of Big Media in general, Dan Rather's stonewalling to this day, and Reuters' cozy relationship with terrorism, I tend to doubt it. But going forward, I'd very much love to be proven wrong.

It's Hard to Leave Me Speechless But ....

Via Powerline:

When it comes to media bias, I'm a hard guy to surprise. That the Washington Post often sees the world in topsy-turvy terms, I take as a given. Nevertheless, the exchange between Howard Kurtz and Post reporter Tom Ricks, on yesterday's Reliable Sources, leaves me speechless:

Tom Ricks, you've covered a number of military conflicts, including Iraq, as I just mentioned. Is civilian casualties increasingly going to be a major media issue? In conflicts where you don't have two standing armies shooting at each other?
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.

KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?

RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me.

And from Vital Perspective, the same report

From CAMERA:

In the course of a hostile interview on July 30 with Israeli spokesperson Miri Eisen, CNN International anchor Rosemary Church actually charged that Israel could shoot down the Hezbollah Katyusha rockets that have rained down on the country, but has chosen not to try:

Washington Post Echoes Lefty Talking Points on Qana

Per Little Green Footballs:

At the Washington Post, Jefferson Morley sneers at the suggestions that photographs were staged at Qana for propaganda purposes, and compares the issue to 9/11 conspiracy theories: The Qana Conspiracy Theory.

Because we all know that Hizballah would never exploit the deaths of civilians for propaganda purposes, and if you suspect they might, you’re obviously nuts.

Click on the link for the rest of the story...

Did We Really Lose World War 2?

On “Meet the Depressed” today Tim Russert referred to several hundred thousand Iraqis demonstrating in support of Hezbollah as an indicator of our failure in Iraq. If that is an indication, perhaps we lost World War 2 because 100,000 Hezbollah supporters just rallied in London.

Is England lost?

Hat tip Power Line.

"Green Helmet" Appears to be Everywhere!

EU Referendum posts commentary on another war-related article from Lebanon. This time a "bread truck" was supposedly destroyed by rockets and its "civilian" occupants killed. But believe it or not the now internationally famous "Green Helmet" is there again, tending to the dead.

Same helmet, same vest, same glasses, same radio in his pocket.

The Tipping Point?

Despite the wailing propaganda from the "liberal" (not) press, which wishes to convey the message that military action is useless and that Israel's military efforts are failing, the IDF has been giving out consistently bullish messages to the effect that it is seriously damaging Hezbolla. I am sure that is right. The indications are that Hezbolla over-reached itself. It did not expect such a robust or prolonged response and was (and still is) anxious for a cease fire. The need became doubly urgent when it saw the nature of the military forces lined up against it, having been at the receiving end of its awesome capabilities.

This, of course, is speculation but nonetheless informed speculation – precisely what one used to expect from the quality Sunday papers. It also puts the Hezbolla response to the Qana incident in context. Arguably, it engineering a massive PR campaign on the site, specifically with a view to turning opinion in the United States against the Israeli military action and forcing an early cease-fire.

If that is actually what did happen, then it is a matter of some significance that the IDF is still deployed and fighting. One could say on that basis – despite the help, willing and unwitting - from its allies in the Western media, that the ploy failed. The current developments in seeking to arrange a cease fire through the United Nations are looking like they are going nowhere in a hurry, and a timetable still looks highly tentative.

However, you do not have to agree with this analysis to accept that the issues would be a valid and highly relevant topic for discussion. Furthermore, given the enormous controversy raging about the Qana incident, one might confidently expect considerable discussion about it – both broad and narrow – in today's papers.

It comes as no real surprise, though, to find that the newspapers are almost completely devoid of any discussion of Qana or its (nearly) strategic implications. But the surprise is absent only because this blog has been part of the controversy, taking nearly half a million hits since the news broke.

From this comes the realisation that, in the UK at least, the controversy has been confined to the internet – the blogs and the forums – confirmed by the fact that, if you google "green helmet" and "Qana", you will find some 36,600 links – with no reference to any of the major British media sources. In other words, the MSM is totally out of the loop. In terms of the "big issue", it is not even in the game and the debate is going on without it.

This cannot be unrelated to the fact that the MSM is running its own agenda and, as we experienced this week from a number of responses to our posts, including this and this, it seems to believe it is perfectly acceptable to lie in order to pursue it. And, as Little Green Footballs and American Thinker point out, it is continuing to do so – the former illustrated by the Reuters' picture above, which shows evidence of having been doctored.

That, more than anything, has created a world of two medias, the MSM and the blogosphere. Each occupies parallel universes with very little connection. But, inasmuch as the blogosphere ran the agenda this week, and the MSM failed to achieve its, there are some indications that the tipping point has been reached. It could well be that, when the histories are written, Qana will be seen as the incident which shifted the balance of power from the dead tree sellers to the keyboard addicts - the week when the bloggers and the internet community held the line.
Maybe such thoughts are premature – but maybe not. If they are - and in any event - the writing is on the wall and it is not surprising the MSM are rattled. Parallel universes there may be, but this town ain't big enough for both of them.

Mark Steyn on Proportionality

Advocates of 'proportion' are just unbalanced

"Disproportion" is the concept of the moment. Do you know how to play? Let's say 150 missiles are lobbed at northern Israel from the Lebanese village of Qana and the Israelis respond with missiles of their own that kill 28 people. Whoa, man, that's way "disproportionate."



But let's say you're a northwestern American municipality -- Seattle, for example -- and you haven't lobbed missiles at anybody, but a Muslim male shows up anyway and shoots six Jewish women, one of whom tries to flee up the stairs, but he spots her, leans over the railing, fires again and kills her. He describes himself as "an American Muslim angry at Israel" and tells 911 dispatchers: ''These are Jews. I want these Jews to get out. I'm tired of getting pushed around, and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.''

Well, that's apparently entirely "proportionate," so "proportionate" that the event is barely reported in the American media, or (if it is) it's portrayed as some kind of random convenience-store drive-by shooting. Pamela Waechter's killer informed his victims that "I'm only doing this for a statement," but the world couldn't be less interested in his statement, not compared to his lawyer's statement that he's suffering from "bipolar disorder.'' And the local FBI guy, like the Mounties in Toronto a month or so back, took the usual no-jihad-to-see-here line. ''There's nothing to indicate it's terrorism related,'' said Special Assistant Agent-In-Charge David Gomez. In America, terrorism is like dentistry and hairdressing: It doesn't count unless you're officially credentialed.

...

Twenty-eight dead civilians in a village from which 150 Katyusha rockets have been launched against Israel doesn't seem "disproportionate" to me. What's "disproportionate" is the idea that civilian life should be allowed to proceed normally in what is, in fact, a terrorist launching platform.

Read the whole thing.

Game Over: Reuters Lies

The game is over. There can no longer be any doubt. Only those who still believe that the “documents” Mary Mapes produced for Dan Rather were genuine will now believe the so-called reporting that’s coming from the Arab side of the Middle East.



Reuters photojournalist Adnan Hajj has been caught using faking – literally faking – photographs of bomb damage to Beirut. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who was one of the leaders in proving the Rather/Mapes documents were fakes, once again shows how the pictures of bomb damage to Beirut were faked.

In The Shape of Days Jeff Harrell states the obvious:

Folks, I hate to break this to you, but it really doesn’t matter very much now what happened in Beirut. Now the story is that a photojournalist — or his editor, or whomever it turns out to be — faked a photo, and that Reuters ran it on their wire. Once you start just making stuff up, the argument is over. You’ve lost.

Very few things in this life can be reduced to objective truth. Did bombs fall on Beirut? Yes, that’s objectively true. But deciding whether it was good or bad, whether it was okay or not, that’s a value judgment. And most folks have a deep-seated resistance to being persuaded by people who lie.

Michelle Malkin chimes in:

I've written to Reuters asking them to respond. Will let you know if I hear back.

Gateway Pundit notes that Reuters has some really, really good contacts with Islamic terrorists.


UPDATE:

Via Michelle Malkin: Reuters has "pulled" the faked photo and "suspended" Hajj.

From the National Journal:

For photo editors, new pressures to get it right are coming from Internet bloggers who collect and post critical comments from ordinary citizens and also from niche experts who may have intimate knowledge of the local culture, the U.S. military, or the particular news event in question, Elbert said. "We in the mainstream media have always decided what [images] we want to push out, but now people are disagreeing and questioning accuracy," he said. "This is really confounding the mainstream media."

Dan Riehl at Riehl World Review provides details on exactly how the photograph was altered.

Reuter's Photoshop Explained
Assuming that an operation like Reuters might start talking about lighting, photo angles, negatives and such, I wanted to document the photoshopping in a point by point fashion. I hope the Images below (1, 2 and Inset) accomplish that. They are enlargements taken from images everyone now has...

Game Over: Reuters Lies

The game is over. There can no longer be any doubt. Only those who still believe that the “documents” Mary Mapes produced for Dan Rather were genuine will now believe the so-called reporting that’s coming from the Arab side of the Middle East.



Reuters photojournalist Adnan Hajj has been caught faking – literally faking – photographs of bomb damage to Beirut. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who was one of the leaders in proving the Rather/Mapes documents were fakes, once again shows how the pictures of bomb damage to Beirut were faked.

In The Shape of Days Jeff Harrell states the obvious:

Folks, I hate to break this to you, but it really doesn’t matter very much now what happened in Beirut. Now the story is that a photojournalist — or his editor, or whomever it turns out to be — faked a photo, and that Reuters ran it on their wire. Once you start just making stuff up, the argument is over. You’ve lost.

Very few things in this life can be reduced to objective truth. Did bombs fall on Beirut? Yes, that’s objectively true. But deciding whether it was good or bad, whether it was okay or not, that’s a value judgment. And most folks have a deep-seated resistance to being persuaded by people who lie.

Michelle Malkin chimes in:

I've written to Reuters asking them to respond. Will let you know if I hear back.

Gateway Pundit notes that Reuters has some really, really good contacts with Islamic terrorists.

Qana - the director's cut

EU Referendum provides compelling evidence that the "rescue" efforts at Qana were staged for the benefit of the MSM. It now appears likely that there will be an investigation of the entire event and its aftermath.

Blogs RULE!

More Pictures of Grand Haven

The Brink of Madness

Victor Davis Hanson on the moral confusion of many in the West:

It is now nearly five years since jihadists from the Arab world left a crater in Manhattan and ignited the Pentagon. Apart from the frontline in Iraq, the United States and NATO have troops battling the Islamic fascists in Afghanistan. European police scramble daily to avoid another London or Madrid train bombing. The French, Dutch, and Danish governments are worried that a sizable number of Muslim immigrants inside their countries are not assimilating, and, more worrisome, are starting to demand that their hosts alter their liberal values to accommodate radical Islam. It is apparently not safe for Australians in Bali, and a Jew alone in any Arab nation would have to be discreet — and perhaps now in France or Sweden as well. Canadians’ past opposition to the Iraq war, and their empathy for the Palestinians, earned no reprieve, if we can believe that Islamists were caught plotting to behead their prime minister. Russians have been blown up by Muslim Chechnyans from Moscow to Beslan. India is routinely attacked by Islamic terrorists. An elected Lebanese minister must keep in mind that a Hezbollah or Syrian terrorist — not an Israeli bomb — might kill him if he utters a wrong word. The only mystery here in the United States is which target the jihadists want to destroy first: the Holland Tunnel in New York or the Sears Tower in Chicago.

In nearly all these cases there is a certain sameness: The Koran is quoted as the moral authority of the perpetrators; terrorism is the preferred method of violence; Jews are usually blamed; dozens of rambling complaints are aired, and killers are often considered stateless, at least in the sense that the countries in which they seek shelter or conduct business or find support do not accept culpability for their actions.

Yet the present Western apology to all this is often to deal piecemeal with these perceived Muslim grievances: India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon. Therefore we are to believe that “freedom fighters” commit terror for political purposes of “liberation.” At the most extreme, some think there is absolutely no pattern to global terrorism, and the mere suggestion that there is constitutes “Islamaphobia.”

Here at home, yet another Islamic fanatic conducts an act of al Qaedism in Seattle, and the police worry immediately about the safety of the mosques from which such hatred has in the past often emanated — as if the problem of a Jew being murdered at the Los Angeles airport or a Seattle civic center arises from not protecting mosques, rather than protecting us from what sometimes goes on in mosques.

He reminds us that this is a virtual replay of the 1930s, and we can now understand how the world let Hitler begin World War 2 when it would have been simpler and infinitely less costly in blood and treasure to do so in the 1930s. Are we condemned to repeat history?

If You Were Jewish, Which Party Do You Support? Which Party Supports You?

To find out, click HERE

Amadinejad calls for Israel’s destruction again; silence ensues

Once again, the president of Iran, a UN member state, calls for the destruction of Israel, a UN member state, in violation of the UN Charter, and his calls are met with silence from the international community.

Israel Takes Out Rocket Launchers In Tyre

From YNet News:

The IDF wished to issue a message of deterrence with the raid, indicating that long-range fire deep into Israeli territory would incur immediate consequences. The city of Tyre and its surroundings have lately become a chief source of the long-range rocket fire into Israel, which has hit Afula, Beit Shean and other Israeli cities in addition to Hadera. During the raid, IDF commandos succeeded in killing senior commanders in Hizbullah’s strategic rocket-launch network.

More Inconsistencies In Qana

As the plot thickens, the waters are getting muddier:

"JohnHuang2" On Israeli "Atrocities"

Fact-resistant Qana-rrhea outbreak in Media


*"Gaunt and exhausted, tormented with the worry about his missing family, Jamal Fayed yesterday wondered round the vast heap of reeking detritus," evidence of horrendous Israeli war crimes. -- The Independent

*"Israeli officials were desperately scrambling to explain the war crimes" they committed "as the international furore over the devastation rose to new heights yesterday." Evidence against Israel mounted yesterday when a British pathologist said that he suspects that allegations "that a large number of civilians died and are (still) under the rubble are highly credible." -- The Independent

*". . . the evidence of the Israeli army's absolute negligence in trying to protect civilian life is everywhere." -- The Economist

*"We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide." -- London Evening Standard

*"Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." -- reporter for the London Times

*"Israel's campaign has actually -- has always -- been about: the irreversible conquest of (Arab) land and society." -- the Nation magazine, in a piece entitled, What Israel Has Done

*"Combating terrorism does not give a blank check to kill civilians. However just the cause is, there are illegitimate means, and the means that have been used here are illegitimate and morally repugnant." -- U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East

*The Israeli Defense Force has made a hellish battleground among the civilians . . . We are getting reports of pure horror . . . " -- Commissioner General of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency

*The international community cannot permit the wanton killings of "civilians and the destruction of the civilian infrastructure to support life. It cannot be right to wage war on civilian populations. The international community has a responsibility to protect, which it must discharge." -- U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights

*"It is in Israel's interest to behave like a democracy that believes in the rule of law . . . Israelis can't trample over the rule of law, over the Geneva conventions, over what are generally regarded as acceptable norms of behaviour without it doing colossal damage to their reputation." -- European Union External Affairs Commissioner

*"I plead once again, for the respect of international law, including international humanitarian law, whenever force is used -- whether by States or by resistance movements." -- Kofi Annan to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights

*"The increasing violence of the Zionist regime and their military operations against (Arabs) has shattered the hope of the (Arab youth.)" -- French ambassador to Tehran

*"What was more shocking to the world was the human tragedy caused by brutal military attacks (against innocent civilians) by Israeli forces." -- China's Permanent Representative to the U.N.

Whatever.

But! There is one problem with these "I-AM-SHOCKED-AND-REPULSED-AND-HORRIFIED" comments you've just read: They have nothing to do with Lebanon, Qana, Beirut or images of Helen Thomas. The remarks were about the "Jenin Massacre," which, though widely reported in the media, never happened.

Click on the link to FreeRepublic to read the rest...

Pajamas Media cover the War

Pajamas Media covers the Israeli - Hezbolla war. Click on the link for more details.

Olmert Interviewed by the Times of London

Excerpt:

Q: But there is a sense in the world, and you must be aware of it, of lack of "proportionality". Many people question how after two soldiers kidnapped and eight killed by Hezbollah we are now seeing upwards of 400 dead and rising in Lebanon. How can such an initial incident justify such a huge response from Israel?

A: I think that you are missing a major part. The war started not only by killing eight Israeli soldiers and abducting two but by shooting Katyusha and other rockets on the northern cities of Israel on that same morning. Indiscriminately.

Now we know that for years Hezbollah - assisted by Iran - built an infrastructure of a very significant volume in the south part of Lebanon to be used against Israeli people. The most obvious, simple, way to describe it to the average British person is: can you imagine seven million British citizens sitting for 22 days in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham in Newcastle, in Brighton and in other cities? Twenty two days in shelters because a terrorist organisation was shooting rockets and missiles on their heads? What would have been the British reaction to that? Do you know of a country that would have responded to such a brutal attack on its citizens softer than Israel did? Based on my knowledge of history no country in Europe would have responded in such a restrained manner as Israel did.

I don’t want now to draw comparisons [but] one could ask the question what precisely did the European forces [do] in Kosovo 10 years ago. How many innocent civilians were killed in Kosovo 10 years ago? We can draw on and on these comparisons.

What are we talking about? More than a million Israelis are sitting 22 days in shelters because of the fear of terrorists. In every single case...that we kill an uninvolved civilian in Lebanon, we consider it as a failure for Israel. And you know how many Israelis raise their voices as a result of this? And they don’t have to because we feel that we failed when we killed uninvolved people.

The difference between us and Hezbollah is that when we kill innocent people we consider it a failure, when they kill innocent people they consider it a success.

Tell me, who are they aiming at when they shoot already 2800 rockets on Haifa, Hanariya, Akko, Sefat, Afula and the rest of the places, if not to kill innocent people? So I’m sorry for every individual that was killed that was not involved.

And by the way, how do you really know that 400 innocent civilians were killed? How do you know who is innocent and who is not? Why? This is not an army. They don’t wear uniforms that distinguish them from other civilians. We didn’t attack any of the Christian quarters of Beirut. We didn’t attack any of the Christian residential areas in any part of Lebanon. We attacked only those areas where they had the Katyusha launchers, where they had the missile launchers, where they had the command positions of Hezbollah, where they had the storage houses, the logistic centres and so on and so forth.

So the fact that people were killed there who were not dressed in uniforms doesn’t mean that they were innocent civilians. There were Hezbollah people, they are the terrorists. Did you ever see terrorists dressed with military uniforms like we have in our army? No

Lileks on Dingell: Screedblog

It begins:

If the Dems retake the House, Rep. Dingell (D-Mi) will chair the Energy and Commerce Committee. They handle oil and stuff. Well, the guys with the oil will love this:

"I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah; I don't take sides for or against Israel," said Dingell on a local TV show. Perhaps he’s on to something. Nothing works in the Middle East anymore, after all; perhaps utter neutrality is our best options. But let’s review the others first.

The US continues to support Israel. This is becoming difficult, since many important nations with well-dressed, urbane spokesmen have decided that Israel should stop its strange policy of firing rockets on UN-run stem-cell research facilites for no apparent reason. These diplomats will tolerate a little wartime madness – we all have our moments, after all – but enough is enough, and now they must go home and sit in the basement and wait for more rocket attacks. If they’re good, they will get a snack.

Strict Neutrality, or Dingellism. This may seem odd to some, given that one side consists of bloodthirsty religious lunatics who relish the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and the other is an Islamic social welfare organization reluctantly pressed into combat. (Any objections to those characterizations, Rep. D? Just curious.)

Read the rest...

An Army of Davids Reports

The truth. How refreshing it would be to get the truth. “Just the facts, ma’am” as Sergeant Joe Friday used to say.

Is it possible to get the truth; unvarnished by qualifiers, by adjectives, but “spin?” It is. But only with non-commercial sources and with iron quality control.

Reporting without the adjectives.

Take Qana. There is not only a question about the reason for the deaths; there is an active controversy – even within the MSM- about the number of the dead. At first, the number of dead was reported as 52. Now the number of “confirmed” dead is in the mid 20s. But let’s ask a few basic questions. And we will ask very simple but detailed questions because we are suspicious of everyone and everything.

• What is Qana?
• Was Qana attacked by the Israelis?
• If so, why was the town attacked?
• Was a building struck by Israeli weapons?
• What kind of weapon struck the building?
• When was the building struck?
• Who was in the building at the time?
• Where were they in the building?
• Why were they in the building?
• Who was killed in the building in the date of the attack?
• How do we know they died during the time in question?
• When did the building collapse?
• How do we know when the building collapsed?
• What did the collapse of the building have to do with any deaths?
• Did anyone escape from the building before it collapsed?
• Who escaped – if anyone?
• Why were the reported dead disproportionately children?
• When was rescue attempted?
• By whom was rescue attempted?
• Who documented the rescue?
• How did rescuers reach the area?
• How did the press reach the area?
• What happed to the bodies?
• Who testified to each fact?
• What documentary evidence exists of any fact?


For now, we have emotionally laden “reporting” which consists more of opinion than fact. If the number of reported dead can fluctuate from over 50 to half that number in the span of 24 hours, it is apparent that the information we are getting from the news media is suspect and false in some cases.

It is also apparent that the media is not interested in presenting facts. It is instead interested in sensationalism to sell advertising space and in furthering its own ideological agenda. This is a deadly combination in an era of ideological uniformity by the MSM, an organ that still sets the political agenda by the selection of the topics it covers and the perspective from which those points are covered.

I propose that the primary public foundations of this country combine to form an information network that is devoted to simple facts.

For example, these are indisputable facts about Qana:

• The town exists.
• It is located in Lebanon
• Areas of Qana were the target of Israeli military attacks
• Israel claims that Qana was the site of rockets launched by Hezbolla and has shown photographic evidence of rockets being launched from that area
• There is no independent proof that the objects were rockets or that the people firing them were members of any group.
• There was a building in Qana that was located near the launch sites of missiles photographed by Israeli military photographers.
• Israel claimed that it struck the area of the building at approximately midnight.
• There is a period of time, approximately 8 hours between the time that Israel claimed to have struck the area of the building and the time the media was informed of the destruction of the building and the death of its inhabitants.
• Photographers took pictures of people claiming to be rescuers holding bodies.
• The bodies were claimed by certain of these rescuers to have died in the building.

More than this we cannot know with any certainty. We have no specific independent knowledge of the identity of the bodies. We don’t now the number of bodies. We have no forensic evidence of the cause of death. We don’t know the total number of casualties. We don’t know if anyone survived the destruction of the building. We don’t have any physical evidence of rockets in the area of the building. We have no forensic evidence of the damage to the building by the Israeli munitions. We cannot be sure that the Israeli attack cause the subsequent collapse of the building - questions are being raised by Israeli sources that the time span is suspicious.

Bottom line, I have become so disenchanted by the members of the media that I would need evidence if they reported that the sun rose in the east. Reporting of disasters is notorious for its unreliability. Remember the initial death toll that was estimated by the reporters on 9/11? It was larger than the actual death toll by an order of magnitude. Most of what you think you know about the effects of Hurricane Katrina is simply wrong: about the death toll, the shooting, the rapes, the murders, the racial make-up of the victims; virtually everything was wrong. Yet the reporters’ community is still congratulating itself on the job it did during that natural disaster. And today we have reports on death and destruction in the Middle East. But here we have not mere incompetence at work; we have organized groups who determine what reporters will see and what they are told to report on. And if they deviate from the story line they face obstruction and even death. It’s little wonder that the reports we get from that part of the world bear virtually no relations to the facts.

The answer is the Truth Squad.

When lies are being represented as facts, it can be supremely useful to have someone around who can separate fact from fiction. Let’s go back to Qana.

Initial reports consistently mentioned a death toll of 52. This is a very specific number. The number du-jour is 28. Even if the Truth Squad was not able to report a more accurate number it would be useful for the Truth Squad to be able to report on whose estimate the 52 number was based and to put the actual death toll as “undetermined” absent a body count by its representative. And even that would not be enough. If you put 52 bodies in front of me and told me that they had all been killed in a bomb blast, I would have not way of knowing if you were telling me the truth without independent forensic investigation of the cause of death and the identity of the bodies. That kind of evidence is customary for legal proceedings in the American judicial system. It’s time we use that kind of evidence gathering in reporting the facts from which we derive our opinions.

At one time this kind of dispassionate analysis of fact may have been impossible. Thanks to technological advances and the internet it may now be possible to approach this level of dispassionate reporting. Perhaps we can get Glenn Reynolds to recruit an “Army of Davids” to do exactly that.

NT Times: "Mouthpiece of the Democrat Party."

Many of my Democrat friends will dismiss this as paranoia, but really, there is no other reasonable explanation for this.

In an article called "Tax Cheats Out of Control" we have three billionaires mentioned. One is identified as a football team owner, another as a movie producer and the other (rather, a brother team) as ... Bush contributors. But the movie producer is none other than:

HAIM SABAN picked up the phone in his office. Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Television, was returning his call. "Boobie," said Mr. Saban, the children's television mogul and a top Democratic fund-raiser, "don't worry, don't worry, I'm not asking you for money." Instead, Mr. Saban asked Mr. Moonves to help a singer, who was a family friend, in finding a TV gig.

***

With his second wife, Cheryl, and their two young children, Mr. Saban lives in a grandiose French-chateau-style home in a gated community in the Beverly Park section. Former President Bill Clinton has stayed there several times, and the Sabans were guests many times at the White House. The Sabans have given as much as $10 million over the years to the Democratic Party and its candidates; Mr. Saban said he was not sure of the exact figure. They have donated more than $10 million -- to child-related charities like Children's Hospital Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Free Clinic. And they have donated for the benefit of Israeli soldiers.

This, from the March 4, 20001 edition ... of the Times.

Why not identify Mr. Sabin as a major Democrat Party financier? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that the article is a negative one and the Times has a policy of identifying political activists negatively only if they are Republican? If you don't notice a pattern here, you are no good at connecting the dots.

Ann Coulter: Always Provocative and Amusing

Q: Bill Keller said The New York Times published the Swift banking story because of the public's right to know. Do you think he thinks that? Why did he publish it? What is the job description of a metro daily newspaper editor?

A: I don't like it when people ask me if I meant what I said or wrote, so I'll take him at his word and assume that he really means what he said: that anyone who reads The New York Times, including our enemies, is entitled to information about secret government programs being used to track terrorists, which means he's either (a) a complete moron or (b) a traitor.

An editor's job is to edit, which should not be confused with "to release sensitive information that can help the enemy during a war."

Read the whole thing.

The Jewish state is fighting not one enemy, but two: Hezbollah, and those who peddle its propaganda

In his article “the Media War Against Israel” in Canada’s National Post Tom Gross point out that the hidden anti-Semitism that has lain dormant for over 60 years is now breaking out again in full flower. And the spear-carriers are not the reviled and maligned “Right” but the beloved “Left.” The “Progressive” movement has chosen sides, and it’s the side of Hezbolla; the side that believes the Holocaust did not do the job properly. The side that want to finish the job. And their megaphone is the Media Left.

Last week, a senior journalist let slip how the news media allows its Mideast coverage to be distorted. CNN "senior international correspondent" Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hezbollah. In particular, he revealed that his story was heavily influenced by the group's "press officer," and that Hezbollah have "very, very sophisticated and slick media operations."

When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN program Reliable Sources, Robertson acknowledged that Hezbollah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where and what to film. Hezbollah "had control of the situation," Robertson said. "They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn't have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath."

Robertson added that Hezbollah has "very, very good control over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists access to those areas. You don't get in there without their permission. We didn't have enough time to see if perhaps there was somebody there who was, you know, a taxi driver by day, and a Hezbollah fighter by night."

Yet Reliable Sources, presented by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hezbollah.

Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week. Writing on his blog while reporting from southern Lebanon, Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton casually mentioned in the middle of a posting: "To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I'm loath to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist's passport, and they've already hassled a number of us and threatened one."

Robertson is not the only foreign journalist to have misled viewers with selected footage from Beirut. NBC's Richard Engel, CBS's Elizabeth Palmer, and a host of European and other networks, were also taken around the damaged areas by Hezbollah minders. Palmer commented on her report that "Hezbollah is also determined that outsiders will only see what it wants them to see."

Palmer's honesty is helpful. But it doesn't prevent the damage being done by organizations such as the BBC, whose bias is obvious to those who know the facts. First, the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lopsided coverage, its Web site helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details about a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.

Stage-Managed Massacre

From FrontPage, we get increasing evidence that the "massacre" at Qana was anything but; it was a Bollywood production designed to weaken Israeli resolve, influence Western opinion, and buy time for Hezbolla to regroup. Before the Internet this kind of deception would have succeeded. Today it is being exposed.

This kind of action on the part of the Islamofascists is part of their playbook.

According to the German scholar Matthias Küntzel, “the Berlin daily the Tagesspiegel published a letter-to-the-editor from Dr. Mounir Herzallah, a Shiite from the South of Lebanon. Dr. Herzallah reports on how Hezbollah-terrorists came to his town, dug a munitions depot and then built a school and a residence directly over it. He writes: ‘Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews lose either way: either because the rockets are fired at them or because, if they attack munitions depot, they are condemned by world public opinion on account of the dead civilians.’ Hezbollah, he says, uses the civilian population ‘as a human shield and then when they are dead as propaganda.’”

Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn: "As many as 50,000 Canadians are believed to be in Lebanon"

What are 50,000 Canadians doing in Lebanon?

How did "50,000 Canadians" come to be in Lebanon? Is it one of our major trading partners? Has Bombardier opened up a Ski-Doo plant there? Is Beirut where the Quebec Nordiques wound up? 50,000 Canucks out of a total Lebanese population of 3.8 million works out to about 1.3 per cent of the population. Hezbollah claims 400,000 supporters in Lebanon after 20 years of diligent recruiting and investment by Iran, but Canada has managed to amass an eighth of that figure with nary a thought. Despite significantly smaller populations than our G7 colleagues, we have more citizens in Lebanon than the Americans, British and Germans.

Combined.

...

In The Power of Identity, Manuel Castells writes about what he calls "resistance identities" and the challenge they pose to traditional nation-states. I would prefer the term "resistant identities," in the sense that pan-Islamism is resistant to the usual assimilationist pull of Western societies. Yet hard-core jihad is always going to be a minority interest. And, as those "50,000 Canadians" suggests, indifference could be far more contagious. In the thirties, there were chaps who found themselves in tricky situations in Italy or Romania, Poland or France, and so for a small consideration acquired a passport from some potential Latin American bolthole. But Immigration Canada is the first to practise the racket on an industrial scale -- and to give it away.