"Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." "Opposition is True Friendship." -William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1796
The Augean Stables and The Second Draft
This blog takes its name from the Fifth Labor of Herakles, to clean the stables of Augeas, where thousands of cattle had left so much un-cleaned dung that the whole Peloponnesus smelled of it. At Second Draft, our discovery of both Pallywood and the Al-Durah Affair have led us to realize that — at least where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned — our MSM represent a veritable Augean Stables of accumulated misreporting. We dedicate this weblog to exploring the many aspects of our MSM’s problem, not only those concerned with the Middle East problem, but more broadly with the many ways in which our media’s errors and our media’s extraordinary resistance to admitting their errors, have contributed and continue to contribute to the serious problems that plague our globe in this young 21st century.
One of the major themes in CNN and BBC early coverage of Operation Cast Lead, is the issue, will this conflict encourage Arab moderation as the Israelis say they hope will happen, or, instead, will it backfire on the Israelis and strengthen Arab solidarities around Hamas. Indeed, one might argue, this is one of the Palestinian talking points that the media has fully embraced (see next article). In order to understand what’s at stake here, I lay out some of the key issues involved in defining “moderation.”
First let’s just sort out the difference between moderation and pragmatism: Moderation means taking a “reasonable” approach that renounces violence as anything but a last resort, a willingness to negotiate, to come to a positive-sum solution. Moderation depends on being able to treat one’s foe with reciprocity, to see their point of view and make compromises to reach a mutually agreeable solution to the hostility. Pragmatism takes “moderate” positions not out of any deep commitment to these principles, but as a response to a situation where zero-sum solutions (like war) do not promise a win.
Such moderation is, most often, found in integrity-guilt cultures. Moderates – at least in principle – are committed to their values regardless of the demands of the group. “Do not follow the majority for evil.” The primary commitment is to principles of justice, not to approval and honor in the eyes of what is potentially a mistaken public.
So when the crunch comes, when “our side” behaves badly, the integrity-guilt moderate responds to being torn between solidarity with the group or keeping his integrity with self-criticism. “I will side with those in the right, even when I am in the wrong; I will not betray my values by rallying around the flag.” As Judah said to those about Tamar, his daughter-in-law whom he was about to kill for his family’s honor: “She was more righteous than I” (Genesis, 38:26).
Of course, such a commitment calls for a high level of capacity to give and receive criticism of the “in group.” And achieving that level of self-criticism can feel like a moral high. Much of the dis-fashion of patriotism is a kind of “permanent” distancing of the “self” from the “in-group.” (more…)
One of the things that struck me when I first viewed the Pallywood footage from September 30, 2000, was the astonishing degree of brutality with which the wounded were evacuated — rarely a stretcher, mostly grab him, yank him, and throw him in the ambulance. Here’s an example from Talal abu Rahme’s rushes from that day.
What struck me in looking at the footage from Gaza starting on December 27, was how brutally they evacuated genuinely injured people. Here’s a man whose leg is clearly and severely injured.
It’s one thing to evacuate a “fake” injured person in such a manner, but quite another thing to do the same to really injured people. I guess the inertia of the style of evacuation overrides any feedback from the person one is supposedly helping. I remember noting the brutality to Enderlin who laughed and said, “Yes, I have a colleague from the Western media who was injured and said the evacuation was more painful than the injury.” Sounds like a metaphor.
In the meantime, here’s an example from my eagle-eyed colleague Yaakov-ben-Moshe at The [Rancid] Breath of the Beast that made it by the less-than-sharp-eyed “journalists” at NPR.
If the lad is injured, surely this must hurt a lot. But here’s a close-up of his face.
What’s his face saying? I think you Western journalists are such fools, that even though I’m smiling at you, I’m going to appear in your MSM as an Israeli-caused casualties and tear the heart strings of some bubble-headed celebrity like Annie Lennox.
And guess what? He’s right!
As we said at the end of our 2005 movie, Pallywood, “The End… is not in sight.”
Mike Embley of the BBC interviews Alvaro de Soto, former UN Envoy to the Middle East who wrote a deeply hostile report to Israel at the end of his tenure. Here Embley gives him the semblence of a hard time while he advocates for Palestinian unity. A rather complete case of PCP.
Here’s a beautiful soul, prime target for demopaths from both her own and Palestinian culture. Annie Lennox participated in a virulently anti-Israel rally and made these remarks to the BBC. The interviewer (I think Mike Embly, but I’m not sure) is pretty tough on her. Under pressure, listen to the answers she gives. Shades of Team America… but this is not puppets, it’s reality TV.
Here’s a second interview in which Ratsila Vassileva of CNN interviews first Tzipi Livni, Israeli Foreign Minister, and then Diana Buttu, an “independent analyst” from Ramalla. The difference in interview style is almost as striking as the difference in quality of remarks from the two interviewees.
After her exchange with Livni, she turned to “independent analyst,” Diana Buttu. Note the language she uses and the complete lack of challenge to this hackneyed politicized rhetoric.
I plan to use this series of exchanges in an essay on the differing nature of “honor-shame” moderation and “integrity-guilt” moderation.
I’ll be posting excerpts from CNN and BBC coverage of Operation Cast Lead. I’ve selected them because I think they reveal some of the twisted dynamics I’ve identified here as demopathy and its dupes, and the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. Most of the posts will deal with moral discussions about Israel’s justifications for its assault on the Gazans.
[A version of this essay appears at Pajama’s Media with some interesting comments. It is the first in a series of posts that will examine the (pathetic) way the MSM has covered the Gaza operation based on a 24/7 recording of BBC, CNN International, and Skye. If any other stations have particularly interesting coverage, please send me links.]
At about 1:10 on Sunday December 28, 2000, the BBC anchor Peter Dobbie found out, along with his audience, that there were 40 Egyptian ambulances ready to evacuate wounded, and lorries full of medical goods sent by Qatar to restock Gazan hospitals, waiting at the border crossing in Egypt. (According to another source there were also 50 Egyptian doctors ready to go into the Strip to help.) Since Dobbie and his audience had heard the repeated complaint from the people in Gaza that the hospitals were overwhelmed by the injured and desperately lacking in supplies, one would have expected the border to be full of purposeful activity. Instead, nothing was happening. The Gazan side lay silent.
A real journalist, someone with a smell for revealing anomalies, would have immediately recognized this as an important story to follow up on. After all, Dobbie had not hesitated to interrupt and forcefully challenge Israeli spokesmen on precisely the issues at stake: the disproportion between Israeli caused fatalities and Israeli suffered fatalities, the inevitable suffering of innocent civilians when such a bombing campaign takes place is so densely populated an area. “The arithmetic doesn’t work,” said Dobbie, “Nine Israeli dead versus 1400 Palestinian dead.”
So here was a perfect issue with which to challenge Hamas spokesmen: “The math doesn’t work? If you are so distraught at the loss of life of your own people, why don’t you take care of them? What on earth would possess you not to avail yourselves of what you pleadingly tell us you so desperately need?” As the honest and courageous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey put it, “My head hurts.”
Alas… the BBC did nothing of the sort. The next hours and days saw nothing but canned footage repeating Palestinian complaints, voiced not only by Hamas spokesmen and BBC reporters, but also UN officials like Chris Gunning and Human Rights advocates.
Too bad. Had the BBC behaved like real journalists, they might have taken the “golden” (read excremental) thread that leads out of the labyrinth, and straight to the “real story.” That story, of course, is the classic Palestinian strategy, taken to new heights by Hamas in the early 21st century – play the victim card… at all costs. It was the same one Hizbullah played so effectively in the summer of 2006. (more…)
Robert Lewis, the editor of Arts and Opinion has an excellent short editorial on the situation in Gaza, which contains the following passage. It summarizes nicely the sheer imbecility of Hamas and the good people of Gaza who voted for them.
Let us hypothesize a small man, weighing 150 pounds, who is unarmed. Facing him is an Arnold Schwarzenegger type, 250 pounds of sinew and muscle, who also has a machine gun slung over his broad shoulders. Since the two don’t like each other, you would expect the smaller man, as an act of self-preservation, to act in such a way so as not to rile the bigger man.
But instead, throwing caution and IQ to the wind, the little man begins throwing rocks — some of which are sharp enough to lacerate — at the bigger man. He repeats the rock throwing the next day and then the next, seemingly intent on making a rite of a wrong. A neutral observer would conclude that only someone intellectually deficient would expect his bigger and more heavily armed adversary, now bleeding, to do nothing indefinitely, that at some point the big man is going to say enough is enough and pick up the little guy and hurt him bad, which is what he is doing now, in Gaza – without apology.
This bizarre contest of mindsets in the valley of Elah begs the question, what prompted the little man to act so irrationally? What does he hope to gain by irritating to the point of violence the self-evidently more capable and stronger man? Based on the thus far unequivocal results of the encounter, one must conclude that the little guy was not in his right mind and/or someone else had already got hold of his mind, like Iran et al, and bade him do his dirty work.
Whether by Israeli accident or Hamas engineering, expect a spectacular civilian massacre in the coming days, followed by an orgy of Pallywood photography, amplified by a compliant Western media, and even greater fury in the streets of the Muslim and Western world. It’s in the Hamas playbook… and will be until the media gets sober. Here’s the background, and the obscenity that will probably be played.
Barry Rubin has laid out the various endgames open to Hamas, and how, when all else fails, it’s the media reserves you draw on to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. And it’s an old story: Arafat called the Western media, busy drinking at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut under the protection of his mafiosi while his “guerillas” participated in a civil war (1975-82) that killed 100,000 civilians, his best division.
The pattern has long been clear, and most recently carried out with explosive effectiveness in the Lebanon war of 2006… when Israel is winning, get yourself a civilian massacre. Make sure that you have shocking civilian casualties that rally all the key players to your side — the other Arab nations and groups and individuals who are secretly, quietly rooting for your defeat, but who, once the images of dead children appear on the TV screens, watch the Arab street riot, and eventually can’t avoid siding with you, the “victim”… the European leaders and diplomats who piously kept an even-handed approach in the hopes that Israel might swiftly decapitate the snake… and the journalists and talking heads who have been chomping at the bit to jump on Israel for their disproportionate response.
At that point, as in the weeks after Kfar Qana, the Israelis have lost the media war: the pressure to withdraw grows daily; the damage to Israel — and to any Jew who dares defend her — becomes unbearable. For the terrorist organization that targets both its enemy’s and its own civilians, just sit back and watch all your pieces fall into place.
But what if the Israelis don’t make a mistake and kill a significant number of people in one blow, like Gaza Beach or Kfar Qana? Would Hamas actually concoct a massacre of their own people?
To even suggest it is disgusting, even racist. How could anyone imagine that a leadership would deliberately kill their own people in order to win a war? Alas, that’s liberal cognitive egocefntrism. On the contrary, pre-modern elites do not hesitate to use violence against the unarmed populace in order to secure their authority. Machiavelli openly laid out the strategy, what Sheldon Wolin called “the economy of violence.” When the population is restive, as Napoleon put it so eloquently, give them a “whiff of grapeshot” and they’ll calm right down.
And of course, in Arab political culture, this approach is not just the norm, it’s taken to pathological extremes… what Thomas Friedman called Hama rules. In 1982, Hafez al Asad, troubled by the increasing power of the Muslim Brotherhood, surrounded the town of Hama where they were strongest (population 20,000) with tanks, and for one week leveled the town with artilery fire, not letting anyone escape. At least half the town died in the process. And Syria has had no trouble from the Muslim Brotherhood ever since.
In the case of Hamas in the early 21st century, the logic is equally ruthless, but far more hypocritical. They are, of course, capable of playing the economy of violence card, and the world saw if clearly (if only briefly due to the ADD of the newsmedia), back in 2006, when they took over Gaza in a bloodbath that saw 160 people killed, some children and old ladies shot execution style to make the point that no one messes with the new bosses.
The tragic results were amply documented by a courageous Palestinian Human Rights organization, the PCHR:
The first section details the developments in the Palestinian National Authority that followed the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006, including acts of violence between the supporters of Fatah movements and those of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which developed into several rounds of fighting between the two movements from April 2006 to June 2007. The second section highlights the latest round of fighting; how it began, how it developed and its end with Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip. The third section details violations of human rights and international humanitarian law perpetrated or allegedly perpetrated by the parties of the conflict, including extra-judicial and willful killings, abduction and torture; using houses and apartment buildings in the fighting; attacks on civilian property; attacks on hospitals and medical and civil defense crews; endangering the lives of civilians in the streets and houses; attacks on peaceful demonstrations; and seizure, robbery and destruction of public, private and non-governmental institutions.
The whole point of such exercises in the “economy of violence” is to let the population know that you are ruthless, that resistance is worse than useless, it is a ticket to oblivion.
But Hamas is now playing a different game now, one that plays out in the media theater of war where you can’t openly attack your own people. On the contrary, in order to play the victim, you need someone to victimize you. (more…)
I have written repeatedly here about demopaths, people who invoke human rights and other civic values in order to protect themselves, even as they aim at destroying the human rights of others. “Using democracy to destroy democracy.” Among the many practitioners of demopathy — a thriving industry in the early 21st century — are the Palestinians, who have made an identity out of being the “human rights” victims, even as they try and destroy the human rights of Jews. Indeed, their commitment to accusing Israelis of violating their human rights has driven them to victimize themselves in order to attack Israel for their suffering. Indeed, as the black humor goes, for Palestinians, when an Israeli civilian is hit, it’s a cause for celebration; when a Palestinian civilian is hit, it’s even better. Nothing drives the mill of Palestinian grievance more than dead Palestinians, as long as Israel can be blamed.
The latest, and most horrific example comes from the current conflict.
For a good example of current righteous indignation of Palestinian “Human Rights” Advocates, see the article by Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunima, who complains bitterly about an Israeli who celebrates the actions of the IAF. Indeed, the pages of Electronic Intifada are filled with the cry of human rights (of Palestinians) violated, by Israel. When it’s violations by Palestinians, including Hamas, they fall silent.
In reading the following article, note that Gazan medical authorities complain repeatedly to the Western media of having too many wounded and not enough medical supplies. Apparently the complaint is more valuable than the relief, which awaits at the Egyptian border.
Egypt says Hamas not allowing wounded to leave Gaza
by Samer al-Atrush – Sun Dec 28, 5:15 am ET AFP – An injured Palestinian man lies on the ground outside the Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City following …
RAFAH, Egypt (AFP) – Egypt on Sunday blamed Hamas for not letting hundreds of Palestinians wounded by Israeli air strikes leave the Gaza Strip for treatment, with dozens of empty ambulances waiting on the border.
More than 270 Palestinians have been killed and 600 wounded since Israel began hammering the Gaza Strip with air strikes on Saturday, but no wounded have yet left via Rafah, the Hamas-ruled territory’s only Arab border crossing.
“No one has come in, we don’t know why they’re closed on the other side,” a senior border security official told AFP. Several plane- and truck-loads of aid are also waiting to be allowed into the Gaza Strip, a security official said.
“The wounded are barred from crossing” into Egypt, Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit said in Cairo, blaming “those who control Gaza. We are waiting for the wounded to cross.”
After the first day, when the highest numbers bandied around were in the low 200s, Hamas admitted, according to PMW, to a death toll of 180 policemen.
Hamas TV: 180 killed are from Hamas armed forces
Among those killed Hamas Police Commander, Tawfik Jaber
Hamas TV acknowledged this morning that the vast majority of those killed are from the Hamas military. A news ticker running repeatedly from 10:00 AM announced:
“More than 180 Palestinian policemen were killed including the [Police] Commander, General Tawfik Jaber.”
In the background Hamas TV is repeatedly broadcasting the same scenes of dozens of bodies of the uniformed Hamas soldiers who were killed in Israel’s first attack yesterday when Israel hit the Hamas officer’s course graduation ceremony.
Hamas TV, Dec. 28, 2008
I note three things about this:
Hizbullah systematically disguised the high death toll during the 2006 summer war because “real men” don’t show they’ve been hurt. High casualties are only good if they are civilian casualties. To admit to this many dead policemen is a shame on every level. Can anyone think of a reason to doubt this figure?
Policemen are only one of the many military operations that Israelis targeted. How many other of the casualties after day 1, according to Palestinian sources are combatants.
This suggests something around a 80-90% military to civilian mortality rate as a result of Israeli airstrikes.
What is the historical record here? What are the other examples of ratios in an aerial bombardment of hostile forces operating from a civilian area? What are the acceptable ratios in US and British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Hamas estimated that at least 15 women and some children had been killed in the past two days. “Palestine has never seen an uglier massacre,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said.
More than 400 people were also wounded. Most of the casualties were security forces, but Palestinian officials said at least 15 civilians were among the dead.
Taking the 15 as the total of civilian casualties, Media Backspin comes up with a figure of 94.8% of the casualties are military men. If even approximately true, that would make this operation the cleanest in the history of aerial warfare, and probably set a standard for decades to come despite the continuously improving nature of targeting systems.
Haniya’s remark is particularly revealing of his quadruple standard. As Belmont Club points out
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported that in one seven day period alone, between June 7 and 14, 2007 internecine fighting between Fatah and Hamas killed 161 Palestinians, including 7 children and 11 women. Nor has it stopped. In June of 2008, human rights groups reported that both Fatah and Hamas were engaged in kidnapping and torturing each other’s operatives. The hammer of violence and repression falls on everyone…
The standard would only be double if it didn’t apply to the enemy; here it applies to one’s own people. What I do is justified, right or wrong; what you do is evil, justified or not.
Further UPDATE: Of course these statistics show up in a significantly different form in Palestinian publications, which regularly speak of massacres, despite the fact that that, traditionally, applies not to the killing of combatants, but of civilians. In order to make that work, the Al Mezan, a Palestinian Human Rights Organization, makes its own assertions.
Mostly, the strikes targeted police and security installations across the densely populated Gaza Strip, which is indicative of IOF’s disregard for civilian life and well-being. More than 900 people have been killed and injured, most of whom are non-combatants…
In order to document this claim about “most of [the casualties] are non-combatants, Al Mezan gives statistics:
Al Mezan’s initial monitoring indicates that at least 257 people have been killed in the IOF’s strikes in the last 24 hours. Of those, the vast majority are non-combatants and civilians; including 20 children, nine women and 60 civilians. The majority of the rest of the casualties are members of the civilian police who were inside their stations or undertaking training. At least 597 people were also injured, including 35 children whose wounds were reportedly critical.
(IOF, for those who don’t frequent Palestinian media, is “Israel Occupation Forces.” It’s so important for Palestinian identity that Israelis be occupiers — explains all their suffering — that they can’t bear letting go of them, even after the Israelis leave, as in Gaza. It’s almost like Israel says, “I wan’t a divorce,” and they respond, “You can’t divorce me, you’re still beating me.”)
So the charge is that the “vast majority” are non-combatants and civilians, not because they can total 89 civilians out of 257 (or almost exactly 33%), but by claiming that the Gaza police forces are non-combatants.
Of course, all of this emanates from people who find the targeting of civilians in Israel “resistance,” and who have nothing to say about Hamas’ stationing of hostile forces within the Palestinian civilian population. In fact, given Hamas’ behavior — firing from civilian areas, locating military installations in civilian areas, hiding among civilians — they are responsible for their own casualties.
Art. 28. The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.
Rules for the Limitation of the Dangers incurred by the Civilian Population in Time of War. ICRC, 1956 CHAPTER II : OBJECTIVES BARRED FROM ATTACK
Immunity of the civilian population
Art. 6. Attacks directed against the civilian population, as such, whether with the object of terrorizing it or for any other reason, are prohibited. This prohibition applies both to attacks on individuals and to those directed against groups.
In consequence, it is also forbidden to attack dwellings, installations or means of transport, which are for the exclusive use of, and occupied by, the civilian population.
Nevertheless, should members of the civilian population, Article 11 notwithstanding, be within or in close proximity to a military objective they must accept the risks resulting from an attack directed against that objective.
Will we ever know even approximately?
Further UPDATE: The stakes here are quite high. One major dimension of the issue of disproportionality of the use of force concerns whether military or civilian sites are targeted.
And in fighting counterinsurgency wars, most armies seek to achieve military victory by defeating the military capacity of an adversary, as efficiently as possible. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of “Israel’s disproportionate use of force,” while NATO armies take pride in their “kill ratios” against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, decisive military action against an aggressor has another effect: it increases deterrence.14 To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
The loss of any civilian lives is truly regrettable. Israel has cancelled many military operations because of its concern with civilian casualties. But should civilian losses occur despite the best efforts of Israel to avoid them, it is ultimately not Israel’s responsibility. As political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: “When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible - and no one else is - for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire.”15
International critics of Israel may be looking to craft balanced statements that spread the blame for the present conflict to both sides. But they would be better served if they did not engage in this artificial exercise, and clearly distinguish the side that is the aggressor in this conflict - Hamas - and the side that is trying to defeat the aggression - Israel.
Michael Abramowitz has come out with a hands-wringing “policy discussion” that personifies what’s wrong about Western thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Comments interspersed.
Hamas Likely to Respond to Attacks That Seem to Stun West
Discussion Policy
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page A20
Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza yesterday, in retaliation for a nonstop barrage of rocket attacks from Hamas fighters, raised the prospect of an escalation of violence that could scuttle any hopes the incoming Obama administration harbored of forging an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
We’ll see Abramowitz’s logic in a moment. But before that, let me note that this is actually a golden opportunity for Obama to peel some Arab “moderates” away from Hamas (and by implication Hizbullah and its patron Iran), but making it clear that Israel has every right to defend itself. In particular, this makes the possibility of a peace that stands a remote chance of actually succeeding possible, since anything that included Hamas was, pace Jimmy Carter, a catastrophe in the making.
“If the casualty reports are accurate, Hamas is going to respond. And this isn’t a two- or three-day deal in which the genie is put back in the bottle,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “The Much Too Promised Land.” “This takes the already slim chance of an early, active and successful Obama engagement on Israel-Palestinian peace and lowers it to about zero.”
The idea that a) the casualty reports are accurate, and b) that only if they’re accurate would Hamas respond are both absurd contingencies. You know you’re dealing with someone in the thrall of “liberal cognitive egocentrism” when you see remarks like that. If we pass from PCP1 to PCP2, we have an interesting conflation of the casualty figures with civilian casualty figures. For the Peter Beaumont of the Guardian (who agrees with Abramowitz’s analysis), this attack should be compared with Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatilla.
That’s doubly wrong: the Israelis killed no one at Sabra and Shatilla; and both those examples are massacres of civilians. What’s especially striking about this operation is the extraordinarily high rate of military targets and accordingly low rate of civilian, possiby under 10%. As the NYT reported about the first strikes:
The vast majority of those killed were Hamas police officers and security men, including two senior commanders, but the dead included several construction workers and at least two children in school uniforms.
This kind of toilette of course, works nicely to reinforce people like Beaumont, for whom this operation is something to be ranked with Deir Yassin. With the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Something, at last, that Israel’s foes can say looks like an atrocity.
As for taking the “already slim chance of an early, active and successful Obama engagement… to about zero,” that’s probably wrong on two counts. 1) It gives Obama a new angle with which to engage various key players (as noted above), and 2) the chances of an early Obama engagement’s success were already below zero. If anything this situation, properly handled, could actually increase the odds significantly. (more…)
The IDF has released this footage from a drone of the Israeli AIr Force hitting an underground missile launcher that is located in a residential area. You can see a missile firing just after impact and landing at the edge of some houses not far away.
If some civilians were injured, can we expect the local reporters to admit that it was from “friendly” fire… as in this case from the previous day, where two Gazan girls were killed by a Palestinian missile? (HT Solomonia)
Palestinian rocket kills 2 Gaza girls
Palestinians misfire rocket, two Gaza girls killed after Qassam hits home in northern Strip; earlier Friday, Palestinian man wounded by misfired rocket taken for treatment in Israeli hospital
According to I*Consult, the Washington Post just published the following photo from Gaza — shot and captioned by an Arab photographer. (Hattip Barry Rubin)
The caption reads:
Palestinian children and a man wounded in Israeli missile strikes are seen in the emergency area at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Saturday, Dec. 27, 2008. Israeli warplanes demolished dozens of Hamas security compounds across Gaza on Saturday in unprecedented waves of simultaneous air strikes. Gaza medics said at least 145 people were killed and more than 310 wounded in the single deadliest day in Gaza fighting in recent memory. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra) (Khalil Hamra - AP)
Are the three children on the other stretcher wounded? Or dressing? Actually, if you read the text carefully, it doesn’t say the children are wounded, but that they are photographed with a wounded man. My suspicion is that were there real blood on these children’s bodies the photographer would have included it in his photo
Apparently, Gaza journalists are having trouble finding civilians among the casualties. Reports estimate 90% of killed are “militants.”
In the meantime, I think the WaPo has removed the picture because I no longer find it at the Washington Post. Maybe they smelled the poop.
Here it is larger (may be a problem for some webbrowsers).
Although many sites have scrubbed it, it remains at the BBC in an interesting variant: (HT/Jayne)
Caption: Most of those killed were members of Hamas, but women and children were also caught in the raids.
Makes for an interesting photo. It’s no longer even clear that they’re in a hospital. In some senses it’s more believable than with the wounded adult.
Of course the tragic crossfire these children are caught between is the camera work of demopaths and the reporting follies of their dupes. Pity even more the genuinely wounded.
There’s a difference between the partitive and the possessive genitive. The shoe’s shaming (of Bush), or the shame of the shoe (for Al-Zeidi). I’ll go with the latter… but then, I’m an Occidentocentric, guilt-integrity kind of guy. Hopeless.
Elder of Zion has a revealing roundup of Arab news treatment of the shoe at Bush’s face incident. He nails it by pointing out that there is a confusion here between importance and impotence. I add some comments along the way.
The Arab press, and the Arab world in general, cannot stop talking about the Great Shoe Revolution. Here are only some of the articles in the past day:
Al-Zeidi maybe one of the bravest men on this globe because not only did he defy and humiliate the emperor but also he knew very well what to expect at the hands of those who created Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and all the other secret prisons in every dark corner of the earth.
As EoZ points out below, the disingenuousness of this response is striking. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo pale beside torture in the average, run-of-the-mill Arab prison, which populate every dark corner of the Arab world. On the contrary, it’s the remarkably high standards of the West that make Abu Ghraib a scandal, not the deeds done there. As for our hero, Al-Zeidi, he’s thrown his foot at the leader for whom he is least likely to suffer reprisal, not the most. (See below, the remarks of Rania al Malky in the Egyptian Daily News about how no journalist is throwing shoes at Arab leaders who do as much if not worse things than Bush did.
So what’s going on here? On one level, this is classic demopathy, not unlike the French journalist who assured me in 2003, as French intellectuals were busy trashing the US for threatening to go into Iraq, that “courage is attacking the strongest, and the US is the strongest.” Courage is attacking those who are likely to hurt you for so doing; and in this case the US was the least likely to punish critics. (This is also true of that courageous anti-fascist “progressive” camp that continuously trashes Bush for being a fas
