The "fake but accurate" Dan Rather mentality still prevails in the Media in their anti- American/anti- Israel/ anti-Bush crusade

The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.

Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the
fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds
among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still
acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature
and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that
war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western
media are no longer merely producing questionable professional
practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it
--and on the wrong side of history.

One of the very few politicians to voice concern at this phenomenon is
Australia's foreign minister Alexander Downer, who said:

What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting
out of Lebanon. For example, a Reuters photographer was forced to
resign after doctoring images to exaggerate the impact of Israeli air
attacks. There were the widely-reported claims that Israel had bombed
deliberately a Red Cross ambulance.

In subsequent weeks, the world has discovered those allegations do not
stand up to even the most rudimentary scrutiny. After closer study of
the images of the damage to the ambulance, it is beyond serious dispute
that this episode has all the makings of a hoax. Yet some of the
world's most prestigious media outlets, including some of those
represented here today, ran that story as fact -- unchallenged,
unquestioned. Similarly, there has been the tendency to report every
casualty on the Lebanese side of the conflict as if a civilian
casualty, when it was indisputable that a great many of those injured
or killed in Israeli offensives were armed Hezbollah combatants.

My point is this: in a grown-up society such as our own, the media
cannot expect to get away with parading falsehoods as truths, or
ignoring salient facts because they happen to be inconvenient to the
line of argument - or narrative - that particular journalists, or media
organisations, might choose to adopt on any given controversy or issue.


Can anyone imagine the British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett,
saying this? Of course not. The level of anti-Israel, anti-American
madness has reached such a pitch in Britain that any similar expression
of alarm at the manifestly blatant mendacity in the reporting of the
Middle East has simply become unthinkable. Yet thanks to the efforts of
the blogosphere -- notably Little Green Footballs, Powerline,
Zombietime and EU Referendum, we can see that the behaviour of the
western media during the Iranian/Syrian/Hezbollah war against Israel
has constituted a major, world-wide scandal, and one which has the
capacity to derail the efforts of the west to defend itself.

The major incidents of apparent media fraud are these.

* The claim that Israeli aircraft intentionally fired missiles at and
struck two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations,
causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. This
claim, which gave such incendiary traction to the lie that Israel
deliberately targeted civilians, was repeated by ITV News, Time
Magazine, the Guardian, Boston Globe, The Age, NBC News, the New York
Times and thousands of outlets around the world.

Zombietime, however, convincingly exposed this claim as a fraud. It is
worth reading its analysis in full in order properly to grasp both the
enormity of the libel and the way it was not only uncritically accepted
but gleefully embellished by respected media outlets, whose journalists
either didn't know or care that they were transmitting an outright
fabrication.

Anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the kind of missiles
used by the Israeli air force would grasp immediately that the hole in
the roof of the ambulance whose picture went round the world could not
have been caused by such a missile. If a missile had indeed hit it
there would have been no roof remaining to inspect; nor would there
have remained an ambulance. Yet the rest of the ambulance in the
pictures, although damaged, was pretty well intact -- and the allegedly
seriously injured ambulance driver not only was pictured with minor
injuries, but even these had miraculously disappeared without trace in
pictures taken a few days later.

In short, the whole claim was patently risible. As Zombietime revealed,
the hole was almost certainly made by an air vent in the roof. It was
part of the ambulance. There was no attack on the ambulance. The whole
claim was a lie, a hoax, a fraud. Yet this lie has gone round the
world, been 'shown' on TV, been embellished by familiar trusted
commentators and thus has attained the status of unchallengeable truth.
But it is a lie.

Now the Red Cross has rebuked Australian Foreign Minister Downer for
relying on an 'unverified' blog for his claim. As Little Green
Footballs observes, this was the same Red Cross which -- as LGF
previously reported -- once the 'unverified' blog started using those
vanishing journalistic attributes such as eyesight and brain activity
to state the overwhelmingly obvious, quietly removed from its website
the high-resolution image of the ambulance that had allegedly been
struck. For if these pictures were indeed a lie, then the Red Cross
itself is squarely in the frame for disseminating it.

* The claim that Israel fired a missile which hit a Reuters vehicle and
wounded two cameramen. One was a Reuters employee, Fadel Shana; the
other, Sabbah Hmaida, was described by Reuters as working for a 'local
news website'; although as Little Green Footballs noted, he was also
reported variously as working for 1) a local news web site, 2) an
Arabic network, 3) Palestinian Media Group, and 4) Dubai TV. Now
Caroline Glick has revealed in the Jerusalem Post that he was actually
working for none other than Iran.

But as Powerline has reported here, here, and here, pictures of this
Reuters vehicle suggest that it was not hit by anything remotely
resembling a missile. There was a modest and rusty gash in the roof and
a windscreen that was shattered (although even that is in doubt in
another picture). That was it. As with the Red Cross claim, the notion
that such damage was consistent with a missile strike is simply
ludicrous.

* The claim that the Israelis deliberately perpetrated a massacre of
civilians at Kana. Apart from the fact that the initial claimed
casualty rate here was subsequently all but halved by the Red Cross (to
28), there is significant evidence that many of the most harrowing
pictures of the victims, which did so much to turn public opinion
against Israel in this war, were staged.

EU Referendum has now assembled a compendium of its considerable
investigative efforts over three weeks entitled The Corruption of the
Media, which it has submitted to the Press Complaints Commission.
Again, the whole thing repays study. In summary, it says:
many of the incidents recorded in visual form by the media were indeed
staged. In fact, we feel we can go further. In our view, the bulk of
the relief effort at Khuraybah on 30 July was turned into a perverted
propaganda exercise. The site, in effect, became one vast, grotesque
film-set on which a macabre drama was played out to a willing and
complicit media, which actively co-operated in the production and
exploited the results.

EU referendum concludes:

.....what we do see from Qana is the sheer scale of the staging - not
the occasional picture of the many. The majority seems to have been
either posed or staged, or both. Given the large AP team present, this
suggests that we are looking at more than just a rogue photographer -
the malpractice seems institutionalised as normal practice.

And even more devastatingly:

In defence of the media, if it can be considered thus, one can only
postulate that staging scenes such as these is so common a practice,
and so deeply embedded in the whole fabric of photo-journalism (and not
just locally in the Middle East), that no one at the incident saw
anything wrong with what transpired. Either that or, so familiar were
they with the techniques used that they simply did not register what
was happening. As for the others, in their air-conditioned offices,
hundreds and thousands of miles away from the action, did they care one
way or the other? After all, Shane Richmond of The Daily Telegraph
implied, the greater truth was being served. 'Is the child dead?', he
asked. 'Was the child killed by Israeli bombs?' Thus, did he say: '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.' That is the nearest to an admission we have
that it is acceptable to stage photographs.

In short, much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems
to have been either staged or fabricated. The big question is why the
western media would perpetrate such institutionalised mendacity. Many
ancillary reasons come to mind. There is the reliance upon corrupted
news and picture agencies which employ Arab propagandists as stringers
and cameramen. There is the herd mentality of the media which decides
collectively what the story is. There is the journalists' fear for
their personal safety if they report the truth about terrorist outfits.
There is the difficulty of discovering the truth from undemocratic
regimes and terrorist organisations. There is the language barrier;
there is professional laziness; there is the naןve inability to
acknowledge the depths of human evil and depravity; there is the moral
inversion of the left which believes that western truth-tellers
automatically tell lies, while third world liars automatically tell the
truth.

But the big answer is that the western media transmit the lies of
Hezbollah because they want to believe them. And that's because the Big
Lie these media tell -- and have themselves been told -- about Israel
and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status
of unchallengeable truth. The plain fact is that western journalists
were sent to cover the war being waged against Israel from Lebanon as a
war being waged by Israel against Lebanon. And that's because that's
how editors think of the Middle East: that the whole ghastly mess is
driven by Israel's actions, and that therefore it is only Israel's
aggression which is the story to be covered. Thus history is inverted,
half a century of Jewish victimisation is erased from public
consciousness, victims are turned into aggressors and genocidal mass
murderers turned into victims, and ignorance and prejudice stalk
England's once staunch and stalwart land.

That's why the fact that hundreds of thousands of refugees from the
north of Israel fled to the shelter of strangers in the south; that
within one third of Israel, those too poor or old or handicapped or
disadvantaged to seek refuge elsewhere were forced to live in shelters
for a month in great hardship; that the entire economy of northern
Israel was effectively shut down for a month; that thousands of rockets
were fired at northern Israel, hundreds every day, many times more than
were daily fired at Britain during the Blitz -- that's why none of this
was reported in Britain (where as a result such facts, when now
related, are received with open-mouthed astonishment) because
journalists were told to ignore it all since that wasn't the story
their editors wanted. Israel's victimisation simply was not, could not,
be the story. The only story was Israel's aggression. But that story is
a Big Lie. So a host of lies were transmitted to support it.

Certain conclusions are now inescapable. First, hatred of Israel and
the irrationality associated with that hatred have now reached
unprecedented proportions within Britain and the west. Second, with a
few honourable exceptions the mainstream media are no longer to be
believed in anything they transmit, either in words or pictures, about
the Middle East. It is only the blogosphere which is now performing the
most elementary disciplines of journalism: to aspire to objectivity, to
separate facts from prejudices, to apply basic checks to claims being
made by partisans to a conflict, and to be particularly wary of those
with a proven track record of lying. Third, the mainstream media must
now be regarded as active accessories to the war being waged against
the free world and therefore as a fifth column in that world -- an
enemy within. Fourth, the impact of the lies and distortions
transmitted by the mainstream media in inflaming the already
pathological hatred of the west within the Arab and Muslim world is
incalculable. Fifth, the mainstream media's vilification, demonisation
and delegitimisation of Israel, based on outright fabrications and
malevolent distortions, is imperilling the very existence of the
country that is the front line of defence of the free world. Sixth,
that vilification is also imperilling the safety and well-being of
Jewish communities around the world, subject now to the double
victimisation of attack by Islamists and attack by non-Muslims for
belonging to a Jewish people that refuses to submit passively to a
second attempt at genocidal slaughter and instead fights to defend
itself.

To date, as far as I can determine, not one mainstream editor or
publisher has acknowledged this corruption of the western media. The
scale of this corruption now threatens to have a lethal impact on the
course of human history. Hatred now drives not just the jihadists but
their western dupes, too. Truth and freedom are indivisible. The
deconstruction of the former inevitably presages the destruction of the
latter. This is the way a civilisation dies.

"PJ O'Donovan" wrote:

The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.

Did she give permission for you to post it, or did you steal it?

--
PB
The return address has been MUNGED
My travel writing: http://www.iol.ie/~draoi/

Martin wrote:

On Fri, 01 Sep 2006 16:08:51 +0100, Padraig Breathnach
wrote:

"PJ O'Donovan" wrote:

The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.

Did she give permission for you to post it, or did you steal it?

Contents of blogs are public domain aren't they?

On what basis?

--
PB
The return address has been MUNGED
My travel writing: http://www.iol.ie/~draoi/

PJ O'Donovan wrote:
The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.

Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the
fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds
among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still
acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth.

Is that why the Israelis decided to attack their vehicle in Gaza last
week?

B;

PJ O'Donovan wrote:
The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.


You never hear about the media war on Poland, Thailand,
Vietnam, Zambia or Tierra Del Fuego, yet we are constantly
subjected to this drivel. Who the hell apart from a fractional
minority in non-Jewish/non-Zionist America actually gives a hoot
about this apart from you guys pretending to be Irish??
The majority of the media is either owned or controlled
by the Jewish people, so this is a purely Jewish topic
and should be on one of the Jewish or Israel-centric newsgroups.

--
MikeOscarPapa
Vote out all incumbents in November '06
Reform the Media:Boycott CBS, CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC
(C-SPAN is on warning)
http://www.freepress.net/
http://www.prwatch.org/
http://www.alternet.org/
http://mediamatters.org/

The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.

PJ


Did she give permission for you to post it, or did you steal it?

Padraig Breathnach



I didn't get the article fdirect rom Melanie Phillips whover she is.

I got it on the net this morning already posted on the net last night
by this guy, (person) stjohnswood

The media war against Israel
Israel Insider, by Melanie Phillips

The view originally appeared in her blog.


Posted By:stjohnswood, 8/31/2006 10:29:12 PM

"Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the
fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds in
the western media who still acknowledge such a thing as the truth.
Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by
the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the
shade. / They are now active participants--and on the wrong side of
history...."


If I hadn't gotten the article from stjohnswood, the web is replete
with postings of it today and since it is a subject that interests me,
I am sure I would have found it posted elsewhere.


Google Search


Web Results 1 - 10 of about 60 for "Early in the recent Lebanon war,
the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters,". (0.11
seconds)

Anything is better than shrub's fake and inaccurate approach.

snip

PJ O'Donovan wrote:

The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.

You never hear about the media war on Poland, Thailand,
Vietnam, Zambia or Tierra Del Fuego, yet we are constantly
subjected to this drivel. Who the hell apart from a fractional
minority in non-Jewish/non-Zionist America actually gives a hoot
about this apart from you guys pretending to be Irish??
The majority of the media is either owned or controlled
by the Jewish people, so this is a purely Jewish topic
and should be on one of the Jewish or Israel-centric newsgroups.

--
MikeOscarPapa
Vote out all incumbents in November '06
Reform the Media:Boycott CBS, CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC
(C-SPAN is on warning)
http://www.freepress.net/
http://www.prwatch.org/
http://www.alternet.org/
http://mediamatters.org/

"PJ O'Donovan" wrote:

The media war against Israel
By Melanie Phillips August 31, 2006


The view originally appeared in her blog.

PJ


Did she give permission for you to post it, or did you steal it?

Padraig Breathnach



I didn't get the article fdirect rom Melanie Phillips whover she is.

I got it on the net this morning already posted on the net last night
by this guy, (person) stjohnswood

So you stole it. Thief.

--
PB
The return address has been MUNGED
My travel writing: http://www.iol.ie/~draoi/

Ah 'PJ O' Donovan' the Jewish shill. Still pretending to be a full
blooded Irishman hymie? Prove to us jew can open his mouth without
lying and get yourself a nice Jewish screenname will you?