Monday, July 31, 2006
Exploiting Dead Babies
UPDATE: News agencies respond
This is repulsive.
A blogger uses dead babies to "prove" his point.
And what exactly is his point? That the same rescuer is shown in various photographs at the same place at the same time and then is shown in a nearby town a day or so later?
As for the 1996 photo purportedly of the same man, while they may have some similiar features the age difference looks to me like it's more than ten years.
"Who is this man?" asks this conspiracy theorist blogger that likes to use dead babies to "prove" his points and refers to one dead baby as an "atrocity" with quotes?
Perhaps it's Naim Raka, the civil defense chief for Qana, who is interviewed in this article where it says that the 50-year-old man pulled out three dead children from the rubble.
Whatever.
I feel sleazy enough looking through a bunch of photos of men carrying dead babies in order to show that some bloggers will stoop to anything to prove their preconceived conspiratorial notions.
And this dead baby exploiter who's getting links from many right leaning blogs has another post with more photos of the same man which "proves" that all the media photographers helped the rescue workers stage photos in order to bring about a "cease fire" and make Israel (and their Bush administration supporters) look bad.
Qana is already a likely lie to those who prefer it to be one.
Update
From an article Tuesday at Haaretz:
As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.
It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.
The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.
The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.
And here's some stuff for the preconceivers in the same article:
The IAF admits the village was struck three times between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Two bombs were dropped on the building in the first strike. Channel 10, however, said on Monday that the initial investigation shows the bombs did not immediately explode, and an explosion in the early morning caused the casualties.
The IDF provided no explanation for the second explosion, and it is not clear whether the bomb was moved, or whether Hezbollah ammunition stored in the building caused the explosion.
UPDATE
Associated Press reports that three news agencies deny "staging" allegations:
Three international news agencies rejected challenges Tuesday to the veracity of photographs of bodies taken in the aftermath of an Israeli air strike in Lebanon, strongly denying the images were staged.
Photographers from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse all covered rescue operations Sunday in Qana, where 56 Lebanese were killed. Many of their photos depicted rescue workers carrying dead children.
A British website, the EU Referendum blog, argued chicanery may have been involved by citing time stamps that went with captions of the photographs.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh talked up the blog on Monday.
The AP said information from its photo editors showed the events were not staged and the time stamps could be misleading for several reasons, including websites using such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken. An AFP executive said he was stunned to be questioned about it. Reuters, in a statement, said it categorically rejects any such suggestion.
...."Do you really think these people would risk their lives under Israeli shelling to set up a digging ceremony for dead Lebanese kids?" asked Patrick Baz, Mideast photo director for AFP.
"I'm totally stunned by first the question and I can't imagine that somebody would think something like that would have happened."
It's irritating how the right seem to be able to get ridiculous stories like that into the press so quickly, while plenty of real reporting on liberal blogs never goes anywhere.
And I'm not gonna blog anymore about the reason why the way things are the way they are on the left because no one ever listens. But look what's been going on in the world the last few weeks and look at what the majority of the focus has been on at the approved media worthy sites...that's all I'm saying about that.
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