Another Hajj Photo That Should Be Retracted (Seriously)

Bumped. As I sounded like a dork on FoxNews, I thought I'd bump this post, so people might know what the hell I was trying to say.

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As I've argued, these foreign stringers, with obvious political biases in favor of Hezbollah and their fellow Ismamists, keep coming up with suspiciously dramatic images that of course inflame Muslim passions.

One has to wonder-- how do they keep getting so lucky? I have written before about these suspiciously-dramatic pictures, and the obvious fact that they are being "sweetened," staged, manipulated, dressed like a Hollywood set for maximum propaganda value.

This practice is unethical, this practice is propaganada, and this practice is, in short, a lie.

A.J. Strata rounded up some very suspicious photos a week ago.

Does anyone, for example, believe this maniquin with its wedding dress -- serving as a symbol of hope for the future now obliterated by Israeli bombs -- just happened to be blown out of the bomb-impact zone and land perfectly upon its feet?

That's by Reuters' (duh) Sharif Karim, by the way-- one of the photographers at Qana, which all the MSM organizations stake their reputations on, as it is INCONCEIVABLE that low-paid low-experience foreign stringers would ever juice up a picture for salability or political propaganda value.

Well! I guess a foreign Muslim photographer just got lucky again to find the inciting, dramatic picture of a burning Koran after an Israeli air strike, huh? It's the perfect visual metaphor for the Islamist cause -- the Jews destroying the Koran itself -- and I just suppose he happened to luck upon a bomb site where one was conveniently still aflame. I would imagine a book would either stop burning, or be completely burned (and hence not burning) 99% of the time you visited a scene two hours after an attack, but this phographer just got lucky once again, right?

That photographer's name, by the way? Adnan Hajj of Reuters.

And yet Reuters put both of these photos on their wires. Without asking any questions of these photographers. Without showing the slightest doubt that perhaps the photographers hadn't "helped" these scenes a little a bit to get a picture more useful for Islamist propaganda.

Quoting a prediction I made four days ago, yet again:

Apparently American media organizations aren't particularly interested in how foreign stringers keep getting these poignant constrasts of the innocence of childhood and the grimness of war over and over again.

I guess they're just lucky or something.

The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.

The media always seems outraged at Bush's "staging" of actual, well, staged political events.

Why are they so uninterested in foreign stringers staging pictures for Hezbollah?

Let me clue the media in on something: The idea that reporters and photographers should be perfectly neutral in a war is somewhat controversial in America. Reporters all seem to believe it, but most of the public actually thinks that Americans should sort of side with Americans.

Why is it that the American and European media assume that Muslims -- some of the most tribally, ethnically loyal people on the face of the earth -- buy into this standard of complete robotic objectivity, when they can't even manage to convince their fellow Americans it's the proper ethics of journalism?

They always lecture us how we should understand more about the Muslim culture. Have any of these morons actually attempted a probing inquiry into whether the culture of these foreign-born Muslim stringers actually accepts the idea of neutrality and objectivity in a war against the infidel Americans and Zionist Jew Pigs?

Or are they just projecting their own Western values on to them, in a bit of racist Orientalism?

Thanks to Dan Riehl, who is going through all of Adnan Hajj's old shots to find further proof of sweetening or outright falsification.

posted by Ace at 12:43 PM

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