Another Elderly Sadrist Crone Posing With Bullets, This Time From Reuters

This reminds me of the Passion of the Toys. Once the foreign stringers find out the western anti-American news agencies are hot for a particular sort of photo, suddenly they're all taking near-identical shots.

What are the European douchebags hot for now? Oh, now it's crones showing off strangely intact bullets? Oh, okay, I can get a few pictures of those. Sadr's got a whole stable of ugly witches and whole warehouses full of ammo. Twenty five American dollars a shot. Whoo-hoo! Photojournalism is easy!

Reuters, this time, from photographer/stooge Kareem Raheem.

A woman displays bullets after a raid in Baghdad's Sadr City
August 12, 2007. Two men were killed while nine others were
arrested during a joint raid by the U.S. and Iraqi military forces
in Sadr City early on Sunday, police said. REUTERS/Kareem Raheem (IRAQ)

Dan Riehl provides this close-up on the bullets.

I can't tell, but they look like bullets to me (i.e., not unfired cartridges). So the bullets seem real, though the posing seems staged, like so much "photojournalism" coming from sensationalist Arab/Muslim stringers.

The slavish imitation of Arab/Muslim stringers is interesting -- as is the see-no-evil attitude of western photo editors.

Do the Western news agencies not notice that when they start paying cash for a particular sort of shot they are suddenly inundated with similar photos? Do they think that's an accident?

As with the Passion of the Toys photographic morality tale, what's hot in Arab propaganda photography is poignant juxtaposition. It's not enough to show a bombed-out building; to put the picture over the edge, you need a child's plush Minnie Mouse toy to contrast the innocence of childhood with the horror of war. Or of course a child's tricycle, in order to poignantly illustrate The Schwinns of War.

And here you need to contrast the well-armed extraordinarily-violent young able-bodied American soldiers with the frail, harmless targets of their aggression, defenseless old Sadrist hags. A picture of bullets on the street gets you nothing -- who cares about bullets on the street? Dime a dozen in Iraq.

But bullets in the hand of a saintly old witch of great-grandmother... ahhhh, there's the money shot.

Arab stringer photographers seem to specialize in staged melodrama. But AFP, Reuters, and -- as I'm sure we'll soon be seeing -- AP just keep paying for such absurd pictures, incentivizing their corps of photographers/stooges/hustlers to keep taking more until the fad is exhausted.

At some point the "We were duped" defense become inoperative. They know damn well these photos are staged. But they want them anyway. Because AP, AFP, and Reuters are willing participants in the jihadis' crude-but-effective psyops division.

Update: Commenters are telling me that these bullets, too, look like intact, unfired full cartridges. Again, I don't know, and I don't think the resolution of the insert is high enough to know for sure.

Either way, the photo is still staged. Children and toys and tricycles are so 2006; this year the hot-seller is fragile swamp hags.

Update: Do I Think Debunking Sadrist Staged Propaganda Pictures Has Won the War in Iraq? Actually, yes, this time.

I believe the war was officially won at 9:45 ET last night when these photos first hit the blogosphere.

I believe, now that yet another cadre of foreign stringer hustlers has been exposed, everything "is now going great in Iraq" and "there are no more problems whatsoever" and furthermore "we are now being greeted with chocolates and flowers."

This is what I believe. Just in case anyone is wondering.

Yahtzee!

That one actually back from the Israel-Hezbollah War. That guy right there was a real innovator. Like Andy Warhol, except with bullets and swamp-hags.

More... Like I said: Slavish, faddish imitation. This one is also from last year. A harbinger -- just slightly ahead of its time.

Iraqi Shi'ite women hold empty bullet shells
in the al-Sheala district of Baghdad, August 1, 2006,
after a raid by Iraqi and U.S. troops
against suspected insurgents.
REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

Note well that military-aged men are never photographed holding these bullets. It is always decrepit hags who are selected for the shots. Why? Well, if military-aged men were holding the bullets, obviously one might infer that 1) maybe these military aged men were doing more than just holding the bullets and 2) maybe there were some actual jihadist "warriors" killed in the engagement.

Apparently there's not a single military-aged Iraqi who's so much as touched a bullet. Or at least there's no photographic evidence of that. (Unless, of course, the jihadis are posing for staged Islamic Hero Portraits, which is just another sort of propaganda pic.)

With the parade of pestilent lich-whores, however, the point is crudely made: Americans have declared open warfare on Granny Sweethag.

Apparently Sadr Is A Fan of The Neocon Zionist Zucker Brothers: As a commenter pointed out (please excuse the lack of hat-tips, stuff's coming in fast), it has previously been documented that unfired bullets can be deadly.

At the very end of this clip.

posted by Ace at 04:08 PM

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