“The Qana Massacre Hoax.”
The first hint of this meme that I noticed was a Powerline post on Sunday about the Condoleeza Rice banner, the one with text referring to the Qana incident, the one that appeared with such suspicious rapidity on the streets of Beirut.
The banner was certainly very timely — it was hung on the morning after the “massacre”, just a couple of hours after the death of the victims in Qana.
And then it turned out that the Israeli airstrike that damaged the building had actually occurred some seven or eight hours prior to the building’s collapse. Curiouser and curiouser.
[Warning: some of the images in posts linked below are graphic.]
Israel Matzav, EU Referendum, and Confederate Yankee have followed up with analyses of the timing of the banner and the sequencing of the Qana photographs. EU Referendum has focused on the suspicious and mysterious “Green Helmet” and “T-shirt”, the two supposed rescue workers who changed clothes and positions so many times carrying the same two miraculously clean and un-bloody bodies to the waiting ambulance.
The “massacre” at Qana may well have been staged. This is not to say that Lebanese children did not die in Israeli airstrikes; they certainly did. This is not to say that the parents of these children do not mourn; I believe that they do.
But this is all very reminscent of Mohammed al-Dura, the boy whose “murder by Israeli fire” has been conclusively shown to be a hoax arranged by the Palestinians, with the complicity of the France 2 television network. Mohammed al-Dura may have been accidentally killed by Palestinian fire, or he may have been deliberately killed for propaganda purposes, or even not killed at all, but he was most definitely not killed by the Israelis.
Yet his murder attained an iconic “truth” which has transcended and outlived the mere facts of the situation. He is visual proof of Israeli (and, by implication, Western) brutality and indifference towards Muslims. He has even been made into a postage stamp in Tunisia.
So the truth doesn’t really matter.
Qana is the latest in a long series of iconic images, an extensive collection of photos and video that might be entitled The West Always Commits Atrocities Against the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. The first in the series was Eddie Adams’ famous photo of the the summary execution of Nguyen Van Lem during the Tet offensive in February of 1968. The uses to which the photo was put ignored all context — namely, that it was taken in the middle of an enemy offensive in a brutal war, and the victim was identifiably an enemy soldier, and an officer of the Viet Cong. The image was eventually enshrined as the visual symbol of America’s guilt towards the “brown people” of Vietnam, and was soon joined by other familiar icons such as Kent State and My Lai.
Eddie Adams’ photo was very disturbing. The newsreel footage of the same incident — which I saw in Britain in the late 1960s, when it was aired by the nascently anti-American BBC — was even more disturbing. But the film was suppressed in this country for many years, because graphic atrocity images were generally not shown in the media.
Times have changed. The mainstream media are nowadays all too ready to show graphic images. Provided, of course, that they illustrate the dominant paradigm: America, Israel, and other Western nations always behave in a barbaric fashion towards the Third World and people of color.
For guilt-ridden liberal Westerners, looking at such images is a form masochistic voyeurism. “Oh, look at that! We’re so bad! We’re so awful! We deserve whatever we get!”
With a ready market like that, the brutal culture of the Arab world has plenty of supply to satisfy the demand. Muslims are the “brown people”, the victims of the moment, and they obligingly supply the forbidden images that we are so hungry to see.
And doing so suits the strategy of the Islamists, so there is a perfect synergy of effort: We want to hang ourselves; they hand us the rope. What could be better?
Staged or real, the prurient images of victimization are a precision-guided missile that strikes the target perfectly.
The dead bodies of children are props; the “rescue workers” are actors and stagehands. And the directors of the drama seem to be the media, who have lately become knowingly complicit.
Take a look at the Qana photo at right (to dampen the voyeuristic aspects, I have cropped out the most disturbing parts). See that guy crouching in the background?
He’s not a rescue worker. He’s another photographer. The photographer who took the this photo was not careful enough to keep his colleague out of the picture. Or maybe it didn’t matter to him — the Potemkin process is so far along that no one really minds if the secret is revealed.
Qana and other similar incidents are, regardless of authenticity, primarily media events. They are managed and delivered as weapons by the enemies of Western Civilization, with the connivance of our own media.
This is War Pornography, delivered to the greedy and guilt-ridden consumers of the West by our ruthless opponents. The couch potatoes of our intelligentsia are sitting here, sweating in a darkened room, with a raincoat over the engorged self-righteousness in their laps.
I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.
Hat tip: Olivia Smith.
There are a heck of a lot of questions about the Qana event. I’ve gathered together as many as I can at my blog but I’m not answering them. Some MSM organization surely ought to be capable of using these questions as a basis for an in depth investigation.
Concerning the Vietnam photo. The context of the photo is even richer than you suggest. The poor, bound prisoner who was executed so brutally was actually a monster who had just perpetrated a hideous slaughter of innocent women and children – not a Calleyesque rampage, but an action carrying out the official policy of the VC, since the victims were the dependents of ROV policemen. For once, Wikipedia has it right. See here for why the little bastard got better than he deserved, and how Adams forever after rued the uses to which his photograph was put.
But propaganda, especially with visuals, works – and truth never catches up.
Journalists are combattants
This is War Pornography, delivered to the greedy and guilt-ridden consumers of the West by our ruthless opponents. The couch potatoes of our intelligentsia are sitting here, sweating in a darkened room, with a raincoat over the engorged self-righteousness in their laps.
If this is all true does a culture that allows itself to indulge in this masochistic effete angst, really deserve to survive?
I know the ‘enemy’ is grotesque, but if what you say about ‘our’ culture is even moderately true, frankly we do not seem to be much of an improvement.
A culture this decayed, has no claim upon survival on the merits, and certainly none on the basis of effort.
Hopefully you are wrong here.
But that mysterious little voice keeps telling me that you have pretty much summed up the situation.
What a sad state of affairs.
Read your comments Dirty Dingus and
they are spot on. I too am troubled
by the time sequence being put out.
The Iraelis say they fired three
missiles at this building. Be nice
to know what they were in terms of
explosive power. If the building
collapsed at the time of this raid
why were rescue efforts not begun
immediately? There were survivors
some of whom freed themselves. The
LA Times story on this quotes local
emergency people to the effect that
it was ‘too dangerous’ to go there
because of the Israeli bombing. But
we know the Israeli Air Force can
strike night or day as the attack
on that target revealed. It was no
more dangerous to go that site at
1:00AM than at 1:00PM then next day
when, as the photos reveal it was
crawling with UN troops, Lebanese
Civil Defense personel, civilians
and photographers. In fact it would
have been less so. The Israeli Air
Force had just struck the target. A
damage assessment would have to be
made to see if another sortie was
necessary. Why no effort to rescue
survivors until the next morning?
Then, as you note, if the people
were still alive after the Israeli
raid why did they remain inside? I
checked weather.com for the weather
that night at Kiryat Shmone. It was
79 degrees under partly cloudy sky.
Clearly inclement weather was not
a reason to stay in a bomb damaged
building. We need to get explosive
experts rather than photographers
to the site of the building. Were
there munitions in that building
that went off later and caused the
collapse? Could it have even been
a deliberate sabotage by Hezbollah
and that is why rescuers and camera
crews were not summoned until after
daybreak.
Baron,
Thanks for the link.
Have you seen the Lebanese Christian blog post in French that claims that Hezbullah transported in bodies from Tyre and then invited the media to the ‘event’? The original post in French is here and my very rough English translation is here.
Carl,
I did a rough translation here
They were handicapped children.
See also France Echos
Fausta,
I understood that the kids were handicapped. I guess Hezbullahland is actually a bit like Sparta. Poor kids.
Just to note : Hezbollah is a world leader in some issues. One of them is use of the media. I understand that virtually no Hezbollah military actions are without an integral video camera team. If the action works, the tape is released asap, if the action fails the tape is never seen.
Expect more. Any excuse that gives a veneer of truth I expect Hezbollah propaganda will sex it up and the BBC will show it by morning. A truely virtusous fact checking MSM would rip this stuff to shreds and ignore it thereafter, but our lefty MSM want to believe. Doubtless Hezbollah does its own analysis and will try to give the MSM more of what it wants (and hurts Israel).
The man in the helmet with stubble and orange vest may be a local Qana rescuce worker, or he may be the local Hezollah PIO (or likely – both).
“The man in the helmet with stubble and orange vest may be a local Qana rescuce worker, or he may be the local Hezollah PIO (or likely – both).”
Whatever he is, he is certainly busy, leapfrogging all over the internet holding aloft day-old dead and practising anguished looks at the heavens.
Well written piece Baron.
Yes, busy fellah, brandishing slain children at the world, trying hard to all bar keep the smile off his face. Does he say “Allah Akbar” when the days work is done and the MSM have bought into it?
These same western liberals seem to sleep easy when in fact the civilian human sheilds being killed are being sacrificed for them. For their pity, outrage; these terrorists have no moral right on their side, they can only create false propaganda for the ignorant, guilt-ridden western liberals, who just want to hate themselves. (Is there a pyschological disorder here?)
More proof that Islam is a stone-age toss back with no moral compass. The only people who convert are men seeking domination of woman; woman seeking the domination of men and those whose lives are such a mess that the idea of not having to think for themselves is a relief…
I have a solution to Saudi terror at my blog, tell me what you think.
Hey Baron, even better is the new evaluation that the kids were all significantly handicapped. Like hitting Powerball two weeks in a row.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.france-echos.com/actualite.php?cle=9800
I noted the following statement from some AFP or Reuters spokesperson on eureferendum’s blog (the final part about the rebuttal);
Quote: “It’s hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy,” she says.”
Yes. It is. And that is exactly what they are relying on when piecing these photsessions together.
Since the aim of Imperialistic Islam is to win the Total War, the sacrifice of any member of the Ummah to further its goal only transforms them into glorious “martyrs”, no matter who kills them. (Even if it is their co-“religious” cousins making Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa by comparison.)
Has anyone in the media checked to see whether these might have been Sunni kids, killed by Shiite Hezbollah, as a way to get rid of an internal enemy and use their p.r. deaths injure an external one?
Two birds with one (or a dozen) crippled kid(s)?
“War is deceit” as the pedophile “prophet” put it.
The Party of Allah has it down to a bloody fine art.