When is an implication, not an implication?

Yesterday, the big fuss was over a gory photo with a fabricated caption, tweeted by a Palestinian UN official. The caption falsely alleged that a little girl had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza. It wasn’t long before the Palestinian propagandists tried to tar the pro-Israel people with the same brush.

Gory Fabrication

They pointed to postings of old photos and video clips depicting rocket attacks or the day-to-day lives of Israelis under attack and said we were guilty of the same sort of misleading behavior. They said we implied these photos and video clips were from this latest round of rocket attacks. But we implied no such thing. Which leads to the thought: when is an implication, not an implication?

Here is the difference between what THEY did and what WE did.

Khulood Badawi’s photo was tweeted with these accompanying words: “Palestine is bleeding. Another child killed by Israel. Another father carrying his child to a grave in Gaza.”

Leaving aside the maudlin nature of these words, designed to evoke pity for the aggressor, this child was not killed by Israelis. Period. It’s a boldfaced, out and out LIE.

Abuse Of Office

Note that the woman who wrote these words is the Information and Media Coordinator of OCHA: the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The very nature of her office is to be journalistically responsible and honest. Instead, she abuses her office to disseminate false propaganda so as to further the cause of her own people, who happen to be the aggressor. So aside from fabricating gory tales of malfeasance by the other side, this is her own people, so in addition to journalistic dishonesty of the most reprehensible sort, we have nepotism and abuse of office as well.

The Other Side

Now let’s look at the other side.

The spokeswoman for the IDF, Avital Leibovich, posts a video clip of a

An Example

Grad rocket barrage with the words, “A barrage of Grad rockets, ranging 40 km., fired by Islamic Jihad into Israel.”

Palestinian blogger @ANimer  let it be known to his public that the clip was uploaded to Youtube in October, before this latest round of rocket fire began. He uses this piece of truthful information to accuse Leibovich of misleading the public. Nimer claims that by posting the clip at this time, Leibovich implies the rocket attack depicted therein is current.

An Example

Stuff and nonsense: the first thing anyone looks at to verify the facts surrounding a youtube clip is the upload date. Does Nimer really believe that Leibovich is so stupid as to miss this important piece of information? Clearly, Leibovich posted the clip to show an example of a Grad missile attack: to show the world the nature of these deadly weapons now raining down on southern Israel.

Ditto the photo from 2009 of the mother face down on the street, doing

Example of Life Under Fire

her best to protect her two children from rocket attack when there was no time to make it to a bomb shelter. The caption as written by Ofir Gendelman states: “photo: a mother and her 2 children cower when a rocket fired by terrorists from Gaza is about to hit their home.”

Now, Israelis in southern Israel have been under a constant barrage of missiles—over 8,000 of them—during the past seven years. This photo shows the world what it is like to live under fire. No more and no less.

Things have escalated. But the Israelis in southern Israel have been living under these conditions for seven years.

Seven years.

We don’t need to imply that our photos and clips are current. Seven years is a LONG time to be under fire.

A very long time.

That is what we want the public to know. We are not out for the “Thrill of the Moment Award.” We want people to know that southern Israel has lived like this for seven very LONG years.

It would not even serve our purpose to depict these photos and clips as something more recent.  Old photos and clips. Yes! That’s the ticket!

Same Old

To summarize: we don’t wish to imply that this violence is something NEW. We would like people to know that it has been going on for a very long time.

Put that in your propaganda pipe and smoke it.

Smoke it