<< THREE FUNERALS AND A WEDDING ~ MAIN ~ ANT UNHEARD >>
DISPROPORTIONATE FAKE
Mark Steyn on the Reuters retouching wrangle:
Here’s a question for western news organizations: If Israel is so obviously such a disproportionate bloodthirsty murderous savage beast, why is it necessary to fake the evidence?
Meanwhile, Hezbollah is accused of plagiarism.
UPDATE. The latest on Reuters photoshopper Adnan Hajj:
Reuters yesterday withdrew all 920 photographs taken by one of its freelance photographers after acknowledging that he had doctored images of the war in Lebanon. On Sunday, Reuters said Adnan Hajj manipulated a photograph of damage to Beirut after an Israeli attack, but the agency discovered yesterday that Mr. Hajj also doctored a photograph of an Israeli F-16 fighter, prompting the removal of all 920 photos from the Reuters database.
In fact, Reuters didn’t discover Hajj’s second doctored image; Rusty Shackleford did.
Today’s Australian agrees with Steyn:
... Hezbollah is winning the propaganda war in the West, where decades of postmodernism have atrophied the culture’s moral musculature and accorded the terrorist group privileged victim status.
I remember The Six Day War in 1967 quite vividly. The star of the show was Moshe Dyan, the swashbuckling Israeli military genius who whupped more Arab arse than anyone else, before or since. The combined might of Syria, Egypt and others folded like a tent in a hurricane in the Sahara. That’s why it only lasted six days.
I also remember the awe with which Dyan was held in the West. We admired him for his great strategic mind, his courage and basically his “guts”. This was in the days before the West lost it’s moral compass, while we still looked up to great leaders who did great things.
Now we snivel around like curs trying not to displease those that seek to harm us. Our craven timidity begets idiotic terms such as “disproportionate response” - like the response to a cowardly terrorist regime such as Hezbollah should somehow be “proportionate”. Ridiculous. No wonder the Muslim nutters laugh at us.
In memory of Moshe - if ever Israel needed our friendship and support it is now.
It appears that Adnan was rather busy using photoshop!
Posted by WeekByWeek on 2006 08 08 at 02:55 AM • permalinkWhen Hezzbollah and their Mothers in Iran say that all they want is to destroy Israel, I feel that the Israelis have been very restrained. There is no negotiating with these medieval people the use of extreme force is all that they will understand. Muslims adore death so as kind and benevolent society we should assist them on their merry little way at every opportunity. They want Nukes give them Nukes.
Actually, just war theory is just fine with disproportionate results. The military should be striving to obtain disproportionate results, and its leaders should be sacked if they don’t achieve them. The idea that the results of violence need to be distributed proportionally is a goofy, confused invention of lefty NGOs.
Let’s imagine Cuba lobs some missles into Miami, and the US decides to go to war. How many Cuban soldiers can be killed before the response is “disproportionate” in the eyes of international law? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. The “jus in bello” laws of war that govern conduct in war don’t have anything to say about the matter. The US military would be striving to kill as many Cuban soldiers as possible while suffering as few deaths as possible, and ideally the result would be completely disproportionate.
Posted by Ernst Blofeld on 2006 08 08 at 03:22 AM • permalinkHezbollah is a “declared terrorist organisation”in Australia. This is not a nuance. Support of Hezbollah is officially defined as support of terrorists. It really doesn’t matter if you do or do not support Israel: killing Hezbollah is good and supporting them is bad. The end.
An international organization like Reuters will never admit to being shown up and discredited by a pyjama clad blogger with a home computer.
<There are twenty seven layers of editorial checking to ensure that doctored photographs are never published.> Sarcasm off.Reuters joins Dan Rather and Terry Macbeth Lane as known users and publishers of forged material, and as a result, any report or photograph published in their name becomes the subject of suspicion and disbelief.
It’s called “credibility”.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2006 08 08 at 04:20 AM • permalinkThe ever-prescient Michael Crichton wrote about the dangers of relying on digital photography to represent reality ... back in 1992. See his novel, Rising Sun, in which a doctored photograph plays a major role.
Posted by Dave in Chicago on 2006 08 08 at 07:52 AM • permalinkDoes anyone remember the “The Tourist Guy” from the hoax-photo atop the WTC just before the planes hit?
Well, he seems to have been mysteriously spotted in Lebanon!
Hey Adnan Hajj, you’re not the only one who knows how to use Photoshop! ;-)
I also remember the awe with which Dyan was held in the West. We admired him for his great strategic mind, his courage and basically his “guts”.
We also thought he was a dreamboat.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 08 08 at 12:41 PM • permalinkSaltydog,
Although it has been misused since 9/11, Just War Theory isn’t postmodern; in fact, it traces back to Augustine and Aquinas, who are decidely un-postmodern philosophers.
As for proportionality, it’s a relative newcomer to JWT, and it tends to be misused. For example, although it’s true that Israel is killing more citizens than Hezbollah—hence the accusation that its actions are disproportionate—Israel isn’t intentionally targeting those citizens, whereas Hezbollah is intentionally entrenching itself within a civilian population. If anything, Hezbollah’s actions are disproportionate, because it’s using Lebanese citizens as human shields.
Posted by Bill Ramey on 2006 08 08 at 02:51 PM • permalinkIn any event, “proportionality” is just a concept, and an logically untenable one at that. Like the “precautionary principle”, I mean, since we never lived by the precautionary principle before, if we start now, don’t we risk bad effects? But I digress.
What if a Isreal allows Hezbollah to continue in its depredations and random attacks. Iran is emboldened. Iran gets it filthy hands on nuclear weapons and uses them because they see we don’t have the stomach to stop them.
Israel is destroyed. Tehran is destroyed, at a minimum in the counter attack. Who knows where it might lead? Maybe even the nitrogen in the atmosphere could get set on fire (note to science dweebs, exageration for effect).
All these people are dead, and countless more risk cancers and other radiological illnesses.
But we have the comfort that our response to Hezbollah was “proportional”.
How many would have been saved had we been able to nuke Nagasaki the day after Pearl Harbor? Would that have been a proportional response? Proportionality is unknowable.
In any event, the irredentist aspect of the Jihadi worldview means that it is impervious to a “proportional” response. In other words, those who die in a limited response die in vain, since nothing will have changed. Crikey, they are still whining about Andalusia after the whooping Spain gave them in the 15th century.
Just War theory is nothing but a way to keep conflicts simmering until the more brutal, ruthless and almost certainly, undemocratic side gets the clear upper hand. It is no way to decrease suffering over time. It is a constraint on the more ethical side in a conflict that can be exploited by the less ethical side. Like Orwell said about pacifism, it is objectively pro-totalitarian.
#23 “War is hell”? No, no—according to the UN, war is supposed to be “heck”!
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 08 at 04:09 PM • permalinkMoptop,
Just War Theory is not the same thing as pacifism. Pacifism is the position that force is never morally permissible; JWT is the position that force is sometimes morally permissible. The two positions contradict one another. Nor is JWT “objectively pro-totalitarian.” The aim of JWT is to spell out the conditions that make a war just. One can certainly disagree about those conditions, but to reject JWT in toto is to embrace either the extreme of pacifism or the extreme of jingoism.
As for proportionality being a “logically untenable” concept, I suspect you mean something to the effect that it’s an unworkable concept. A logically untenable concept is a concept that violates the laws of logic, e.g., a square circle. Proportionality doesn’t violate those laws, so I think your point is a different one, namely, that the doctrine of proportionality hamstrings the ethical side in a war. But I think that your criticisms are compatible with my earlier point: before we determine whether a response is proportional or not we need to take all of the relevant facts into account, e.g., the fact that Hezbollah entrenches itself in civilian populations. There isn’t a need to reject proportionality in toto, just because some misuse the doctrine.
Posted by Bill Ramey on 2006 08 08 at 06:03 PM • permalinkThe manipulated images are dangerous, (particularly in times of war). Which side is the photographer working for, does the photographer have other agendas like some journalists?
Is the image an accurate depiction, almost “virgin” like in its documentation.
Who is contaminating the truth, and which sides agenda?
Faking the evidence dulls the viewers perception and allows manipulation no different to the real truth of the situation.
Look at Hezz ball-arhhsss appeal to the uneducation with minimal infrastructure and that keeps them happy and drunk with trust.
Today’s illusion is bought to you by a greedy photographer who took irrelevant images, that benefits know-one….
$$ Is the dollar more important or are the media organisations starting to believe the artifical processes ( ie. some programs of manipulation) that are developing in the media world?This whole JWT thing sounds to me like a bunch of people who aren’t so good at actually doing things sitting around pondering what the people who can do have done. Does anything useful come out of JWT?
Posted by Dave in Chicago on 2006 08 08 at 06:46 PM • permalinkBreaking News: Pristine polar bear killed in Lebanon fighting. Global warming probably played a role.
http://tinyurl.com/rcwbb
(More at a link through LGF)Posted by andycanuck on 2006 08 08 at 06:50 PM • permalink#25 Bill, one problem is that JWT doesn’t take account of things like ‘the fog of war’, misleading propaganda and unintentional errors [collateral damage].
The way the BBC repeats ‘massacre’ with the Qana deaths on SBS shows it has no objectivity at all and so both are willing servants of propaganda.
‘Massacre’ only applies to an intentionally targeted and deliberately intended result, neither of which apply to Israel [though Kofi Annan doesn’t know this either].My basic issue with JWT is that short wars tend to have have fewer casualties that wars that drag on. Achieving your objectives quickly leaves less time for casualties—on both sides—to mount.
JWT introduces an element of doubt into the campaign strategy, which demonstratably restricts the manuever of your forces on ethical grounds.
My best modern example is Desert Storm, which translated into 11+ years of limited war and endless internal Iraqi “disorder”, and horrendus death toll, because we didn’t feel justified in taking Baghdad and deposing Hussein in 1992.
Or Vietnam, where we were hounded by artificial restrictions. Had our campaign strategy been aggressive, approaching “war to the knife”, we may have saved countless lives in the long run by taking the war to Hanoi. And I do not include air raids in that.
JWT works only when both sides agree to and follow the theory. Which is not unlike treating international terrorism as a law enforcement issue. It works only when the terrorists behave as criminals.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 08 08 at 08:10 PM • permalinkDave,
I have neither the skills nor the knowledge necessary to build a chair. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that I can spell out the requirements of a good chair and that I can criticize a carpenter who makes a bad chair (or praise a carpenter for making a good one). Indeed, if we want good chairs and not bad ones, we have no choice but to make judgments about chairs. The same is true of wars. If we want to fight just wars, then we have no choice but to make judgments about ethical vs. non-ethical conduct in war. Theory without practice may be useless, but practice without theory is blind. That’s why theory is just as important as practice. Indeed, that’s why the “chickenhawk argument” fails; it implies that one has to be a soldier in order to have an opinion about the war, or else shut one’s mouth.
<soapbox>
Folks, those of us who deplore leftist thought cannot afford to be anti-intellectual, anti-philosophy, anti-academic, and anti-theory. As C.S. Lewis said, bad philosophy needs to be driven out by good philosophy. If someone argues that Israel isn’t fighting a just war, then we need to argue that it is. We do not need to make an ill-informed and dismissive attack on just war theory. Those kinds of attacks—and I see them frequently on right-leaning blogs—only play into leftist stereotypes about the right as bunch of unsophisticated rubes.
</soapbox>
Posted by Bill Ramey on 2006 08 08 at 08:13 PM • permalinkI’m not nearly as smart as most here, so I don’t really understand this talk of Just War Theory. To me, a war is just when it is a war of self-defense (or defense of another). But such a war need not be fought defensively, and quick and dirty means lives will be saved. War is hell, all’s fair, etc., etc. To talk of it as “theory” only reminds me of nineteenth century warfare when armies marched at each other in perfect rows, and fought according to an accepted set of rules like gentlemen. After WWI, we no longer had that kind of enemy, and will not ever again. In this century, we’d better be prepared to do what it takes to win, or we will be overrun by the barbarians.
#33 Twice read, I am disarmed of any criticism. A thoughtful and well-worded post.
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 08 at 10:29 PM • permalinkThe_Real_JeffS: JWT works only when both sides agree to and follow the theory. Which is not unlike treating international terrorism as a law enforcement issue. It works only when the terrorists behave as criminals.
Exactly.
Which is why the view that Israel is ‘punishing the innocent Lebanese’ doesn’t work [except in the treacherous MSM]. The Israelis’ infrastructure bombing was all to deny sanctuary and free movement to uncontrolled terrorists targeting their civilians.
Lebanon knew what the UN resolutions said since 2004, and ignored them, pleading weakness in the face of very obvious intimidation by their citizens.
Secondly, Hezbollah declared war openly in defiance of the State, so willingly became non-state combatants like David Hicks was.
So they can have no recourse to the Geneva Convention, and rely on the decency of the Israelis for any mercy.
Ironically they now say they ‘only’ raided Israel to hold hostages for hundreds of their ‘prisoners’. Lebanon’s Government stupidly claims the issue was a couple of Syrian farms!
In the USA, SCOTUS is behaving just as if the Gitmo non-state combatants found ‘on the field of battle’ are simple criminals and not lawless terrorists. SCOTUS is in conflict with The Convention, not Bush.Gateway Pundit adds NYTimes to the so easily-scammed on another staged pic here:
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/08/new-york-times-busted-in-hezbollah.html
Makes me think the little girl in the long Qana series may not have been dead either. Her left arm is tensely placed on her side in the pic when held in front of the ambulance, she’s always clean, and her colour looks too good.
How are the MSM going to recover from this serial stupidity and bias?
“I suspect you mean something to the effect that it’s an unworkable concept. “
Ok, I will give a little on that one, it is a practical limitation of logic that some things are impossible to know. Can anyone prove beyond doubt, as a practical matter, that Tazmanian tigers are extinct? In all likelihood, they are. It is also unkwnowable what the future holds. Intent of the enemy is unknowable. An attack may be a statement, a warning shot maybe, or a probe of one’s defenses. Diplomatic overatures are often lies.
Similarly, Occam’s Razor is only a concept. It is perfectly possible that the less simple explanation is correct, simply based on the influence of other, unknown and possibly unknowable, but relevant, facts.
Proportionality is unknowable.
One could safely say that a nation should only go to war if its national survival were at stake. This is unknowable too. We can argue that France should have known, when Germany was re-arming in the thirties, that its survival as an independant and free nation was at stake, but they apparently didn’t. To us, with our current knowledge, an attack on the Rhineland which obliterated factories and killed thousands of civilians would appear “just”. Had they actually prevented WWII in Europe, we would have been deprived of the knowledge required to arrive at this conclusion.
The purpose of war is to render an unacceptable compromise or alternative acceptable. “Acceptable” is a state of mind. Do we expect the losing party to accept that they have been defeated “justly”, and so accept their defeat? The Muzzies are still complaining about Andalusia!
We are shifting into a new paradim in warfighting.
4th Generation Warfare is as much about sucess in the “info space” as it is about sucess on the battlefield.In such warfighting the media is very much the new “front line”.
This is an example of what should now be considered enemy activities. 4 listed methods of current journalistic fraud and enemy propaganda
These enemy are as real a threat and as real a danger as the enemy trigger pullers and suicide bombers that they encourage and support.
Page 1 of 1 pages
Members:
Login | Register
| Member List
I hate to be a pain but this needs a second, typo corrected, post.
Are some ABC staff racists? Consider these recent stories from the ABC website:
Hezbollah rockets kill 15
Hezbollah rockets killed 15 people in northern Israel on Sunday, including 12 army reservists, Israel’s highest death toll in a single day since the start of the Lebanon war.
Rockets rained down on the northern city of Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, killing three people and wounding up to 30, medics and local media said.
In Lebanon, Israeli warplanes again pounded Hezbollah’s stronghold in the suburbs of Beirut and bombed villages across south Lebanon.
Nine civilians, a Lebanese soldier and a Palestinian militant were killed, while three Chinese UN peacekeepers were wounded in cross-fire between Israeli troops and Hezbollah.
Israel under assault from Hezbollah rockets
TONY EASTLEY: It’s three weeks since the fighting began in Lebanon and still the shells and rockets are raining down, adding to the death and injury toll on both sides.
And as the fighting continues the United Nations has discussed a draft resolution to try and bring and end to the bloodshed, but so far, to no avail.
And so the suffering continues.
In Lebanon 17 people including 12 civilians were killed by Israeli fire.
A barrage of Hezbollah rockets killed twelve Israeli reservists close to the border, and further south Hezbollah struck the Israeli city of Haifa.
It was just after dark when several rockets landed in residential areas killing at least three people and injuring dozens of others. An apartment block was badly damaged and set afire.
Arab ministers to hold emergency meeting in Beirut
ELEANOR HALL: The Israeli newspaper Haareetz is quoting a senior Israeli Army official as saying the attack on Lebanon is to be ramped up after Hezbollah rockets killed 15 people in northern Israel overnight.
The unnamed source said for the first time since Beirut’s airport was bombed, Israel’s Air Force will target key civilian infrastructure targets.
At the same time, an Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon has killed another 19 civilians, and a Lebanese soldier.
BARNEY PORTER: Around 760 people have now been killed in Lebanon, most of them civilians, while the latest fighting has taken Israeli deaths in the conflict to 58 soldiers and 36 civilians.
The interesting thing is how some ABC staff discriminate in the use of the terms ‘civilian’ and ‘people’. All the above, except for Barney Porter, describe the non combatant Lebanese dead as ‘civilians’ whilst the Israeli non combatant dead are ‘people’.
People are sometimes accidentally killed in war, whilst killing civilians is a war crime. It would seem that some in the ABC are guilty of racial and or religious stereotyping and ‘dog whistling’ that the Lebanese are victims of war crimes, whilst Jews / Israeli non combatant deaths are the results of accidents. This is shamefully unbalanced and biased reporting that is inconsistent with the ABC Charter. Management should be held to account and this racism must be stamped out of the national broadcaster.
Who in the ABC will stamp out this racism?
ABC Story Links
Hezbollah rockets kill 15
Israel under assault from Hezbollah rockets
Arab ministers to hold emergency meeting in Beirut