Legacy Matters

Waving the Dead Baby

'Waving the Bloody Shirt' was a tactic used by Republicans in the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War to gain political advantage by implying that southern Democrats were responsible for much of the bloodshed.  Wikipedia entry

The shirt was often that of a black man, freed by the Civil War, whipped to death by southern Democrats, with the bloody evidence being waved by Republicans to win black votes says Michael Gaynor.

Today's equivalent of the bloody shirt are staged photos of dead children and young men being used by Hezbollah to inflame anti-israeli sentiment.    Gerard van de Leun calls it The Weaponization of  Children.   Videos and photographs have become as potent as machine guns and bombs in the War against Terror.

Who does not feel sick at seeing a photo of a dead baby.  But who parades the same dead body back and forth, sometimes raising the body high above his head. He's called "Green Helmet." The EU Referendum explores here and here., a rebuttal here, update here and here and here with a summary at Qana Director's Cut.

On YouTube, you can watch Green Helmet acting as a cynical movie director, ghoulishly positioning a dead body of a child over and over again for the cameras.

Sadly, many of the mainstream media haven have becoming victims or complicit in spreading such propaganda.  Emotion, they feel, is vital to telling the story.  Few asked whether the photos were genuine.    Reuters, the AP, the Washington Post, Time and U.S. News and World Report have all been implicated.

A blogger, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs first exposed the Reuters photo fraud,  scoring a direct hit according to the Washington Post and shining when the news media get it wrong in US Today.

Reuters was forced to retract 920 photos by freelance Lebanese, undoubtedly Hezbollah,  photographer Adnan Hajj.

Zombie has a taxonomy of Reuters' photo fraud
1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.
2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were authentic spontaneous news events.
3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects and presenting the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.
4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

So how are the mainstream media taken in? Laziness in most cases, in some parts, bias, in other cases, anti-Semitism.  I would also guess because the photos are so dramatic,  like the Pieta below.

This beautifully posed photograph by Taylor Hicks of a young man supposedly killed by Israeli bombs, yet remarkably dust-free and still sweating with his hat tucked under his arm was published by the New York Times on July 27, 2006 until forced to make a correction.

Said the NYT
The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.

Gateway Pundit  reports on Dead Man Walking

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