Legacy MattersTo see how low Wrangler has gone with a new ad campaign, "We Are Animals", you have to click over to Wizbang to see corpses being used to sell jeans.
I'm on record as being creeped out by the Bodies exhibition that has traveled across the country.
Skinned cadaver exhibit
Gruesome Profiting from the Dead
Now I find that There are a few things you ought to know about those 'Bodies'.
Peter Bronson answers the objections of those who say "only uptight Cincinnati" would object to the display of skinned corpses.
Last year the company that leases bodies from China had 11 touring shows of 'Bodies' and made some $30 million in profits.
Fiona Ma, a California lawmaker who passed San Francisco's ban on displaying corpses without consent, says the "grave-robbing" plastination industry in China dissects thousands of bodies for exhibits.
Human rights groups say some of those could be political or religious prisoners who were executed by the same Chinese government that harvests black-market organs.
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"When I see pictures of the exhibit, I feel something," said Morris Tsai, a Chinese-American of Mount Auburn, who protested at the Museum Center. "Maybe it's in the eyes or facial structure, but I can totally see that they're Chinese and I feel sorry for them. For we have taken advantage of the fact that since they died poor and alone, that somehow consent isn't necessary to turn a human being into a museum piece."
He wonders how Americans would feel if the bodies were unclaimed victims of Katrina. The answer is obvious: There would be hell to pay.
"Allowing Chinese to be put on display diminishes me and others like me," Tsai said.
I'd say parading dead bodies for profit diminishes everybody.
After you report that 11 of your family members have been slaughtered in Iraq, you become an international sensation giving press conferences and winning great sympathy, particularly among the anti-war media ensconced in Jordan where you now live.
Imagine the embarrassment when your supposedly dead family members back in Baghdad show up and wave for the cameras and an arrest warrant has been issued against you by the new Iraqi government.
Gateway Pundit has lots more as well as photos of your supposedly dead relatives.
How Embarrassing!.. "Dead" Iraqis Show Up at Press Conference to Smile and Wave for Cameras.
Al Qaeda's "Working Paper for a Media Invasion of America" - from a recently translated document originally published on a jihaddist web site brought to you not by the mainstream media but from the Mudville Gazette, a blog by an American soldier.
Osama Bin Ladin, the document's author Najd al-Rawi says wants his fellow mujahadeen to pay more attention to the opportunities presented by the American media. The author wants more videos, especially of attacks on US soldiers and more English translations of videos that can "throw fear into the American people's hearts."
Lastly, the paper points out what the author considers the best locations for providing this material, and suggests dissemination via the world wide web, following efforts to ensure the origin can't be traced.
Targets listed:
- US discussion forums
- US chat rooms
- Well known newspapers and magazines
- American TV channels with web sites
- Famous US authors with email addresses such as Friedman, Chomsky, Fukuyama, Huntington, and others
- Famous US web sites like MEMRI, or those of the Zionist lobby (AIPAC), or research institutes like Rand
CNN has already aired one video showing American soldiers being killed by snipers with film supplied by a terrorist organization.
Many of these snuff videos have been uploaded to YouTube where they are traded by Islamic jihaadists. The New York Times published a piece in its travel section, Anti-US Attack Videos Spread on the Web, especially on YouTube.
At the same time, American videos that protest the Islamic violence or are anti-jihad have been banned, I presume because the jihaadists are quick to protest. Michelle Malkin is leading an effort of many bloggers to protest the snuff films and other violent videos. Fighting jihad at YouTube
YouTube and the cyber jihad.
The war on terror is not just being fought on battlefields or within intelligence agencies. With the Internet, terrorists are able to attack us by cowing nervous Web site owners into submitting to their demands. When they can't scare Internet operators, they simply try to hack into a site and shut it down. As Mrs. Malkin rightly notes, in the case of YouTube, "instead of boycotting the site, we need to stay and fight." She has urged her readers to keep posting anti-Islamist videos to combat the terrorists' cyber-jihad.
Civil-liberties advocates are constantly warning about the dangers of censorship enacted by the government. What they have just as constantly overlooked is the very real danger of censorship enacted by private businesses fearful of Islamist rage. The only way to fight this assault on our freedoms is by not giving in as YouTube has.
CNN is the network that refuses to air beheading videos or the Mohammed cartoons yet defends its showing of an American soldier being shot by terrorists in Iraq as the "unvarnished truth", no matter how disturbing it might be for millions of viewers and especially the soldier's family.
For some reason, the airing of clips of snipers targeting American soldiers, killing at least one, is deemed "newsworthy" in a way beheading videos and the Mohammed cartoons are not.
Now, this footage was not filmed by CNN but came into its hands "unexpectedly through contact with an insurgent leader" and is part of an insurgent group's propaganda video.
I would expect a news organization to be familiar with the many Al Qaeda documents seized in Afghanistan in 2001 and translated far too slowly into English, and only some of which have reached the mainstream press.
The New Yorker published The Master Plan of Al Qaeda in its Annals of Terrorism in September. The Mudville Gazette posted Al Qaeda's "Working Plan for a Media Invasion of America" in October.
Najd al-Rawi, the document's author, begins by noting that although they've been successful in many ways, the jihaddists haven't fully exploited the opportunities presented by the US media. .. He points out that videos from the "Shayks of jihad" are in great demand in the western media.
Such videos are readily available - but for the most part translation to English is left to the media outlets that elect to broadcast them. The plan suggests a remedy for this oversight, and the paper calls for talented professionals to join the jihad - specifically, translators, and people with journalistic or literary talent who can provide a "ringing and powerful style that will have impact on the American people."
So what we have is an American cable network airing terrorist propaganda showing the death of an American soldier as news.
For shame.
You will recognize the photographs below.
To really understand how fake photos of the dead are used as propaganda, you must read Camera Obscura by Richard Landes in The New Republic. It documents how French TV fudged the death of Mohammed Al Durah and sparked the intifada in Israel and the beginning cycle of suicide bombers.
Or you can read the full report with links on Landes's blog The Augean Stables.
In 2000, anyone told of Muslim plans to Islamicize the West laughed with scorn. It was the least of Western worries. Today, [22] some have already given up Europe for lost, others see it [23] in the balance, even as others [24] awaken with shock to the radical shift in the balance of forces. And every aspect of l’affaire Al Durah is emblematic of why: from the Palestinian forces that staged it… to the Western [25] mainstream media and [26] NGOs which presented it as news without asking hard questions, which believed any subsequent Palestinian claims of Israelis killing children, and resisted all efforts at correction… to the Muslim world that turned it into an icon of hatred and a call to genocidal holy war… to the “leftist” revolutionaries who jumped on the jihad bandwagon and via Durban, led the [27] “peace” movement of Spring 2003 into the lair of Jihad… to a public distressingly eager for “dirt” on Israel and unaware of the forces empowered by diffusing such poisons into the global information stream.
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These [28] court trials, then–in which France2 seeks to bury any serious assessment of so critical and poisonous a tale–are also trials of France’s ability to defend her republican values against an Islamist onslaught that it seems ill-equipped to resist. It is Dreyfus redux: the path to modernity for the Army and Church lay in preferring honesty to honor; this time the challenge is to French Mainstream Media and French Muslims.
And, as France goes, so goes Europe. (Would France have it any other way?)
Three journalists have been charged under a French law designed to protect individuals from the mass media with libeling France2 producer Charles Enderlin and France2 simply for questioning the truth of the staged photos.
Richard Landes, a professor at Boston University, was called as a witness at two of the trials held this fall.
Nidre Poller, an American married to a French man, reported from France on the trial.
"Not since the days of Alfred Dreyfus and Emile Zola has the French legal system been put to such a test on basic issues of racism and freedom of expression."
Technorati Tags: Al Durah
Photojournalist Brian Denton whose work has appeared in the New York Times, alleges that some wire photographers were directing the unearthing of bodies in graves in order to compose more powerful and compelling photographs in what he later called "not an isolated incident".
i have been working in lebanon since all this started, and seeing the behavior of many of the lebanese wire service photographers has been a bit unsettling. while hajj has garnered a lot of attention for his doctoring of images digitally, whether guilty or not, i have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms. these photographers have come away with powerful shots, that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem.
The link to the original Denton posting no longer works as the Lightstalkers forum has removed the page. Charles Johnson has captured the original post and has many updates here.
More on what's come to be known as fauxtography and the gruesome use of dead bodies to seek personal or political advantage, a tactic beneath contempt professionally and morally.
Photographer Alleges Unearthing of bodies Brian Denton writes
--- i have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms. these photographers have come away with powerful shots, that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem.
A very young girl, either 3 or 5 depending on the news reports, thought to have been killed by an Israeli military strike was taken to a hospital in Gaza.
Photographs of her grieving father carrying her to the hospital surrounded by armed guards wer sent around the world by the AP and Reuters.
At the hospital doctors, found no shrapnel and said the young girl apparently died after sustaining head injuries after a fall from a swing.
'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
Technorati Tags: puppy, Reuters photo fraud, unusual death