Free Republic

About This Blog This blog is owned and written by John F Burgess. Its purpose is to comment, knowledgeably, about Saudi Arabia, from an American perspective. It’s not about Saudi-bashing, nor is it an apologia for the country. Rather, it’s an effort to put that country into context..... » Read More All original content © 2004-07 Haj Increases Use of High Tech Interesting article in Saudi Gazette on the use of new inventions to improve conditions at Haj this year. The first involves seamless trousers that men will wear under the Ihram, the two-piece garment made of seamless material (usually...

Following an appeal from the Argentinean Attorney General, Interpol issued international extradition warrants for five senior Iranians and one senior Hezbollah operative. The charge was involvement in the suicide bombing attack of the Jewish community center building (AMIA) in Argentina in 1994. The men wanted by Argentina. Top row, left to right: Ali Akbar Heshemi Bahramie Rafsanjani, Ali Fallahijan, Ali Akbar Velayati, Mohsen Rezai. Bottom row, left to right: Imad Moughnieh, Mohsen Rabbani, Ahmad Reza Asghari, (also known as Mohsen Randjbaran), Ahmad Vahidi. Picture from the Argentinean Attorney General's Website. International extradition warrants were not issued by Interpol for Ali...

THE intelligence agencies are monitoring every Muslim who travels from Britain to Mecca on pilgrimage in a wider effort to piece together intelligence on suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist activity. A senior Whitehall official has disclosed that the operation targeting trips to the holy city in Saudi Arabia by more than 100,000 British Muslims is part of a trawl by MI5 and MI6 for information about movements of suspected terrorists. It follows evidence that British Islamic terrorists have visited the city before carrying out attacks in Britain and abroad. The importance of the intelligence operation was one of the reasons given by...

new information about the Reuters Photoshop scandal: Reuters fired a top photo editor for the Middle East during an internal investigation of two doctored photos from the Israel-Lebanon war that were published last summer. The editor was the second casualty of the photo manipulation controversy surrounding Reuters freelancer Adnan Hajj. Two of Hajj’s photographs showed obvious signs of digital alterations. Facing a storm of criticism last August, Reuters terminated its relationship with Hajj and pulled more than 900 of his photos from its archive. A Reuters spokesperson said Thursday that the company would not release the name of the editor...

LONDON (Reuters) - Reuters named a new chief photographer for the Middle East on Thursday and said it had tightened its editing procedures after the publication last year of two photographs that had been digitally altered. The measures were among several steps announced by David Schlesinger, editor-in-chief of the global news and information agency, following an internal investigation that he said had resulted in disciplinary action. The two photos, both of Israeli military action in Lebanon during the war there last August, were taken by a freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj. Reuters ended its relationship with Hajj following an initial inquiry...

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia - Muslims circled the Kaaba, Islam's holiest site, for a final time Tuesday, bringing to a close what may have been the largest hajj pilgrimage ever. There were none of the deadly stampedes that have marred past pilgrimages. Hundreds of thousands of the faithful returned to Mecca from a holy site outside the city to perform the "farewell" circling of the Kaaba, a cube-shaped stone structure draped in black cloth that Muslim's around the world face during daily prayers. As they packed up to go, many then plunged into the nearby markets to buy mementos and gifts....

MORE than 1.5 million Muslims have arrived in Saudi Arabia for the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca which begins on Thursday. The official SPA news agency quoted the Hajj Commission as saying 1,526,603 people had arrived in the kingdom by yesterday to take part in this year's pilgrimage. As well as expected further arrivals from abroad, Saudis and other Muslims resident in the country will swell the number of the faithful undertaking the hajj to some two million. The Hajj Supreme Committee said 202 pilgrims have died since arriving in the kingdom, mainly the elderly or infirm and generally from...

Reflections on the treatment of non-believers by the three great monotheistic religions on their holy days. As Jews began their Hanukkah celebrations this week, commemorating the recovery of the Holy Land and the Temple from foreign invaders by Judas Maccabeus, and more than a billion Christians prepare for one of the holiest days of the church year, where the doors of Christian churches will be thrown open to anyone willing to hear the good news of Christ’s coming to earth as a human to redeem humanity, millions of Muslims are preparing for their own spiritual journey next week in the...

Damascus, 22 Dec. (AKI) - The largest Christmas tree in the Middle East was decorated and available to viewers as of Friday in Homs, central Syria. The so-called 'tree for peace' is 40 metres high and was decorated with figures recalling the birth of Jesus as well as decorations for Id al-Adha, which marks the culmination of the hajj (pilgrimage) rites at Mina, Saudi Arabia, near Mecca, but is celebrated by Muslims throughout the world. The tree cost 25,000 euros.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has issued a (call for complaints) of discrimination on the part of airlines by Muslims who travel to Mecca this year: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), citing what it called the "airport profiling" of six imams removed from a recent flight, yesterday said Muslims traveling this month to the holy site in Saudi Arabia need to be aware of their rights. "Given the increase in the number of complaints CAIR has received alleging airport profiling of American Muslims, we believe it is important that all those taking part in this year's hajj be aware...

IT'S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance. Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark. But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists. It is this...

The media war against Israel Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of...

International journalists discuss Lebanon war coverage; NYT bureau chief: Israel 'not interested in Lebanese deaths' A number of journalists claimed during a convention in Jerusalem Monday evening that Israel and the IDF were mostly to blame for the way the foreign media covered the Lebanon war. The panel of journalists, largely from the international media, convened to discuss their coverage of the war, at a conference arranged by the Media Line agency's Mideast Press Club. "Journalists' access to the battlefield is controlled exclusively by the IDF," said Simon McGregor-Wood, Chairman of the Foreign Press Association, and Bureau Chief of ABC...

Fauxtography Defender's Faux News Turns out that Greg Mitchell, the Editor & Publisher editor who has been attacking the blogosphere like a rabid ferret for pointing out the bogus news from the Middle East, has first-hand experience with staging news. (Hat tip: Confederate Yankee.) Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts,...

All Your Fakes Are Belong to Us A jawa video spoof on Beirut Fauxtography.

BEFORE the American news media's collective shrug consigns the Reuters photo scandal to the nether world of shabby journalistic footnotes, one of this affair's wider implications is worth a moment's exploration. The incident began when Los Angeles-based blogger Charles Johnson and one of his readers detected a freelance photographer for the Reuters news agency manipulating pictures of the fighting in Lebanon. They, along with other online press monitors, soon turned up not only doctored images, but also numerous staged and falsely captioned pictures by various photographers — all designed to incite outrage against Israel. Reuters fired Adnan Hajj, the photojournalist...

Amid the controversy over certain pictures from Lebanon, a longtime student of war photography asks, "I'm not sure if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both." By David D. Perlmutter (August 18, 2006) -- The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks...

It's the story that the journalistic elite would rather just go away. In the aftermath of Reuters' admission that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated two war images from Lebanon after bloggers smoked out his crude Photoshop alterations, and all 920 of his Reuters photos were pulled, evidence of far more troubling photo staging and media deception in the Middle East continues to pour in. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) calls it "fauxtography." Reuters on Sunday withdrew an image of smoke rising from burning buildings after an Israeli air strike on the suburbs of Beirut on...

The first Photoshop war Lebanon war's doctored photos could be harbinger of photojournalism crisis Gal Mor The photo of an apparently new Mickey Mouse doll, resting on a ruined street in the Lebanese town of Tyre following an Israeli Air Force attack, took me back to a British TV show called "Drop the Dead Monkey," which aired in Israel about 15 years ago. One of the journalists in Channel 4's satirical show used to hang around battle zones with a teddy bear in his trunk and place it at disaster zones a short time before cameras began shooting, in order...

Many of the mainstream media apologists have conceded – and they had little choice but to do so – that many of the photographs of the Israelis’ response to Hez b’Allah’s act of war, were staged. The evidence of staging and Photoshopping is too public. The media allowed itself to be used to defame Israel, stir up sympathy for Lebanon and halt the advance into Lebanon. But the concessions of wrongdoing stop short with digital alterations. Media spokesmen are still in denial about the biggest media fraud of all: the dramatic dead baby display at Qana. EUreferendum has not given...

When Reuters was forced to sever ties with free-lance photographer Adnan Hajj and remove more than 900 of his photos from its database earlier this month, long-whispered questions about the reliability of Arab stringers and freelancers came to the forefront. But while the widespread use of Arab locals in covering the Middle East raises many legitimate concerns, the Palestinian propaganda machine has enjoyed tremendous success over the years hoodwinking supposedly sophisticated Western journalists. And Hezbollah appears to have done the same over the past month. In short, almost nothing that is purported to happen in the Arab world can automatically...

Thanks to some intrepid digging from commenters Lancelot and Harris at EU Referendum, another video of the events at Qana has been found. This is one that I have never seen before and really shows what was going on that day. It is truly a must see for anyone that believes that the photos at Qana were staged. It completely debunks the "our photographers do not set up photos" and "the rescuers were not holding up the children for photos" claims. Believe it or not, it is a link from Wikipedia of all places. Here's the direct link to the...

Lebanese rescuer 'Green Helmet' injured A civil defense worker who has drawn controversy for holding up the bodies of children killed in Lebanon said Tuesday he was lightly injured fighting a weekend fire sparked by an Israeli bomb. Salam Daher, dubbed the Green Helmet for the color of his civil defense headgear, said he was hit by debris Sunday when a bomb or missile fell on a building while he was helping to battle a fire at a gas station in the port city of Tyre. "I fell over when the bomb hit, and I got some scratches from debris...

Ray Robison has yet another example of staged photojournalism from Lebanon, a car with verses from the Koran strategically placed for propaganda effect: Al-AP at it again with staged photos. Ray comments: Notice this car has a wall-hanging positioned on the door. An Arabic reader tells me this board has verses from the Koran on it. Because Islam does not allow for images of the Prophet Mohammed, Muslims use verses to adorn their homes the same way some Christians use paintings of Jesus. If you want to make the argument that this wall-hanging got where it is by chance, then...

Fox is now showing the German TV video of Qana showing Green Helmet Guy posing a dead child Click here to watch the Fox News video Here is the original FR post Here is the original video on YouTube: Green Helmet the movie director [Germany's NDR busts him in the act]

The recent discovery that a Lebanese freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated pictures he took for Reuters has raised questions about the standards of photojournalism at a time of widespread digital photography. The case also increased pressure on news photo editors, who select and edit thousands of photographs under deadline pressure each day, to detect digital alterations. "The Soviets had to have a whole department to doctor pictures," said David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair and a former director of photography for Life magazine. "Now all it takes is a swipe of a mouse, and the kid down the...

AP Circles the Wagons Around Green Helmet Guy It’s utterly surreal. The Associated Press does a full court press, supporting the man they now call Salam Daher with a multimedia presentation packed full of distortions and outright lies: A Grueling Task in Lebanon. Watch the AP presentation here: A Grueling Task in Lebanon

Kopel: Were front-page photos staged? Images from Qana raise issue of whether media were manipulated. If you see a news photograph of the war in Lebanon, shot from within Hezbollah territory, can you be confident the picture and caption are accurate? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Earlier this week, Reuters fired photographer Adnan Hajj and withdrew his portfolio of 920 pictures after Little Green Footballs, The Jawa Report, and many other weblogs provided evidence that Hajj had used digital editing and other techniques to fake numerous photos of the Lebanon war. On July 31, the News and Post ran the...

DAY 2 - THIS IS OUR 'TOP' POST UNTIL WE GET A RESPONSE FROM AP Page views since posting: 10,411 - First posted: 7.25 PM 10 August 2006. New post underneath this one. They hunt in packs, they film in packs and they lie in packs. And their bosses, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, thousands of miles from the action, back up their lies. And the liar-in-chief is Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor for Associated Press. Unlike Reuters' who have at least admitted their photo-fraud and started their own internal investigation, Carroll's hastily-produced "rebuttal" of the staged...

At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web site www.LittleGreenFootballs.com is credited with first revealing the scandal, which has been dubbed Reutersgate, but the affair has spread far wider than the Reuters News Agency and into several of...

ATTENTION EDITORS - CAPTION CORRECTION FOR SJS01 - 05 WHICH WERE TRANSMITTED AT APPROXIMATELY 1725 GMT ON AUGUST 9, 2006. THE CAPTION INCORRECTLY STATES THE CAUSE OF DEATH. CORRECTED VERSIONS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW THIS ADVISORY. WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE CAUSED. REUTERS. A Palestinian man carries the body of three year-old Raja Abu Shaban, in Gaza August 9, 2006. The three-year-old girl who had been reported killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on Wednesday actually died of an accident, Palestinian medical workers said on Thursday. Workers at Gaza's Shifa hospital said on August 10, 2006 that the...

-Snip- As we said about the Reuters incident, media bias is a consensus, not a conspiracy. Consensus is what this apparent rash of unprofessional photography appears to be, which should remind U.S. policy-makers that active public diplomacy is indispensable as long as there are journalists who find war stories too good to check. -Snip-These new instances appear to be shoddy journalism, not propagandizing, and so their bias is inadvertent but nevertheless revealing. -Snip- Once the facts emerge in such cases, the full weight of the government's communications efforts should be made to ensure that the correct information is distributed broadly...

Warning Graphic Content Germany`s NDR presents unpublished video footage from the qana events, demasking "Green Helmet" as a cynical movie director, staging photographs with a liitle boys body. ... (more) Watch the video here Warning: It's graphic.

LGF: “Fauxtography” is born Slublog: Toys in all the right places Extreme Makeover Beirut Edition Allah Pundit * Lebanese pieta * Gway Pundit Ynetnews on AP photos Watch the Video

Media Bias: Need a little anti-war, anti-Semitic buck-up? Try some Reuters coverage. The British news outlet will be only too happy to oblige. Over the weekend, a Reuters photographer was caught trying to make one of Israel's defensive attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon look much more devastating than it was. The photo was eventually withdrawn and the photographer ostensibly fired. The photo, an image of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, had apparently been altered to give the effect that the smoke was thicker and the damage worse than it was. The doctored version, credited to Adnan Hajj,...

The Passion of the Toys In Platoon, Oliver Stone said the first casualty of war is innocence. He was wrong. As the photos here show, the first casualties of war are...the symbols of innocence. And photographers from Reuters and the AP just happened upon many of these perfectly placed symbols of war's horrors. Ben Curtis, AP Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Issam Kobeisi, Reuters Mohamed Azakir, Reuters This last one is the only one that seems...untouched. Feel the pathos. Mourn for these oh-so-photogenic and suspiciously dust-free trinkets of childhood. Just don't ask any questions about their...

Michelle recaps the Hajj/Reuters affair along with great examples of the doctored and staged photos. A must see. Click here to watch the videoA must watch

I don't know if this has been brought to anyone's attention yet, but in a quick search of the authenticated Reuters photographs attributed to Adnan Hajj, I found the following two. One is from July 24 of a bombed out area in Beirut, with a clearly identifiable building in a prominent part of the shot. The second is of the exact same area, same buildings, same condition, with a woman walking past "a building flattened during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs August 5, 2006." JOHN adds: Another example of the same phenomenon--not an identical photo, but two...

The interesting thing about the scandal surrounding the use of fake photoshopped pictures from the fighting in Lebanon is that it is BIG NEWS everywhere EXCEPT in the Lamestream Media where there is barely a mention of it. On the Web, TECHNORATI shows "Reuters" as the #1 search item, "Lebanon" as #2, and Reuters fake photo photographer, "Adnan Hajj" at #3. So why the disconnect? One might as well ask why newspaper circulation is plummeting or why Network News viewership is steadily declining. In fact, this fake photo story probably wouldn't have even become big news had it not...

LONDON, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah. Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work. "There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," Szlukovenyi said in a statement. "Reuters...

Though I am five thousand miles away, I think that I can detect the vibrations emanating from West Norwood Cemetery in London. For surely Paul Julius Reuter, the German rabbi’s son who founded the Reuters News Agency a century and a half ago, is spinning in his grave. No other news agency can match the history or romance of Reuters, dating as it does to the pre-telegraphy era, when Reuter employed carrier pigeons to ferry stock price information between Aachen, Germany and Brussels. Hollywood even made a highly-regarded biopic in 1940, Message from Reuters, starring Edward G. Robinson as the...

Fox News just reported that Reuters admits second photo was doctored. Here's the image:

Another photo by Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj has been shown to be doctored. The photo, which proports to be of an Israeli F-16 firing missiles on Lebanon has been doctored to make the photo seem more sensational. Here is the original Reuters photo along with its caption.

LONDON, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Reuters, the global news and information agency, told a freelance Lebanese photographer on Sunday it would not use any more of his pictures after he doctored an image of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on Beirut. The photograph by Adnan Hajj, which was published on news Web sites on Saturday, showed thick black smoke rising above buildings in the Lebanese capital after an Israeli air raid in the war with the Shi'ite Islamic group Hizbollah, now in its fourth week. Reuters withdrew the doctored image on Sunday and replaced it with the unaltered...

Saudis, with Pakistani help, working on nuclear programme Tue Mar 28, 5:37 PM ET Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear programme, with help from Pakistani experts, a German magazine reports in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.The German magazine Cicero says that during the Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia in aircraft laid on by the oil-rich kingdom.Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them took the opportunity to "disappear" from their hotel rooms, sometimes for up to three weeks, it quoted German security...

Rescue teams scoured the Red Sea for survivors Saturday after an Egyptian ferry sank, leaving more than 1,000 people dead or missing in one of the worst maritime tragedies in years, as the rescued spoke of a fire on board the ill-equipped vessel. "Why didn't the crew get it under control?" asked one former passenger hospitalized at this Red Sea port, after survivors said the blaze had raged for at least three hours before the ship went down. The owners of the ship said between 300 and 400 of the more than 1,400 people on board had been rescued...

The early morning news anchor on CBS in Boston read a breaking news report, just off the wires, that a Red Sea cruise ship with 1300 people had vanished off radar....

LOS ANGELES RADIO STATION SQUARES-OFF WITH MUSLIM GROUP Mon Jan 30 2006 10:10:49 ET Los Angeles's top talkradio station is under fire from a Muslim civil liberties group because of comments made earlier this month by morning man Bill Handel. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has demanded an apology from Handel for making fun of a stampede that killed hundreds of Muslims during an annual pilgrimage. But the station and Handel are set to fire back, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. Handel will apologize IF the Council on American-Islamic Relations: 1) Decries all acts of terror (described specifically, not generally)...

LOS ANGELES RADIO STATION SQUARES-OFF WITH MUSLIM GROUP Mon Jan 30 2006 10:10:49 ET Los Angeles's top talkradio station is under fire from a Muslim civil liberties group because of comments made earlier this month by morning man Bill Handel. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has demanded an apology from Handel for making fun of a stampede that killed hundreds of Muslims during an annual pilgrimage. But the station and Handel are set to fire back, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. Handel will apologize IF the Council on American-Islamic Relations: 1) Decries all acts of terror (described specifically, not generally)...