Free Republic

What are we seeing when we watch events from the Middle East on our television screens? Is it news or is it terrorist theater? Let us observe two media events which occurred on Sunday in Gaza. Sunday afternoon released hostages and Fox News journalists Steven Centanni and Olaf Wiig spoke before the cameras. The fact of their release and their statements were reported by more than 1,000 news organizations throughout the world. At the press conference, Centanni and Wiig, who were forced by their Palestinian captors to convert to Islam, praised the Palestinians. Centanni said, "I just hope this never...

Don’t apologize. Don’t express sincere regrets. Don’t promise to investigate. Don’t fall into that trap. Apologize in private, in the privacy of the heart, apologize in prayer, ask for divine forgiveness, but don’t apologize to public opinion. Don’t fall into the traps set by vicious jihadis and relayed by unscrupulous media. Investigate, hold to the highest standards, but don’t promise to investigate. Don’t make promises to the cynical birds of ill augur perched on the fringes of the battle, squawking accusations against your brave hearts. Don’t say “we will investigate” because they translate it to “guilty as charged.” Did they...

Need some help here. A lot of us have been following the apparent staging of events in South Lebanon by Hezbollah. Elsewhere, I've gotten into arguments, mostly with a bunch of Euros, who are claiming the "Green Helmet Guy", aka Abu Chadi the Mortician, is just "getting the word out from their side of the argument". Any resources out there showing him unloading and "planting" corpses from his refrigerated truck ??? These Eurotrash apparentely can't add two and two together, so to convince, I need more iron-clad proof. Anyone know of any such proof ???

It was the shot seen round the world: shocking, disturbing, heartrending and intentionally so. [Graphic content appears below and in links.] A man dressed up as a rescue worker held up a dead infant, purportedly killed in the basement of a building that supposedly collapsed after it was allegedly hit by Israeli ordnance. The AP wire story begins: "Abu Shadi Jradi pulled bodies out of wreckage for hours - two toddler girls wearing tiny gold earrings, a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck [sic]. Somewhere in the middle, Jradi slumped beneath a tree and wept."...

Green Helmet Guy, the “rescue worker” who posed for photo ops with children’s bodies in Qana, is interviewed by Al Jazeera in Arabic, in a video clip at YouTube: UPDATE at 8/2/06 8:48:14 am: Watch in the background at around the 1:20 mark, as rescue workers carrying a stretcher pause and set it on the ground, to allow photographers to get in position and take pictures.

Watching the anguish in Lebanon following an Israeli airstrike that killed at least 37 children in Qana Sunday put me in mind of Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her children several years ago. The Smith parallel requires a small stretch of free association, so bear with me. You'll recall that Smith killed her children, then tried to blame a fictional villain. After allowing her car to slip into a lake with the boys strapped to their car seats inside Smith claimed the children had been kidnapped. Her infertile imagination provided a racist cliche: a black man did...

UK, US weblogs question inconsistencies in photographs of Qana attack flooding international media A number of web logs in the United States and Britain have claimed that a man who appeared in much of the international press's coverage of the Qana bombing lifting children's bodies may have been a Hizbullah agent who staged photo-ops for the international media. Under the headline "milking it?" the EU Referendum blog, a British website dedicated to taking the UK out of the European Union, states: "Certainly, the photographs are distressing, and indeed they are meant to be." The blog focuses in on a man...

Was Qana Staged? Cont'd [Jonah Goldberg] A giant banner denouncing Rice and the "Qana massacre" might have been made a bit too quickly. I don't want to get too far out ahead on this, but I know we've got a zillion printer-type folks among our readers. Do you guys think such a banner could be made in 2-4 hours (particularly in a supposedly war-ravaged area)?Update: From a reader: "Do you guys think such a banner could be made in 2-4 hours (particularly in a supposedly war-ravaged area)?" Heck no. A designer could throw it together in probably 15 minutes or...

It was to be a perfect Hollywood ending for Hezbollah. Just as the Israeli bombing of the village of Qana in 1996 brought a premature end to Israel's "Grapes of Wrath operation," so too a sequel of Qana II could change, once and for all, the direction of Israel's current summer blockbuster, "Change of Direction." Ten years ago, world condemnation of an errant Israeli shell that hit a civilian compound forced then-PM Shimon Peres to curtail the offensive against terror bases. The setting was also perfect: Kana was again being used as a primary site for launching rockets against Israeli...