The picture, and the thousand words it does not tell

The idolization of people like this man who tried - and in his case failed - to execute a random murder of a large number of people is a dominant feature of the Palestinian Arab narrative, along with professions of victimhood, oppression and frustrated glory.

One of yesterday's "Best Photos of the Day" at the Guardian 

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
12 February '13..

The nuances of the Arab/Israel conflict and the tsunami of Islamist terrorism that it spawned decades ago (continuing until now) are largely missed - in our opinion - in the media's coverage. Sometimes this is because of innocent motivations where the journalist or the editor or the photographer or the headline writer or the photo editor or the page composition editor or the news-reader or the expert analyst make simple mistakes or are just not careful enough with their research.

And all too often it's due to less respectable reasons.

Thanks to the fine people at CIF Watch, we have a very good illustration today of how this impacts on news coverage and the forming of public opinion.

They do a sterling job of "monitoring and combating anti-semitism and the assault on Israel's legitimacy" at the British newspaper The Guardian and at the Guardian's blog called 'Comment is Free' (hence the name "CIF Watch"). Yesterday they highlighted a picture that was part of the Guardian's "Best Photos of the Day". You can see it above.

Then the CIF Watch editors point out

"what a Guardian reader casually glancing at the Palestinian “prisoner” wouldn’t have known. A friend who’s fluent in Arabic read the poster and identified the ‘prisoner’ as Ayman Ismail Al-Sharawna. Al-Sharawna was jailed in Israel because of his involvement in a terrorist attack in May 2002, in which two Palestinians placed an explosive device near a group of civilians in Beersheba and fled the scene. Eighteen Israelis were injured in the attack. (A technical fault prevented the bomb from exploding fully.) He was sentenced to 38 years in prison, but released on October 18, 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal. On January 31, 2012, the IDF re-arrested Al-Sharawna, resident of a Palestinian town near Hebron, on suspicion of having returned to terror planning with a Hamas cell in the West Bank..."

(Continue)

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