This Ongoing War..
06 March '13..
Philippe Assouline, a freelance journalist and lawyer, has a valuable contribution to the ongoing battle against the forces of cognitive warfare in an essay published on the Huffington Post website yesterday.
From al Durah to Badawi: Lethal Journalism and Palestinian Propaganda's Manufacturing of Consent
Huffington Post | March 5, 2013
It was a defining image of the last conflagration in Gaza. Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and Egyptian prime minister Hashim Kandil held up a Palestinian child's corpse to the cameras, his face bloodied, his lifeless eyes a compelling entreaty to the world: "Will you not stand against Israel for killing this child!?"
But it wasn't Israel that murdered 4-year-old Mohammed Sadallah, it appears to have been Hamas. In a grotesque irony, one of the thousands of rockets Hamas had aimed at Israeli children reportedly landed on the 4-year-old Gazan boy instead. The Islamist group thought nothing of turning the child into a PR weapon -- and the international press obliged. That same week, Palestinian activists repeatedly tried to pass off photos of dead Arab children as Israel's doing. The photos were in fact of Syrian children massacred weeks earlier by Bashar Assad.
And this month, following unprecedented public criticism, the UN fired Kulhood Badawi, one of its senior public affairs officers in Jerusalem. Badawi had tried to peddle a photo of a girl killed in an accident in 2006 as a victim of Israel. These activists, Badawi and Hamas -- whose minister boasted in 2009 of its use of "human shields of the women, the children... to challenge the Zionist bombing machine" - assumed that the international press would simply take them at their word, as it had always done.
(Continue for full text)
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