Five Broken Cameras? Actually, Five Perfectly Functioning Cameras

Uri Heitner..
Israel Hayom..
26 February '13..

This is a scene worthy of a movie: A man of Middle Eastern appearance steps onto a bus. The camera focuses on his face. He utters a sentence that reveals his Arabic accent. Suddenly, the driver stands up from his chair, grabs the man, ejects him forcefully from the bus and shuts the swinging doors behind him. Cut.

This kind of scene has the potential to teach audiences about the racism that permeates Israeli society, using the driver's actions, throwing a man off his bus just because of his ethnic background — just because he is Arab — as the means to convey the lesson. But what would have happened if just seconds after the cut, the man who was thrown off of the bus detonated an explosive belt? It would turn out that the driver had identified a suicide bomber, prevented a terrorist attack and saved the lives of dozens of passengers.

And that is how you make a documentary, calculating where to "zoom" and when to "cut." That's what it's all about. Whether you're using one functioning camera or five broken ones, the technical devices matter less than the director's decision-making process. The director's decisions express his or her agenda. If the director wants to represent Israeli society as a racist one, then he or she can do that by splicing the picture from the larger context — namely, the context that revealed a racist terrorist attack against Israelis and against Jews, and which was averted thanks to the driver's ingenuity. Over the years, there have been numerous bus drivers who have succeeded in staving off terrorist attacks and saving lives, just as described. Unfortunately, in many cases, this was not how things ended. For a long time, the conversation steered toward the topic of "exploding buses," but the truth is that it wasn't the buses that exploded. Rather, it was people who turned themselves into booby-traps and blew themselves up, hoping to slaughter as many Jews as possible in buses, malls and nightclubs.

The wave of suicide attacks that washed over Israel in the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century expressed hope, not despair. The leading sentiment among Palestinians was that they had found the ultimate war doctrine, one that the enemy could not cope with, and one that would exhaust, break, crush and defeat the toughness of Israeli society.

Santa's Image Problem

Honest Reporting/Backspin

27 December 09

The Palestinians hijacked Mickey Mouse. Is it any surprise they're creating not-so-jolly image problems for Santa too? Check out the latest photo stunt (via Gateway Pundit) which Reuters fell for.

A Palestinian demonstrator in a Santa Claus costume throws a stone at Israeli troops during a protest against the controversial Israeli barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin near Ramallah December 25, 2009. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

What next? Viktor the Viking, Florida's Albert the Gator and, -- perish the thought -- Hogettes showing up for Bilin's manufactured dissent?

Related Reading: Photo-Ops are Child's Play

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A Third Intifada, of What Nature?

Tamar Sternthal
Snapshots/CAMERA
22 November 09

Reading Jack Khoury in Ha'aretz today, one would think that Mahmoud Abbas and senior Fatah officials have launched a campaign to advocate for a third, nonviolent intifada. Indeed, the headline and sub-headline, on page 2, read:

Abbas promotes 'popular resistance' to occupation, such as Bil'in protests

Palestinian president agrees to new intifada as long as it is not violent

The article notes that in a BBC interview [BBC Arabic, on Thursday, Nov. 19], Abbas said:

There is the armed struggle and I am against that because it will only bring destruction and devastation to the Palestinian people, which the last war in Gaza proved

Likewise, further along the article states:

Abbas' statements are in the context of recent statements by senior Fatah officials in the West Bank on the possibility of a third intifada as a response to the failure of the peace process and what they call Israel's rejectionism. In an interview with the Nazareth-based newspaper Hadith al-Nas, senior Fatah officials said Fatah wants to implement resolutions made at the Fatah convention in Bethlehem last summer. One senior official said "We want thousands of Palestinians to demonstrate daily near the settlements of the occupation, carrying out a human siege and calling for the end of the occupation," one senior official said.

However unlike the previous intifada, the movement will not endorse an armed struggle or the use of firearms, the official added.

And what is one supposed to make of the context of eight recent Arabic statements in favor of armed conflict uttered by various Fatah officials, including Abbas himself, and distributed in English in Friday by MEMRI ("Palestinian Officials Threaten to Renew Armed Struggle, Launch Third Intifada")?

From MEMRI we learn that a week before his BBC interview, Abbas stated at a rally marking the five-year anniversary of Arafat's death:

"We will continue [Arafat's] long and exhausting struggle [that was] fraught with blood, sweat, and tears. The road [we are traveling] today is anchored in a noble heritage of struggle that we built with brave hands, an enlightened mind, and a national thinking [rooted in] long experience. We combined armed struggle with political activity. Our guns were not the guns of highway robbers. They were political guns [promoting] a noble goal." [Al Ayyam, Nov. 12, 2009]

Other statements in support of armed violence are voiced by Nabil Sha'ath, Amin Maqboul, Marwan Al-Barghouti, Hafez Al-Barghouti, among others.

Beyond cherry-picking quotes and ignoring contrary statements, Ha'aretz is also at fault for promoting the falsehood that Bil'in protests are nonviolent and for not clarifying that resolutions passed at the Fatah convention last summer do call for violence.

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