I suspect…
…that this sort of thing is rife in the reporting of the action in Egypt right now.
Watch the video:
Someone just sent me a short video clip with some footage by AlJazeera that was taken inside the mosque yesterday that should be noted.
In the video below, you can see what is supposed to be an “victim” of the violence laying on the mosque floor either unconscious or dead. And yet when the medic lifts his bloodied shirt and mistakenly shows that the man has no injuries, the “unconscious” man quickly uses his opposite leg to knock the medic’s arm away from his shirt.
I have no idea what the Arabic writing at the end signifies. But the footage (literally: watch his foot) speaks for itself.
Over the past decade I have come to be deeply suspicious of all photography and reports that originate in Middle Eastern countries in which Islamists are engaged in promulgating news of casualties to the West. The al Durah tape controversy (and Richard Landes’ work exposing Pallywood), discussed at great length on this blog, was a big part of it. Another was the deception in Jenin and the media’s falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
Of course, this does not mean there are no casualties in Egypt now, nor does it mean that many innocent people aren’t being killed by the police. It does mean we need to know how many, who they are, and who is doing the instigating, and that we may never know because deception is endemic. Note for example this:
A few hours later the police did move in after they came under fire from inside the mosque. Three Reuters reporters were on the scene to provide a first-hand account of what exactly happened.
Amazingly, they recounted in a subsequent article that what appeared to be the the wife of the known Muslim Brotherhood leader was giving the go-ahead to gunmen inside the mosque to begin opening fire on the police below that were trying to negotiate their exit under safe conduct.
It is a time-tested technique: to set up a situation and then purposely provoke the authorities into firing back and creating casualties and provide photo-ops to claim victimhood, or even to fake wounds to the same purpose. If you don’t care how many of your people get killed in the process (and even welcome the creation of a certain number of martyrs), it’s brilliant.
Why shouldn’t they?
The propaganda campaign against US-led peace operations efforts in Iraq was immensely successful and provided definitive proof the strategy works. More, many in the West not only believed the propaganda, they amplified, augmented, and propagated the propaganda far beyond the reach of the original propagandists.
They’re not stupid in Egypt. They simply using what’s proven to work.
Note, while President Bush ordered the COIN ‘surge’ in Iraq in the face of tremendous political pressure to abandon the Iraqi people to the terrorists, coming from within even his own administration, and the COIN ‘surge’ resulted in a rout of the terrorists on the ground in Iraq, the propaganda campaign was still a long-term take-away success for the terrorists.
The Obama administration makes decisions on the premise that Bush foreign policy was wrong and to be avoided. And that premise is based largely on the terrorist propaganda campaign, not on results, rationale, nor a rational matching of means to ends.
That the Brotherhood will lie and fabricate incidents, injuries and deaths is a given. They would not do so however, if a compliant media had not repeatedly and consistently demonstrated a willingness to collude in the creation of the Big Lie.
The Middle East, land of miracles. The dead rise, the maimed are healed, and it’s always, always Bush’s fault. Whoops a whole bunch Egyptians didn’t get the Bush’s fault narrative. Kerry get out there, find and fix that peace process. While the region burns and is on the edge of nuke lobbing, amazing!
The mistake the MB is making with the whole victimhood approach, assuming the intended audience is the BO administration, is that he’s watching- the busy golf schedule combined with his laser like focus on the economy, not to mention the dire problems facing our country – like not enforcing laws that disproportionately affect minorities who break them, providing amnesty for people who enter the country illegally, using the NSA to spy on political enemies, using the IRS like Hitler’s SS, scuttling our nuclear weapons, suppressing an energy boom with the EPA, saving the planet from global warming, etc..well that’s just naming a few of his true interests. Notice how all all of them involve something to be gained for himself, directly or indirectly.
Which means the MB is shit-out-of-luck If they think he gives a hoot about a few dead Muslim Bros. They’re presuming he has the time or the interest in their nothing-in-it-for-Obama problems.
southpaw:
I do not believe Obama is their intended audience. They either know he supports them, or consider him irrelevant and impotent.
Their audience, IMHO, is Western Europe and the international community, leftists and other useful idiots in America, as well as jihadis and prospective jihadis in the Muslim world.
The same group the Iranian mullahs went for back in 1979.
Neo:
I think the MBros. have written off Obama as basically impotent and unable to make a decision, especially now that things have been blowing up in his face.
I would be tempted to guess that he’s physically impotent too.
But I’m cynical about Metro Men(sic).
The Egyptian military knows what the MB are capable of as do many Egyptians. This may be the last chance to crush the MB. I hope the military takes it. Obama and Kerry should look the other way.
Meanwhile we should build the Keystone pipeline and open federal lands to drilling.
Their audience, IMHO, is Western Europe and the international community, leftists and other useful idiots in America, as well as jihadis and prospective jihadis in the Muslim world.
The same group the Iranian mullahs went for back in 1979.
It will probably work with the jihadis, but I don’t think the other groups because there’s no evil Shah backed by the evil U.S. in this. And no Israel.
This reminds me of the fake Paleo funeral (goog Fake Palestinian Funeral) a few years back.
The military cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood is akin to as if the German military rose up against Hitler in the 30’s. Military juntas aren’t always a bad thing.
Obama embraced the Brotherhood against all advice. The two of them are Soul Brothers-in-Arms anyway.
He is a craven tyrant who thinks “De Peeple” are always somehow right in their demands for “justice”, or that he can harness that energy and ride that horse to political power.
It all depends on what is meant by “justice” though. For the Bros “justice” means killing Jews, eradicating Israel, instituting a Sharia Caliphate, and making Islam the dominant world power – as it should be if Allah is who they think he is.
Obama will take energy from wherever he thinks he can get it. He does not care about true “justice” at all. I have serious reservations whether he can spell the word let alone define it and work for it.
They have their monsters over there. We have ours here. They hide in mosques; ours hide in plain view at 1600 Penn, or the IRS Building.
Between the Muslim Brotherhood and the IRS, the difference is only in the ultimate rationale for abusing power and people.
Here’s a tip–if it’s “up close” carnage on Al Jazeera, it’s staged. And if there is an actual corpse on the screen, look for the same corpse to magically appear in multiple locations in succession.
I was always a bit puzzled by Marshall Mcluhan calling the medium of photography ‘the whorehouse without walls.’ After the exposure of Pallywood by Richard Landes it became pretty clear that the MSM was quite prepared serve us up news porn.
And how many American journalists will be lending their credibility to this sort of propaganda with Al Jazeera America? We can thank Al Gore for inviting them in through the front door.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America)
Lacune – My parents spent several months in Jerusalem in 2000 and they were shocked at the blatant lies on CNN International. They’d visit some part of the city and then later in the day see a “news” report that there was a violent incident at that same place. They and their fellow classmates each selected a person from the canned/recycled footage of these so-called incidents and would locate them with each new report. They said almost every report of these incidents was false. Again, this was not Al Jazeera, it was CNN.
Meanwhile, Putin and the Russians are siding with the Egyptian military while our bystander president is playing golf.
There were a number of photo-shopped items during the last IDF dustup with the hizzies.
Faked up an ambulance destroyed by IAF, without any holes in it, and so forth.
The ICRC took the photo off its main page “to maintain our integrity” or some such. Meaning to deny people the opportunity to look closely at it.
Some people believe this stuff and others pretend to and preach it in order to fool the gullible.
Propaganda can make perfectly good insurgents look like the dead and slaughtered. But they can’t make dead people look like perfectly good insurgents as well.
Thus the solution against propaganda is obvious. There is only one realm that propaganda can do little to zero in.
Neo writes:
“Of course, this does not mean there are no casualties in Egypt now, nor does it mean that many innocent people aren’t being killed by the police. It does mean we need to know how many, who they are, and who is doing the instigating, and that we may never know because deception is endemic.”
I do not know what “innocent” means in an area where “deception is endemic.” I am concerned that putative innocence is related to the so-called disproportionate use of force. Are innocents merely claimed non-provocateurs when deception (especially as to claimed innocence) is endemic? I am inclined to doubt that innocents are somehow just swpt up into the middle of a rioting mob or other violent endeavor.
Innocence and guilt are concepts better limited to the judicial process than to human activity writ large. We are not on trial at all moments of our lives, not in a court at least.
Don Carlos:
It depends on the conditions under which the violence occurs.
In the case of the recent violence in Egypt, there is probably some sort of hierarchy of innocence, in which the various possibilities for innocent casualties go as follows (not necessarily in any special order here):
—passers-by (probably not many of those at all)
—children purposely placed there by parents or other adults in order to draw great outrage and sympathy if hit
—people peacefully demonstrating for Morsi (the demonstrations and sit-ins had been going on for quite some time without much if any violence until recently)
—cameramen/woman and newspeople (this man, for example)
It’s impossible to not be cynical about any situation involving Egyptians, Obama and the media.
I hate to admit it, but to eradicate islamofascism in Egypt and elsewhere they would need to suffer a military defeat of the scale Nazi did. Hundred thousand must be killed and several millions imprisoned to achieve this.
“Cause pain before you injure. Injure before you maim. Maim before you kill. And if you must kill, make it a clean kill. Squeeze every drop of life from the opponent. Because life is so precious, it cannot be wasted, even in death.”
“Let him cut your skin, and you cut his flesh. Let him cut your flesh, and you cut his bones. Let him cut your bones, and you cut off his life.”
Those that refuse to adhere to such precepts, often end up like the Christians of Iraq and the Jews of Judea. Somebody’s always going to find an excuse to get em. Absent any yojimbo around.
But remember what MO told us? It was closer to the truth than anything out of Obama’s lips at least.
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/10312/barack-will-never-allow-you-go-back-your-lives-usual
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
Have we shed our cynicism yet? Have we put down our divisions yet? Have we been made to move outside our comfort zones yet?
If not… then just wait. Because they’re working on it. The Ole Grand Plan as usual for human fate.