Saturday, January 26, 2008
The post below, Darkness at Noon -- MSM Plays Along with Hamas Photo Staging, has really gone viral, thanks in no small part to the push given it yesterday by Scott Johnson at Powerline. Thank you to Scott and to all those who have linked (you know who you are).
Today, Scott writes in the Weekly Standard about another case of the media playing along with another bit of Pallywood stage-play: He Didn't Give at the Office - Remember that picture of Yasser Arafat, blood donor?. Scott starts with the admission of Charles Enderlin made at his recent Boston appearance that the press went along with it, and looks at the incident, the photos, who took them and the way it was used and portrayed.
...Two photographs of a reclining Arafat are credited to the AP's Adel Hana. Both photos ran with a caption that reads like a press release: "Arafat, along with hundreds of Palestinians, participated in a blood drive for the victims of the deadly airline hijackings in the United States, which he condemned as a 'horrible attack.'" We all know how much Arafat disliked horrible attacks by Arab terrorists.
In neither photo is a needle in evidence. In the first AP photo, Arafat is prostrate. His blood has not yet been drawn and no blood is in evidence. Rather, Arafat stares warily at the tourniquet placed around his bare arm. The donation is about to be made. A nurse with a head scarf is about to search for the chairman's vein, Arafat looking on at his arm.
In the other AP photo, Arafat has apparently given his blood. The nurse with the head scarf is nowhere to be seen. In her place, a kneeling male medical official with his back to the camera jointly holds a nearly bursting bag of blood together with a uniformed security officer. With Enderlin's gloss, the photo takes on a comic aspect. Heavy lifting is required; it takes two hands to hold all the blood donated by the chairman to the beloved American people!...
[h/t: Democracy Project]
