MY SAY: PUTTING CHILDREN FIRST….IN THE LINE OF MEDIA FIRE
There is an iconic picture of a child, a young boy, terrified, holding his hands up as armed Nazis surround and round up the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Pictures of children who are injured or at risk evoke a special horror among decent people.
Indecent journalists exploit and stage such photographs to further bias and political agenda. A recent Time magazine cover is an example. In Gaza, Hamas paid the grieving family of a dead baby, Layla al-Ghandour to use her photo to blame Israeli troops who fired on violent “demonstrators” along the Gaza border with Israel.
Nothing is new here.
In August of 1982 during the first Lebanon/Israel War, front pages and television footage were flooded with pictures of a Lebanese baby with bandages covering her body. The headlines and networks screamed: “ A baby who lost both arms was severely burned as a result of a bomb dropped by and Israeli plane.”
Then U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, by every measure a decent and fair man, declared after being shown the photograph and headline: “The symbol of this war is a baby whose arms have been amputated.”
Harsh words indeed, but totally wrong. The baby, it was soon disclosed, had not lost any limbs nor suffered severe burns. In fact, the light injuries were sustained from a shell misfired by the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Many years later, following the terrorist spree that segued the Oslo Agreement, the mainstream media failed to notice or record photos of mangled baby strollers or the blood soaked sheets of a crib in Israel.
Telling truth to biased journalists is akin to casting pearls before swine. rsk
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