My mother used to tell a story about how when she was in college, she believed that she had a professor who liked her so much that her papers were never checked, but just given an “A” automatically. Of course, that’s a better problem than a teacher automatically failing a student without looking at their work, but it bothered her all the same.
To prove it, one day she submitted a paper with a full typewritten page from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” inserted in the middle. The teacher didn’t look, and my mother got an A.
I learned from this experience, and from my parents in general, the importance of personal integrity. I apply that to all facets of my life, and I measure others by theirs, or lack thereof. As I age, I see and am more critical of others falling short of my standard, but especially those in positions of public influence and trust.
No more glaring example exists today than the media, the polarization of which would make Walter Cronkite turn in his grave. And no more glaring example of lack of integrity in the media exists than when it comes to Israel. One could get a PhD in that without having to work very hard, but recently we have seen that in spades.
There’s hardly a media outlet that didn’t plaster images and reports of allegedly starving Palestinian Arab children from Gaza going viral at the speed of light globally before being debunked and proven that the children in the images were suffering from congenital illnesses that had nothing to do with allegations of “famine” in Gaza. Corrections barely made the light of day.
One has to ask if there were, in fact, starvation and famine, and increased death tolls reported by Hamas due to these, why would they need to use fake images? Where are the pictures of the real starving children? Yet media outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, Guardian, Sky News, among others, didn’t hesitate to use these without checking a single fact, or the source of the “reports.” My mother, who was a talented writer, would be screaming over the lack of integrity in this poor excuse for journalism.
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Another fake image that made it to the cover of Time Magazine (still publishing and trying to stay relevant) entitled “The Gaza Tragedy,” showed a photo of Gazan children holding empty pots and buckets. Without any words, Time depicted either: A. starving children, or B. that they had just dropped off their laundry. Of course, the intent was to depict starvation, and just like my mother’s teacher, nobody needed to turn a page before their opinion was cast.
But that image was not only determined to be a fake, it was staged. It’s the world’s first Fake Famine. Subsequent pictures have surfaced by photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, capturing the shot. All part of the lies of what’s become Pallywood, a key element of the propaganda arm of Hamas and others who will not only use every opportunity to criticize Israel for anything, but they will even fake it for the gullible media rushing to publish it. Their readers and viewers lap it up.
One could imagine the scene today with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal from “When Harry Met Sally,” where she (the media) fakes it so well that he (the public) cannot tell the difference between what is real and fake.
A rare media exception are German-language papers, BILD and Süddeutsche Zeitung, which not only caught and called out the journalistic fraud, and will be ‘having none of what the rest of the media is having,’ but they even cut ties with and will not use Palestinian Arab photographer Fteiha.
The same week that the media was gleefully faking it to the whole world, Hamas released videos of two Israeli hostages in Gaza who are actually starving to death. Pictures and video of skin-on-bones Evityar David digging his own grave, and emaciated Rom Braslavski breaking down, have gone viral for those who care, proving Hamas’s atrocities and inhumanity beyond any reasonable doubt. The problem is the faking-it world media scarcely reported on this actual starvation, Hamas’s own shameless filming and releasing the images, and that to prove these atrocities, no fake pictures were needed.
It doesn’t take a Pulitzer Prize winner to connect the dots between the fantasy of Carroll’s “Alice” and the Palestinian fantasy where anything, no matter how ridiculous, is accepted as reality.
Prophetically, Lewis Carroll expressed notions that could be applied to Gaza and the Fake Famine. Writing 150 years ago, he wrote words that could be applied nefariously today to Hamas and Gaza’s playbook, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.” Indeed, Carroll depicts the scene a group of terrorists sitting around the breakfast table dipping their pita in humus, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
As a writer himself, Carroll understood what the media would do in the voice of his character, the Queen of Hearts. “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
Between Alice, Harry, Sally, and Hamas, the world is filled with lots of fakes. The problem is that the media that races down the dark rabbit hole to publish defamatory, libelous images depicting a Fake Famine in Gaza should at least try to hold itself up to a standard that has the appearance of objectivity. There should be an effort to scrutinize reports and images before rushing to publish them, as well as question the sources. Objectivity requires covering all angles of a story, including, in this case, the images and condition of the 50 hostages Hamas has in captivity. This is not only an actual atrocity, but there’s even a parallel between alleged and actual starvation.
Barring actual fairness and objectivity, those who care about the truth and integrity should figuratively apply the Queen of Hearts' sentence, “Off with their heads,” to how we consume news of most anything.
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