Hezbollywood

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"Hezbollywood" is a meme popularized by a number of website pundits meant to suggest that Hezbollah and the media were artificially inflating the number of civilian deaths resulting from the attack on Lebanon by Israel in July of 2006 after a pair of Israeli soldiers were taken by militants.

Following the Israeli air raid on the southern Lebanese town of Qana in late July of 2006, a number of mostly right-wing bloggers began to speculate that the photos and coverage coming out of Lebanon were more hype than actual depictions of what was happening on the ground. Death tolls were second guessed, photo time stamps were questioned and speculation that people were staging scenes of carnage was rife. Two photos taken by Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj were singled out as proof of fakery perpetuated by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah with help from members of the press.

Both were taken in Beirut.

The one most often cited involves an obviously altered skyline and black smoke plumes. Bloggers cliamed this image in particular was proof that other images, such as those taken in Qana. were likely faked as well. The fervor reached such a level that AFP, Reuters and the Associated Press felt the need to make public statements in defense of their work. One website, Israel Insider, apparently coined the phrase "Hezbollywood." It was used at the top of an article by Reuven Koret. It was immediately adopted by several other bloggers around the internet in their own writings.

I'm always fascinated with the birth of a meme. A new one recently surfaced amid the vitriolic rhetoric that gets dished out by the neoconservative punditry of the Internet: "Hezbollywood." Google it and be in awe of its (as of this writing) 131,000 results. I'm almost surprised that Google even bothers to ask, "Did you mean: Hollywood?"
... Of course not. Right now, right-wing word herders are singing "Hooray For Hezbollywood!" And why not? In one simple word, they can summarize an entire paranoia. ...
... There are literally thousands of images being made of the destruction in Lebanon by hundreds of photographers. They're with news agencies or are freelancers and individual Lebanese civilians who happen to have a camera handy. If this accusation were true, Hezbollah would have to be working on a massive scale in an effort that would require thousands of highly trained media- and computer-savvy technicians. It would be a special effects team that would make George Lucas jealous. And the idea ignores the reality that Hezbollah had slightly more pressing matters to attend to at the time, what with missile attacks and a ground war going on. ...

The creation of "Hezbollywood" from Electronic Intifada  LYONS

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Attack on Qana

What happened behind the scenes at Qana?

As best we can, we have pieced together the jumble of evidence which surrounded the production of the iconic photographs which were published around the world, and put them in perspective. Many of the photographs have been used before, some are new to this site and others are video "grabs". But it is not the pictures, per se, that tell the story, so much as their ordering and analysis. Make of this what you will, but I can assure you that you are not supposed to see them in this light.
The "story" - for that is what it is - starts here, in the wreckage of the buiding at Qana which is performing the temporary and unwholesome function of a morgue. It is from here, that the bodies are extracted, the essential props of this theatre. And standing on the left of the frame is one of the two star characters of our story, Mr "White Tee-Shirt". With equal accuracy, though, we could call him Mr Hezbollah, for reasons which will become apparent.
Mr "White Tee-shirt" is billed variously as a "rescuer" and "local resident". We see him in many pictures, very much at the centre of events. He has free, unchallenged access to the collapsed building, even though he is not in uniform and has no apparent formal role. But, although we see a lot of him, there is not a single picture of him digging or moving rubble. More often, he is standing around watching, like he is doing here. But for what?
Well, here he is again, this time inside the wreckage and again he is not actually doing anything but watching. But it seems he is doing more than that. We get the distinct impression he is looking for particular bodies. The one in the arms of the Red Cross worker, the body of the "girl in orange" is not one of them. Mr "White Tee-shirt takes no interest in it and shows no emotion.

Qana – the director’s cut from EU Referendum  RAENORTH

It was the shot seen round the world: shocking, disturbing, heartrending and intentionally so. [Graphic content appears below and in links.] A man dressed up as a rescue worker held up a dead infant, purportedly killed in the basement of a building that supposedly collapsed after it was allegedly hit by Israeli ordnance.
The AP wire story begins: "Abu Shadi Jradi pulled bodies out of wreckage for hours - two toddler girls wearing tiny gold earrings, a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck [sic]. Somewhere in the middle, Jradi slumped beneath a tree and wept." Since we have a picture of this man pulling the small boy out, it is quite clear that Mr. Jradi is the "Man with the Green Helmet."

Hezbollywood Horror: "Civil Defense Worker" doubles as Traveling Mortician from Israeli Insider  Reuven Koret

Links are in chronological order.

Chronology from FreeRepublic  PajamaTruthMafia

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Beirut Photos

Chronology from FreeRepublic  PajamaTruthMafia

If a regular old picture is worth a thousand words, how much does a digitally altered image fetch on the international market today? I ask because a lot of words have been spilled over one digitally altered photograph in particular.
I've spent a great deal of time as of late poring over a pair of images, both allegedly derived from a single click of the shutter by Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj on August 5. Both depict a Beirut skyline filled with black smoke after an Israeli bombardment. The one cited as the original unedited version shows a jet blue sky over white, sun-soaked buildings from which inky smoke plumes rise. In the obviously altered second photo, the sky is washed out and pale, the skyline is noticeable higher in the frame, the buildings are darker and have strangely sharpened edges, and the cloud plumes have been digitally cloned with no dramatic or even realistic effect. Smoke just doesn't look like that.
Because of this and one other photo attributed to Hajj - one containing a suspected alteration to the weapons being fired by an Israeli jet - he no longer works for Reuters, and the news agency has pulled from circulation 920 other photos he has taken for for the agency, though it said there is no indication those were tampered with.
Of course, altering the content of an image meant to depict actual events is unethical. And until people hear from this particular photographer himself, we won't know the full story. My own attempts to gain further information for the Reuters news agency were met without response. In the meantime, the rampant speculation about staged and altered photographs in Lebanon has its poster child. Bloggers on conservative, pro-war websites like Little Green Footballs, IsraPundit, The Jawa Report and others had already been floating test conspiracies about the aftermath of a July 30 Israeli air raid on a Qana apartment building being staged. Hajj had taken photos there as well. When Reuters issued a "Photo Kill" announcement for that one Beirut skyline shot, these and other pajama pundits seized on it. Not only did they suggest that Hajj's Qana photos might also be false, but that other photographers' work also was suspect, and well, maybe there was no massacre of civilians at all.

Digitally Erasing a Massacre from CounterPunch  LYONS

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Attack on Lebanese Ambulances

It's bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance.
Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark.
But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists.
It is this refusal to admit that suggests there was an agenda, after all, to so much of the hysterical reporting of the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah.
No wonder Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer damned that coverage at a conference in Brisbane this week of Australian newspaper publishers: "What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon."

Not the hole truth from Herald Sun (Australia)  

In short, much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems to have been either staged or fabricated. The big question is why the western media would perpetrate such institutionalised mendacity. Many ancillary reasons come to mind. There is the reliance upon corrupted news and picture agencies which employ Arab propagandists as stringers and cameramen. There is the herd mentality of the media which decides collectively what the story is. There is the journalists’ fear for their personal safety if they report the truth about terrorist outfits. There is the difficulty of discovering the truth from undemocratic regimes and terrorist organisations. There is the language barrier; there is professional laziness; there is the naïve inability to acknowledge the depths of human evil and depravity; there is the moral inversion of the left which believes that western truth-tellers automatically tell lies, while third world liars automatically tell the truth.
But the big answer is that the western media transmit the lies of Hezbollah because they want to believe them. And that’s because the Big Lie these media tell — and have themselves been told — about Israel and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status of unchallengeable truth. The plain fact is that western journalists were sent to cover the war being waged against Israel from Lebanon as a war being waged by Israel against Lebanon. And that’s because that’s how editors think of the Middle East: that the whole ghastly mess is driven by Israel’s actions, and that therefore it is only Israel’s aggression which is the story to be covered. Thus history is inverted, half a century of Jewish victimisation is erased from public consciousness, victims are turned into aggressors and genocidal mass murderers turned into victims, and ignorance and prejudice stalk England’s once staunch and stalwart land.
That’s why the fact that hundreds of thousands of refugees from the north of Israel fled to the shelter of strangers in the south; that within one third of Israel, those too poor or old or handicapped or disadvantaged to seek refuge elsewhere were forced to live in shelters for a month in great hardship; that the entire economy of northern Israel was effectively shut down for a month; that thousands of rockets were fired at northern Israel, hundreds every day, many times more than were daily fired at Britain during the Blitz — that’s why none of this was reported in Britain (where as a result such facts, when now related, are received with open-mouthed astonishment) because journalists were told to ignore it all since that wasn’t the story their editors wanted. Israel’s victimisation simply was not, could not, be the story. The only story was Israel’s aggression. But that story is a Big Lie. So a host of lies were transmitted to support it.

The Media War Against Israel from   Melanie Phillips

The 33-day Israeli military operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon is rife with examples of how disinformation has become "mainstream news." One of the most egregious examples was the claim, widely circulated in the Western media, that IDF aircraft intentionally targeted a Red Cross convoy of clearly marked ambulances in Qana on July 23. Though photographs clearly show no such attack occurred, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch used published accounts of the attack as evidence of Israeli "war crimes." Bloggers -- like Powerline and Zombietime -- who reported this incident as disinformation were dismissed as "right-wing extremists."

Masters of Manipulation from Washington Times  Oliver North

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