1 Dead, 15 injured

There has been another case of Islamic murder by motor vehicle. The SF Chronicle reports:

As many as 14 people were injured this afternoon by a motorist who drove around San Francisco deliberately running them down before being arrested by police, who believe the same driver struck and killed a man earlier today in Fremont.

At least one hit-and-run victim remained in critical condition this evening.

Reports of the incidents began pouring in at 12:47 p.m., police said.

Within a half-hour, San Francisco police had cornered and arrested 29-year-old Omeed Aziz Popal, who has addresses in Ceres (Stanislaus County) and Fremont.

Authorities suspect Popal was the same driver who ran over and killed a 54-year-old man in Fremont around noon….

Mayor Gavin Newsom visited five of the victims at San Francisco General Hospital.

“This was so senseless and inexplicable,” the mayor said afterward.

Note how the Chronicle, in the case of this kind of story, carefully overlooks parallels, and fails to discern any possible religious motivation.

Gateway Pundit has a link collection.

videos

Glaciers shrinking. Cause: Global Warming.

Glaciers growing. Cause: Global Warming.

The mind frequently boggles at the mendacity of leftwing journalists. But Greg Mitchell, of Editor & Publisher, wins the blue ribbon first prize for the most insolently and shamelessly prevaricating column we’ve seen in a long time. Glenn Greenwald’s title, one is forced to observe, is in serious danger.

Mitchell has actually published an editorial in defense of the MSM and the Lebanon Fautographers. He calls the latter “brave.” (It is evidently dangerous to photograph people posing by burning garbage dumps or to use the Photoshop clone tool too much.) And he sneers at the bloggers who demonstrated many instances of fraud as “risk(ing) nothing but carpal tunnel syndrome.”

I was looking forward with interest to see if he had the unmitigated gall to try to defend any individual example of fauxtography. He wisely avoids trying in the case of Adnan Hajj; but, mirabile dictu! he does find cases he’s prepared to try to spin.

Here’s just one typical example of blog hysteria in their attacks on what some of them call “fauxtography.”

An image captured by one of The New York Times’ most acclaimed photographers, Tyler Hicks, that appeared in the paper and in a gallery at its Web site, showed a young man being pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building after the Israeli attack on Qana that killed at least 28, including 16 or more children. Eagled-eyed bloggers soon found, on other news sites, images of the same man darting about the same disaster scene, trying to rescue people.

So, in their usual manner, they put 1 and 1 together and got 2 much: One blog after another charged that this man, after doing his rescue work, was planted on the pile, as a bomb victim, by Hezbollah, probably with the cooperation of Tyler Hicks, who then sent the manipulated photo around the world. The Times, as usual, was denounced by the rightwing bloggers for pro-terrorist and/or anti-American bias.

Even the popular, non-political site Gawker joined in, under the headline, “Times War Photos Artfully Staged, Directed.”

Well, there was, indeed, something wrong with the Times presentation. On the Web, though not in print, it suggested that the man had been blasted in the Israeli attack. In fact, the Times quickly found out — and corrected its Web caption — that the man fell down and got hurt in his rescue efforts. This simple explanation for the chronology was too much for some of the bloggers who continued questioning the incident, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Others in the mainstream keep citing it too. As recently as this past Sunday, a Boston Herald editorial still had the man in the Hicks photo posing for the camera, then getting up and running around. It said the Times had “issued a correction” — without mentioning that it related to the caption about how he got hurt, not about it being a bogus photo.

But all of this was inevitable. Many bloggers appear ignorant of time-stamping and the fact that photos are often posted on Web sites out of sequence.

The Model: Gangsta Hat Guy

Pieta of Gangsta Hat Guy

Is that so? The poor chap fell down and injured himself in the course of his heroic rescue activities, knocking himself unconscious, but managing to land completely surrounded by debris, and miraculously –while falling– taking off his gangsta hat, and tucking it carefully under his arm!

Be sure to watch this video discussing the techniques of Pallywood agitprop.

Now whom do you find credible, dear readers? Greg Mitchell or Gateway Pundit who wrote the original exposé?

It should get funnier. Mitchell promises a follow-up Part II. I can’t wait.

From Second Draft: a video examining earlier Palestinian propaganda news production.

Matthew Sheffield has compiled a nice collection of links to exposés of faked photojournalism from Lebanon.

Be sure to catch the German television news magazine Zapp’s video of Green Helmet guy acting as director.

Brave insurgent defending burning Lebanon against Israeli warplanes.

But, oops! he’s really posing in front of burning garbage at the local dump.

Thomas S., an Allahpundit reader catches US News falling for a faked photo.

Michelle Malkin covers this one, and another new one which appears to incorporate an underwear model as victim.

And be sure not to miss Michelle’s latest video on the Reuters photos: Picture Kill. It offers another excellent Malkin-special summary.

This poor woman laments the destruction of her home in Southern Beirut by Israeli bombing, 22 July 2006. Reuters via Yahoo News.

And then, what do you know?

Here’s the same poor woman reacting to the destruction of her house in the suburbs of Beirut 05 August 2006. AP via Yahoo News.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence?

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Hat tip to Drinking From Home who provides close-up facial photos, demonstrating the presence of the same mark and the same scar firmly establishing the identity of the woman in both photos as the same, and who observes mildly:

Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home-owner in Beirut, or something isn’t quite right.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has another scalp to hang on his barn door, next to Dan Rather’s.

Yesterday, LGF identified Photoshop-manipulated imagery in the Reuters’ photograph of alleged “burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006.”

Charles Johnson is an experienced photographer, and knowledgeable Photoshop user, and was readily able to recognize repetitive smoke patterns produced by application of the Photoshop clone tool.

Reuters has since admitted that LGF was right, and withdrawn the photo. Interestingly, Ynet.news reports that the photographer responsible was also the source of many of the photographs from Qana, also demonstrated by bloggers (specifically by EU Referendum) to have been staged.

Score two major Blogosphere corrections of the MSM falling for Hezbollah propaganda tricks in under a week.

Thomas Lifson, at American Thinker, raises the question of the complicity of mainstream Western Press with the deliberate murder of their own people by terrorists for propaganda purposes.

Something is very, very wrong with the reporting on Qana, for the moment, the worldwide symbol of Hezbollah’s media offensive. It is already reasonably clear that major media photographers were willingly made into tools of propaganda, accomplices in the hideous desecration of corpses of children. The timing of the building collapse hours after the actual air attack raises very awkward questions. Why were women and children kept inside the building for so long? Were they murdered?

Now, the previously-announced toll of 57 appears to be as phony as the picture of the dust-covered baby with a sparking clean pacifier.

But, as Charles Johnson reports, the wire services responsible for disseminating the staged photos are refusing to admit the obvious.

Reuven Koret makes the case that the whole Qana affair was staged.

On the morning of July 30, according to the IDF, the air force came in three waves. In the first, between midnight and one in the morning, there was a strike at or near the building that eventually collapsed.

Brent Sadler of CNN reports that the Israeli ordnance did not even hit the building but landed “20 or 30 meters” from the structure.

There was a second strike at other targets far from the collapse building several hours later, and a third strike at around 7:30 in the morning. There too the nearest hit was some 460 meters away, according to the IDF. But first reports of a building collapse came only around 8 am…

Thus there was an unexplained 7 to 8 hour gap between the time of the helicopter strike and the building collapse. Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters, in a press briefing, told journalists that “the attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear.” ..

There are other mysteries. The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?

National Public Radio’s correspondent reported that residents of that building had left and the victims were non-residents who chose to shelter in the building that night. They were “too poor” to leave the down, one resident told CNN’s Wedeman. Who were these people?

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did, in droves.While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.

Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted.

There was little blood, CNN’s Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping — sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.

But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. While medical examination clearly is called for to arrive at a definitive dating and cause of their deaths, they do not appear to have died hours before. The bodies looked like they had been dead for days.

Viewers can judge for themselves. But the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial Israeli bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to “plant” bodies killed in previous fighting — reports in previous days indicated that nearby Tyre was used as a temporary morgue — place them in the basement, and then engineer a “controlled demolition” to fake another Israeli attack.

The well-documented use by Palestinians of this kind of faked footage — from the alleged shooting of Mohammed Dura in Gaza, scenes from Jenin of “dead” victims falling off gurneys and then climbing back on — have merited the creation of a new film genre called “Palliwood.”

Richard at EU Referendum documents the manipulative use of the body of a child casualty in photograph after carefully staged propaganda photograph (published uncritically by the media around the world).

Follow up on Mr. Green Helmet.

The media, the Lebanese Red Cross, and the government of Lebanon are all playing Hezbollah’s game by pointing to civilian casualties and whining over the Israeli bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana, a base used to fire hundreds of rockets at Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert inappropriately expressed “great sorrow” for the airstrikes, which could only have produced civilian casualties among Hezbollah supporters who deliberately ignored leaflets and other warnings from the Israeli Defense Forces to evacuate the war zone.

AP

At least one media voice is reporting the truth, the Australian Herald Sun has published a series of photographs of the cowardly insurgents deliberately hiding (with heavy weapons) in residential areas, titled Photos that damn Hezbollah .