A conspiracy so vast …
The International Committee of the Red Cross is very serious indeed about its neutrality. There is an obvious reason for this; neutrality underpins its special status, and if its neutrality is compromised, its personnel may be placed directly in danger and its ability to do its job is reduced. In other words, to impugn the neutrality of the Red Cross is a very serious charge indeed, and ought to only be made on the basis of very strong evidence indeed.
So it is perhaps odd to see Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer (who comes across as a hell of a moron; could any Aussie readers confirm this?) merrily asserting that the Lebanese Red Cross conspired with Hezbollah to fake an attack on one of its ambulances, seemingly as collateral damage to a broadside against the media for being biased against Israel.
In fact, his source was a blog, “Zombietime“, which has looked through news agency photos of the ambulance and proved to its own satisfaction that they are fakes. I must say that their case seems pretty unconvincing to me, since it appears to be based on some very strong conditional statements about what “a missile” can and can’t do, and “a missile” is a really quite generic category to be making such statements about.
I think that if I was the Australian foreign minister, I would have considered the pros and cons of undermining the credibility of the Red Cross (particularly as the ICRC is an important provider of the humanitarian aid which supports a lot of the things that the USA, UK and Australia want to do in the sphere of foreign policy) and decided that a political slam on the mainstream media was not worth it, particularly since nobody actually disputes that civilians were killed and ambulances were hit during the Lebanese invasion. Blogosphere triumphalism doesn’t really seem all that important compared to the neutrality of the Red Cross.
Of course, we all remember Rathergate, so it is silly to say out of hand that some people working diligently on a blog might not be able to fact check a story, albeit that of course an ambulance is a lot more difficult to assess from photos than a document. However, there is no need to get into the whys and wherefores of the matter at issue, because the IDF did, in fact, admit that they had hit some ambulances.
If there was a conspiracy to make up a fake ambulance, it appears that the IDF press office is involved and are producing propaganda for Hezbollah – pretty exciting if true. Zombietown have some fairly convoluted theories on their blog about how this statement can be made consistent with the hoax theory, along the lines of saying that the IDF regularly apologises for accidental killings first and then investigates later (a practice which would seem to me to be suicidal in a world of personal injury liability, and which was not followed in the case of the Gaza beach blast, for example). But it hardly matters, because at this point the “media bias” and “irresponsible journalism” angles are shot, aren’t they?
If the Red Cross says “an ambulance was hit” and the IDF says “yep, we hit an ambulance”, what on earth should you print? The bloggers and Mr Downer are implicitly saying with a straight face that “responsbible journalism” requires an editor to say “well, the Red Cross say the IDF hit their ambulance, the IDF say that they hit the Red Cross’s ambulance … I’d better send someone down to find out what really happened. We can take Steve and Bob off the newsdesk, it’s not like they are busy or anything, there’s only a war on”. If this were truly “responsible journalism”, then responsible journalists might, if they were lucky, be in a position to tell us that Osama bin Laden was behind the Twin Towers attack, some time around 2018.
Melanie Phillips (by the way, the “Melanie Phillips Naziometer” currently counts 7 mentions of the Nazis on her blog front page) has perhaps gone a step further than Mr Downer and Zombietown, asserting that not only was there a Red Cross conspiracy and that the mainstream media were irresponsible to have failed to uncover it, but that this is evidence of a media conspiracy to promote a Big Lie and smear Israel, because the liberal media are motivated by blind hatred and anti-Semitism.
I was quite surprised to see that this view was endorsed on Harry’s Place, a site which I do not usually regard as a part of the nuttersphere. It takes quite some brass neck to claim that the overall effect of newspaper coverage was to sustain a Big Lie that the invasion of Lebanon caused substantial civilian casualties (it is rather like, in form if not remotely in scale, those websites which make exaggerated claims about the importance of small technical errors in historical accounts of the Holocaust whenever they find one). At the most, the public might have been misled into believing that some vehicles were hit by missiles when they were actually hit by other munitions, or that there were 52 casualties of the Qana bombing[1] rather than 28, for the day and a half it took for the figures to be corrected.
This is a completely unserious charge; the very fact that this ambulance thing is the best piece of evidence the denialists have rather throws into relief the fact that the overall impression given by the media of the Lebanon invasion (that it was completely horrible and Lebanese civilians were the primary victims) is correct.
In general, if you are consistently finding yourself to be more “pro-Israel” than the army of Israel, it might be time to step back and have a bit of a think.
[1] I actually can’t remember whether Qana was hit by an air raid or by missiles, although if I am wrong I am sure there is a blog out there that can exhaustively prove that it was one or the other and attribute my mistake to anti-Semitism.
by the way, I hope that this new WordPress interface is quick-running and easy to use on Macs, because it is damn near intolerable in Windows.
I’m sure someone will find comparing the defense of Israel’s war in Lebanon to Holocaust denial profoundly offensive.
There’s a distinctly anti-ICRC tendency in the American right. Much the same things you’ve said could have been said about the people who claimed the ICRC was anti-semitic because it couldn’t admit Israel until recently. The Magen David Adom was generally quite happy with its relations with the ICRC, in sharp contrast to the (largely American) commenters who saw Swiss anti-semitism in every action it took. When you find yourself more hostile to the ICRC over the MDA than the MDA is, some reality check is necessary.
I’m not quite sure what the root of this hostility is, except perhaps that any international organization that even gives lip-service to treating America the same way it treats everyone else is automatically suspect.
I can only assume the Australian right is following the same pattern as in the US.
You see, that’s what you get for that “incomprehensible mindless contrarians” bit. Next thing you know, articles posted from a Windows machine will automatically have incriminatory phrases added.
Alexander Downer, it’s fair to say, is not renowned in Australia for being an intellectual giant.
Indeed not
I am glad we all have such a faith in the press, considering that Reuters photos were doctored, the BBC feld false info on the number of casualties in Jenin 2002, Qana 2006, as well as another village whose name escapes me in Lebanon but the number of dead fell from 40 to 1, where a BBC report on Bint Jabil was proved false by Channel 4 News. Maybe the Australian Foreign Minister had a point; I’m not saying there is a conspiracy in the press, but they seem to accept anything that they were told in Southern Lebanon, an area controlled by Hezbollah. CNN’s Nic Robertson admitted that Hezbollah controlled his report, “They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath”.
People complain that Israeli bombs destroy houses, whereas Katyusha rockets make dents; but then how does an ambulance receive damage only where the air vent is?
You’re not really surprised by Harry’s Place, are you? Let’s be honest.
Come on, admit it: it’s almost impossible to resist hitting an ambulance – colorful object moving fast with flashing lights all over. You hypocrites; let him who has never hit an ambulance cast the first stone.
Removing fertile topsoil from Labanese fields and moving it over the border to Israel in 1999 should be a bit harder to explain.
I’m waiting to learn how the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and even the US State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, conspired with Lebanese civilians, the Lebanese government and news organizations to claim that Israel used cluster bombs during the conflict, indeed that reports of thousands of such bomblets found at 359 separate sites are completely fabricated. Moreover, the aforementioned have furthered conspired to claim that 90% of the cluster bomb strikes ‘occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict when a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution was pending.’ Further evidence of this conspiracy is the utterly fanatastical belief by many human rights activists that such cluster munitions are illegal under multiple provisions of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions (1977) as they are notoriously inaccurate weapons that spread damage indiscriminately. How can we not accept the Israeli government’s categorical denial that it engaged in the unauthorized use of cluster munitions in Lebanon, knowing in our heart of hearts that its weaponry and the use thereof invariably, consistently and closely conforms to international standards. It is exquisitely clear that this is an immense conspiracy against the good name of the Israeli Defense Forces when we hear a UN relief coordinator making the extravagant if not delusional claim that ‘Every day, people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordnances,’ or when others unnecessarily create a state of alarm by asserting thousands of Lebanese men, women and children remain at risk from unexploded munitions.
The worst thing about Downer is that he’s not even close to being the biggest wanker in the government. (Tony Abbott, anyone?)
I was quite surprised to see that this view was endorsed on Harry’s Place, a site which I do not usually regard as a part of the nuttersphere.
C’mon now. Who was it dubbed HP “Little Green Soceerbals”, then?
Sorry, Soccerballs.
7, 11, 12 – yes, I suppose what I meant was that I was surprised that it was David T who posted it as he is pretty much the only sane regular contributor (actually some of the new ones might or might not be but they all rather blur into one for me).
tangentially to which, I was checking back on David Bernstein’s laughable and disgusting efforts on the Volokh website around the time of the Qana bombing and lots of them have been substantially edited.
“I think that if I was the Australian foreign minister, I would have considered the pros and cons of . . .”
Alexander Downer considering something before speaking? Now there’s a novel idea!
However, there is no need to get into the whys and wherefores of the matter at issue, because the IDF did, in fact, admit that they had hit some ambulances.
Get serious! Zombietime is not claiming that the IDF never hits any ambulances. He is claiming that this specific ambulance—- the most highly publicized ambulance strike of the war—- was not hit, that the evidence in this specific case was fabricated. Please address the claims that he is making. Do you think that ambulance 782, as pictured in papers around the world, was hit by the IDF?
“which has looked through news agency photos of the ambulance and proved to its own satisfaction that they are fakes. I must say that their case seems pretty unconvincing to me, since it appears to be based on some very strong conditional statements about what “a missile” can and can’t do, and “a missile” ”
That’s interesting. When I looked at the pictures, it seemed self-evident that they were fakes. The ‘missile’ hole is very clearly a mounting bracket for the red whoopy light on top of the vehicle (in some pictures you can even see the screw holes for the whoopy light mounts, still silver and unpainted). This is independent of all the other arguments-what a missile strike would do to the inside of a vehicle, the remarkable coincidence of a missile hitting the direct center of the red cross on the roof, etc etc. Whether the press was compliant in the fakes, or merely lazy I don’t know. But the missile hole is clearly mythical. You’ve seen those pictures, and don’t see the obvious fakes? Leading a horse to water and all that.
Steve
and attribute my mistake to anti-Semitism.
Of course. Any time you disagree with Israel’s actions, you’re anti-Semitic. I think perhaps it’s handier these days, even, than calling someone a Nazi (although they seem to go rather hand in hand…).
Shutting down all debate by name calling is a time honored tradition. Welcome to the consequences of supporting victim hood as the de facto moral high ground.
Steve and Dave; you, like your mate at Zombietime, seem to be very sure indeed that you know everything about what happens when “a missile” hits “an ambulance”. You remind me a lot of those “professional structural engineers” who knew all about what happens when “an airplane” hits “a steel frame building”, and my opinion is that you are bullshitting just as hard as they were.
If I were to, by way of experiment, chuck a grenade onto the roof of an ambulance, I would expect:
1. That there would be significant concussion, denting the roof of the ambulance in a concave manner.
2. That there would be a pattern of holes and shrapnel damage radiating out from the point where the grenade exploded.
3. That any weak points in the roof, like the light fitting, would be blown through, particularly if these were very near the point of the explosion (which I remind, would also be the point from which the roof damage would appear to radiate).
4. That anyone inside would be hurt, probably quite badly, by the blast and the shrapnel, but that nevertheless, since the roof would not be completely blown away, there wouldn’t be fire damage or really serious structural damage to the inside of the vehicle.
All of these things appear to be true of the ambulance shown. So I conclude that it was, in fact, hit by something like a rock-propelled grenade. Since the IDF was using drones in and around that area which fired munitions roughly equivalent to RPGs, Occam’s Razor leads me to believe that this ambulance was probably hit by one of them, and that the Red Cross volunteers who were operating it, one of whom had his leg blown off, were telling the truth.
It might be that I am mistaken in this view. However, even if I am, my point stands; there is a perfectly sensible version of events in which there was no conspiracy, so newspapers cannot be blamed for not constructing a conspiracy theory.
Zombietime is not claiming that the IDF never hits any ambulances. He is claiming that this specific ambulance—- the most highly publicized ambulance strike of the war—- was not hit, that the evidence in this specific case was fabricated
I note (and I am not going to be sidetracked from this point by people waving versions of Godwin’s Law), that you can find any number of “scholars” on the internet who claim that they have never denied that there was a massacre of Jews in Europe, just that the specific configuration of the buildings of Auschwitz was not consistent with their having been used as gas chambers. Indeed, I think that for a long time this was David Irving’s actual defence.
some fairly convoluted theories … along the lines of saying that the IDF regularly apologises for accidental killings first and then investigates later (a practice … which was not followed in the case of the Gaza beach blast, for example).
This is simply false (and easy to check by searching the news archives). The IDF initially issued a statement of regret and retracted it later when the internal investigation indicated discrepancies in timing of the last shell and the actual blast.
and attribute my mistake to anti-Semitism.
It is much more tempting to attribute your mistakes to an arrogant refusal to accept any evidence contradicting an array of your preconceived notions (geopolitical, sociological, etc).
There is an increasing amount of evidence that personnel and vehicles of relief agencies at times perform functions incompatible with their mandate in conflict zones. Instead of blaming someone for refusing to ignore it, perhaps one should consider it seriously and discuss the responsibility of those responsible for the outrage.
I am not a right-wing fanatic nor an unconditional supporter of Israeli policy by any means, but one-sided statements like yours make me roll my eyes just as much as the “unbiased” coverage of Fox News.
the remarkable coincidence of a missile hitting the direct center of the red cross on the roof
It sure is a remarkable coincidence that everything that has ever happened didn’t happen in a slightly different way.
I write solely to laud D^2’s coining the term “nuttersphere.”
I repeat: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Steve
+
I think here we have to start off with the basics. The blogosphere (or at least the American part of it) seems to be filled with white heterosexual males, all (so far as I can tell) in their 30s or 40s, all of whom, apparently, have nothing better to do with their time than pore over photos produced by Reuters and others that question (so it seems) their political views. What would we say about people who pored over the photos of 9/11 looking for inconsistencies and ‘shadows that don’t add up’ and ‘people who are seen in the same place hours apart’ or so forth, in an attempt to demonstrate (or hint) that the 9/11 was an elaborate charade? We would call them nutters, and their views incredibly offensive.
The very fact that they are actually looking for these ‘inconsistencies’ and so forth and etc. in the first place strikes me as being dubious.
However the key problem with their views isn’t about photos at all. It’s about motivation. OK: there is we are told, a liberal bias in the media. OK. Let’s pretend that might be true for a moment. The problem is: what’s the motivation? Why should journalists have a liberal bias? Whatever one might think about the MediaLens/Noam Chomsky ‘propaganda model’ at least I understand it. The idea is that Rupert Murdoch is an extreme right winger (which is demonstrably true) that he sets the agenda for his newspapers and TV stations (again, something which is demonstrably true) and that you won’t get a job on his papers/TV stations unless you have the ‘right’ (pun intended) politics. And there are numerous other examples (Conrad Black, Richard Desmond etc.).
But who are the ‘left wing’ newspaper proprietors? What’s their motivation? Why should Reuters be biased towards Hizbollah?
I’m not being smart here: I would like someone from the ‘nuttosphere’ to actually answer this question and explain why they think the media should be biased against the Right, when it is obviously in newspaper owner’s interests to be biased in favour of the Right?
#23: It is actually, to the best of my knowledge, a coinage of Jamie Kenny’s.
I write to #6 (adam), #15 (david kane) and #16 (steve):
I am assuming that most people reading this blog do not believe that the press is wholly accurate all the time. On that basis, if this incident was not misreported, what impact do you believe that has in the context of the war as a whole?
Of course, I meant to say “misreported”, rather than “not misreported”.
From this I deduce that it’s one of those days.
What’s their motivation?
In this case their motivation is simply that they are anti-Semites, Brendan.
In other cases their motivation is a product of them being rootless secular cosmopolitans; godless, unpatriotic transnational elite.
My word, fame at last.
Meanwhile, on topic
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20307128-7582,00.html
excerpt:
Downer’s spokesman, Tony Parkinson, said on Tuesday: “Those (website) pictures do not show an ambulance that has been struck by a missile nor do they sustain the argument the ambulance was struck by a missile.”
He is wrong. The damage done was consistent with ruined cars and vans that I saw elsewhere in Lebanon and earlier in Gaza, which had been hit by a missile fired from a drone. The Israeli-made drones have many types of missiles, but the most regularly used has a small warhead designed for use in urban areas. It aims not to kill anyone outside a small zone and rarely leaves a calling card outside its target.
Downer and Parkinson should know this. The Australian Government last year signed a deal to buy drones from Israel. They would surely have come with a buyer’s guide.
I’m not quite sure what the root of this hostility is [of the American right towards the Red Cross
It sounds awful, but there does seems to be a cultural animus in some quarters towards any person or organisation, with the possible exception of the US, who sets themselves up as a moral agent in the world, and this seems to lead to a hatred of international organisations in general.
This might arise mainly from two factions.
i) War on Morality “conservatives”, who can’t stomach the idea that anyone might act out of motives other than self-interest.
ii) Extreme American nationalists, who resent the fact that any organisation other than the US could possibly claim to be a force for good in the world.
This is very simplistic, obviously, but I don’t think it’s too far-fetched, as I have come across both these kinds of people on the internet, and they do seem hold the attitudes I’m describing.
“What would we say about people who pored over the photos of 9/11 looking for inconsistencies and ‘shadows that don’t add up’ and ‘people who are seen in the same place hours apart’ or so forth, in an attempt to demonstrate (or hint) that the 9/11 was an elaborate charade? We would call them nutters, and their views incredibly offensive.”
Only if they are wrong.
“However the key problem with their views isn’t about photos at all. It’s about motivation.”
What do ‘their’ views have to do with anything? The topic of this post is fraud by the Red Cross, and a website that makes the charge. You’re suggesting that photos implying fraud by the Red Cross have nothing to do with fraud by the Red Cross, and the accuracy of that argument has nothing to do with whether the Red Cross is in fact fraudulent?
Just a weird, weird post.
Steve
A funny summary of the argument I found elsewhere.
“The Israeli missile unbolted the ventilation cover of the ambulance, flamelessly detonated itself sending shrapnel inwards instead of outwards, then left no trace of itself while leaving the ambulance largely intact. Boy, has Israel taken “smart bomb” technology to new heights.”
Steve
“But who are the ‘left wing’ newspaper proprietors? What’s their motivation? Why should Reuters be biased towards Hizbollah?”
By the way; a pretty bad choice of hypotheticals. Reuters has actually admitted that their photographer photoshopped his work (the smoky city-scape photos), and have withdrawn hundreds of his photos from their database. Maybe you should rewrite the example to use CBS, or BBC, or someone who is not obviously guilty as charged.
Steve
#33: Steve, that is not a summary of my argument at all. Did you even read my post #19 (you responded to it at #24 but not in a way that gives me confidence that you’d read it).
One reuters freelance photoshopping something and being sacked as soon as he is caught does not seem to me institutional bias. I have known a lot of Reuters journalists, and the idea that they are left-wing porpagandists is absurd.
[Tangentially, his photoshopping did not of course give the impression that a bomb had been dropped where none had in fact been dropped. Everyone agrees that the Israeli air foce did in fact drop the bomb whose plume of smoke he photoshopped to be darker than it was in reality. So I don’t see that anythin gis proved about Israeli conduct by the affair.
Just a weird, weird post.
Fascinating stuff, Steve. Although you have the same inchoate reaction to almost every post you see here, it’s always interesting to read about this, day after day.
you can lead steve to writing but you can’t make him read!
Steve: “By the way; a pretty bad choice of hypotheticals. Reuters has actually admitted that their photographer photoshopped his work (the smoky city-scape photos), and have withdrawn hundreds of his photos from their database. Maybe you should rewrite the example to use CBS, or BBC, or someone who is not obviously guilty as charged.”
Just piling on, because you deserve it: that’s an extremely dumb argument. Once that guy was demonstrated to have altered a photgraph, he was fired, and all of his pictures on Reuters were withdrawn, under the assumption that he was not trustworthy, and that Reuters would no longer be associated with any prior work that he had done.
That’s the mark of an honest corporation.
not fired; he was a freelance who was never employed by them.
Engels,
My only quesiton about your analysis is why has the Pope been getting a free pass on this lately?
That’s the mark of a corporation doing damage control after they got caught, and their guilt was being trumpeted all over the web. Let them assign a few photo analysts to look for other fraudsters, and then I’ll be impressed with their belated honesty.
Ok, Martin, sometimes Christians (and possibly Jews) are allowed to have genuine humanitarian motives, and are patronised and ignored, rather than treated with contempt, but the general claim stands.
Brett, that applies to the blog inspectorate too. They only look hard at things they don’t like too. Do they really think that photos are only sexed up when they are of damage done by Israelis? Or is it more likely that photographers often doctor things to sell a picture?
Steve, that summary is eerily reminiscent of the cruise missiles supposedly turning round street corners and disappearing down chimneys. Are these things surgically accurate or not?
First, c’mon. If a car is hit by a missile, it’s gone. Even the damn windows are intact; the story of the ambulance hit was changed several times; the ambulance roof is full of rust marks. And, this is the second (or third) time Israeli missles managed to hit the exact center of the red cross.
You mention Zombietime; but there is also EU Referedum which published a very long analysis of the many apparently faked and staged photographs.
No one disputes, as you pretend they do, that there wasn’t lots of destruction in Lebanon (and, oh, don’t forget, as everyone seems to, Israel as well). The issue is fakery and staged photographs for propaganda purposes.
The Times published a faked photo here. If they haven’t taken this down yet, notice the black man’s head and the weird “halo” around it. I’m a fairly heavy Photoshop user and it’s clearly a bad fake job; I’ve shown it to a person I know in pre-press who concurs.
Why would someone clone a black man’s head in a picture of Lebanese? I haven’t a clue.
But faked it is.
Another point: The Times had a slide show about Lebanon and Israel (purportedly about the damage etc.) The Lebanese slide show had many images of destruction and suffering; the Israeli slides where all of peaceful, pleasant scenes.
Why should major news organizations be so anti-Israel? Again, I don’t know. I can speculate; but I don’t know the reason. Maybe it’s because Israel is small and Muslims are many (more money for them)? Who knows? Perhaps there are different reasons.
The UK press is wildly anti-Semitic; that includes the BBC as well as the Guardian and Telegraph. But then again, Britain itself has not been overly inclined to Jews, right? Didn’t they ship Nazis to help the Arabs in 1947 (according to The Nation)?
Yep, sounds like the work of the Learned Elders of Anti-Zion, all right.
You’d think extreme Zionists, of all people, would steer clear of these kinds of allegations. The worst conspiratorial abuse of conspiracy theory was directed at the Jews, and Israel’s clout in America invites that sort of thing to make a comeback. By “conspiratorial abuse of conspiracy theory” I mean, of course, that the Protocols were themselves a conspiracy by the Russian government.
To whom does one write to complain about the quality of the trolls around here? Come on: “seymour paine,” “a. nevelichko,” “steve”—these aren’t even very funny noms de blog. And the arguments are just phoned in. Can’t we even get a FrontPage or a LGF link?
Let’s go, trolls—pick it up! Go big or go home.
I’m just embittered that Other Steve has tainted my name.
I’m not quite sure what the root of this hostility is, except perhaps that any international organization that even gives lip-service to treating America the same way it treats everyone else is automatically suspect.
I think a great deal of it relates to MDA not being an official Red Cross/Red Crescent organization until quite recently; people seemed willing to chalk this up to anti-Israeli animus. The IRC’s point, that the rules require adoption of one of the Geneva Conventions’ specified symbols (including the red cross, the red crescent, and the now-defunct red lion, but not the red Shield of David), seemed perfectly valid to me. Eventually they adopted a new international symbol that countries wishing to avoid either the Cross or the Crescent could use, but I imagine that for years there’s going to be bad blood from people who took it personally.
Engels,
Again, I agree. I acutally think that Bono is a more interesting case than the Pope. He is probably patronized and ignored by the groups you are referring to, rather than vilified, but maybe not.
Regardless, I think he is viewed differently than other Europeans with a humanistic cause because he took Warren Buffet’s advice in his campaign for Africa, which is appeal to America’s pride not its sense of charity.
I agree with your analysis, I’m just a little surprised that you are surprised that people take umbrage to moralistic do-gooders, particularly those that are somehow outsiders.
The IRC now recongnizes the Israeli symbol Magen David Adom.
“The International Committee of the Red Cross is very serious indeed about its neutrality.”
Which is why, of course, they refused to allow the Israeli Red Cross to be part of the ICRC over more than half a century. While allowing Arab Red Cross organizations full membership.
Daniel, do you really mean to imply that a consistenly anti-Israel focus and attitude is merely ‘neutral’?
I suppose you do.
Since that is the same some of ‘neutrality’ constantly displayed by the majority of bloggers and posters on this web site. Whose foci and attitudes you whole-heartedly support on a daily basis.
jeez folks-
I can appreciate not liking trolls, but really-I’ve made two claims in my four posts:
1) I accept Zombietimes’ claim that the ambulance missile strike was staged, and said the missile hole is really just a whoopy light mounting hole, and
2) Reuters is a bad example to use for journalistic neutrality the week after they had to release one of their photographers, and delete a slew of photos for being photoshopped.
If that represents ‘troll,’ then you have very thin skins indeed.
Steve
I think the issue of faking the ambulance photos and whether or not the Red Cross was involved in faking the ambulance photos are very different questions.
I’m surprised that so many people treat it as if it is the same.
In terms of evidence of faking, the discussion looks pretty damning to me.
Contra daniel at comment 19, the photographs are not consistent with an explosion taking place from the outside blowing off the middle vent (The depression centering around that cross isn’t consistent with the outside holes being caused by the same external explosion in that they are on the outside of the cratering, not the inside). The rusting is not consistent with the timeline given. The claims of the “eyewitnesses” are not at all consistent with daniel’s scenario. In general the whole thing is very suspicious.
Be that as it may, that in no way suggests that the Red Cross organization was complicit in the fraud. Suggesting (much less simply stating) an accusation of that magnitude is a whole different thing.
Now, I would say that the news media was insufficiently skeptical when reporting the “bombing” of the ambulance, but that is a completely different issue.
The IRC now recongnizes the Israeli symbol Magen David Adom.
Magen David Adom is the national aid society of Israel and was just recently recognized by the ICRC. According to the new protocol, Magen David Adom may continue to use the red shield of David inside Israel, but that doesn’t mean the ICRC recognizes it. Outside Israel, it must place the shield inside the red crystal for indicative purposes and use the crystal alone for protective purposes.
As if the faux french “Maurice Meilleur” is better?
However, there is no need to get into the whys and wherefores of the matter at issue, because the IDF did, in fact, admit that they had hit some ambulances.
Actually, that’s incorrect. The link you provided includes no such admission whatsoever. Moreover, the IDF routinely expresses “regret” over reported incidents of civilian casualties that it may conceivably have caused, without actually admitting (or denying) blame until its own investigation is complete. (This may be, as you say, a foolish policy in an era of liability lawsuits, but it’s the IDF’s policy nonetheless. And as A. Nevelichko has pointed out, it was, in fact, followed in the case of the “Gaza beach incident”, your claim to the contrary notwithstanding.) It appears that such a boilerplate statement was made in this case—but in no way does this imply that the IDF has accepted any of the Lebanese Red Crescent’s claims about the ambulance in question.
Given, then, that most of your defense of the reporters who accepted the ambulance story at face value relies on the IDF’s nonexistent admission of culpability, perhaps you should revisit the question of whether those reporters should have been so credulous. After all, while you may not be familiar with the ins and outs of IDF PR policy, a competent Middle East correspondent would surely know that an initial IDF statement regretting a claimed incident of civilian casualties actually says nothing about the IDF’s beliefs regarding whether the incident even occurred, let alone who might have been responsible for it.
Which is why, of course, they refused to allow the Israeli Red Cross to be part of the ICRC over more than half a century. While allowing Arab Red Cross organizations full membership.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. The Red Crescents was already in the Geneva Convention and had been since 1949. It took an amendment add the Red Crystal to the list of approved symbols; until then, the IRC was bound by its own rules not to admit the MDA unless they wanted to display the Red Cross or Red Crescent. You can and should blame the Arab block for making the process of approval so incredibly difficult, but people start darkly muttering about the IRC acknowledging Arabs instead of using Occam’s Razor and accepting that giant Swiss bureaucracies might move slowly. Sri Lanka and Eritrea wished to avoid using the Cross or the Cresent, proposed variants, and had similarly difficulties getting them approved (I think Eritrea simply gave up on the idea of joining the IRC entirely), but nobody blames anti-Sri Lankan prejudice. Similarly, nobody seems to think that the Indian Red Swastika was a brilliant idea that the Swiss should have immediately adopted.
Since Israel grossly violated many laws of war in its recent attack on Lebanon, complicated discussions of what did or did not happen to a single ambulance are kinda beside the point. Of course supporters of a regime that increasingly resembles Serbia or apartheit South Africa have every reason to try to change the subject.
In terms of evidence of faking, the discussion looks pretty damning to me.
But is the evidence of faking faked too?
I dunno, Suzanne Goldenberg was right there and she says two ambulances were hit. And you looked at some photographs posted on some website and say they weren’t. I’m all conflicted now…
There’s an excellent piece here (http://www.dvrepublic.com/story.php?n=546&x=5, originally published in Salon) about this.
“Since Israel grossly violated many laws of war in its recent attack on Lebanon, complicated discussions of what did or did not happen to a single ambulance are kinda beside the point.”
This may be true. But the question of what did or did not happen to a single ambulance is not beside the point OF THIS POST. Go back and read the original post-see in particular the third paragraph.
Steve
Steve,
Where is it ever appropriate to attack the agenda-capturing that this sort of faux controversy represents? No place, evidently, which is why it the tactic works so well. The heck with that.
BTW, for some excellent artistic fakery watch this.
I come from the world of hard sciences. In my world, a person, who goes on record stating something subsequently shown to be wrong, starts by apologizing for an (inadvertently) misleading statement and only then proceeds to explain why that snafu does not invalidate his or her entire argument. Also, in that strange world of mine, people are not branded as “trolls” merely for pointing out factual and logical inaccuracies in somebody else’s statements.
Phillips does not argue, directly, that the main issue is anti-semitism.
You say her argument is “because the liberal media are motivated by blind hatred and anti-Semitism.”
I think it is more subtle than this. I admit—she doesn’t make the most compelling arguments. however, she says people “hate Israel.” Which, it should be admitted, a lot of people do. Claiming there is an irrational hatred of Israel (she also claims there is an irrational hatred of America) is not the same as claiming anti-semitism is the reason for a media distortion. She has some other reasons that are also not directly charges of anti-semitism.
By claiming that her argument simply amounts to a charge of anti-semitism you jump on a rather tired rhetorical bandwagon.
“You’d think extreme Zionists, of all people, would steer clear of these kinds of allegations.” What? Israelis are not allowed to ever imagine that others are biased against them or lie about them or even conspire to do so? Because they might sound like the Jews in the Elders of Zion? I don’t get it.
This is a completely unserious charge; the very fact that this ambulance thing is the best piece of evidence the denialists have rather throws into relief the fact that the overall impression given by the media of the Lebanon invasion (that it was completely horrible and Lebanese civilians were the primary victims) is correct.
I think you’re missing the point here, Daniel. Although many facts about the war are not in dispute—yes, this war, like all wars, was “completely horrible”, and the Lebanese civilians living near where most of the fighting occurred were doomed to be its “primary victims”—certain rather important issues are, in fact, disputed.
In particular, the Israeli government claims that Hezbollah routinely used civilians as human shields, that the IDF nevertheless did its level best to avoid causing civilian casualties, and that it was successful within the bounds of its capabilities in doing so. Hezbollah, in contrast, claims that it was not using civilians as human shields, that the IDF was deliberately or at least recklessly targeting civilians, and that the civilian toll was therefore much more massive than it would have been had the IDF exercised reasonable caution.
It would be nice if impartial investigators—Western journalists, for example—could investigate these claims and counterclaims, gather evidence in a careful and skeptical manner, and come to a plausible, trustworthy conclusion as to which parts of which account are more correct.
The ambulance incident, however, suggests—as do the “fauxtography” scandals and many other suspicious cases—that representatives of many of the best-known and best-trusted Western journalistic organizations, far from conducting an impartial investigation, are in fact happily cooperating with Hezbollah propagandists, and accepting their claims at face value with zero skepticism and no investigation whatsoever.
Now, perhaps you don’t care whether the Israeli effort to spare Lebanese civilians was heroic, perfunctory, or somewhere in between. (For example, you might believe that a single Lebanese civilian, accidentally killed while hanging around a Hezbollah rocket launcher, is enough reason to condemn Israel unconditionally for war crimes.) But there are those of us who make distinctions between the deliberate or reckless slaughter of civilians and the regrettable failure of attempts to spare them during a self-defense operation. And for us, it matters a great deal that journalists are proving themselves untrustworthy gatherers of the crucial information we need to make those distinctions.
I think the media are mostly motivated in this by the fact that only one side in this conflict starts slitting journalists’ throats if they get ticked off at a media company’s policies.
It’s dangerous to notice that Hezbollah is feeding you faked photos.
If that represents ‘troll,’ then you have very thin skins indeed.
Yeah, tell me about it….
Brett Bellmore:
only one side in this conflict starts slitting journalists’ throats
I seem to have missed the report of journalists’ throats being cut during the Lebanon war. Perhaps you could enlighten us on deaths among journalists during the conflict, their causes, those responsible. etc.?
Dan Simon:
the Israeli effort to spare Lebanese civilians
Huh?
That’s an impressively dishonest out-of-context quotation, Chris. Makes me just a little bit proud of myself, to think that someone who would do something like that would also ban my thoughtful, serious arguments from the comments section of his postings.
The entire sentence you butchered was,
Now, Israel is well-known to have made some effort to spare Lebanese civilians—calling off all its airstrikes for 48 hours, for instance, while it investigated a particular strike that killed a number of civilians. The question of whether that effort was perfunctory, heroic, or somewhere in between is, as I explained, a matter that one would have hoped that journalists would have been interested in investigating seriously—instead of simply taking Hezbollah propaganda at face value.By “one”, of course, I mean reasonable, fair-minded people.
Never mind Hezb propaganda Dan, do you take Israeli military at their word? They at one point said they’d hit any vehicle that moved. Dan Halutz promised 10 buildings would drop for every rocket that fell on Israel. They bombed the highways, the Beirut airport, and the Lebanese army in its barracks… It didn’t even honor its 48-hour moratorium. They dropped a scad of cluster bombs AFTER they knew there would be a ceasefire. I don’t know what more you would expect from them in order to take them at their word. As for the photo issues I’d refer you to Greg Mitchell’s columns. And come straight—do you seriously think ICRC, Reuters et al. are organizationally dedicated to hating Jews?
I appreciate Daniel’s comments in 19. I remain skeptical about whether it is possible to a fair minded dispute in the CT comment section, especially given the lack of ideological diversity among CT authors and the resulting amen corner aspect of the regulars. But let’s give it a shot. To Daniel:
1) Do you agree that we are talking about this specific ambulance, number 782 and pictured in the Boston Globe? There may be other ambulances that have been shot, but this specific one is the one that Zombietime is talking about.
2) Do you accept (for the purposes of this discussion) that Zombietime is honest in his quotes and his pictures? He may be totally wrong in his analysis, but do you accept that his quotes are correct, his pictures not forged and so on? We can revise this judgment going forward, but if you think that the raw evidence at his site is not accurate, there isn’t much point in talking.
Once we get these preliminaries out of the way, we can move forward. For the record, “chuck a grenade onto the roof of an ambulance” is fairly different from launching a “rock-propelled grenade.” And rock-propelled grenades are not launched from helicopters or jets. I assume you know all this, but just wanted to point out the a reasonable discussion will need to be precise about what you claimed happened.
Never mind Hezb propaganda Dan, do you take Israeli military at their word?
Generally, although not always. The key thing to understand about them is that they face an aggressive domestic press that is happy to catch them out on any lies they tell. That doesn’t mean they won’t try to shade the truth if they think they can get away with it—just that they don’t usually think that they can.
And none of your quotes from them are at all inconsistent with their claims to have tried very hard to minimize civilian casualties in Lebanon.
do you seriously think ICRC, Reuters et al. are organizationally dedicated to hating Jews?
While both organizations clearly have their share of Jew-haters, one hardly needs to resort to anti-Semitism to explain their actions. The Lebanese Red Crescent—at least the part of it that operates in Hezbollah-dominated regions of Lebanon—is as wholly a creature of Hezbollah as are any of the ICRC member organizations in countries ruled by totalitarian regimes. And ICRC is in turn simply a creature of its member organizations—enough of which are beholden to such regimes that they’re not about to let the ICRC adopt a policy of skepticism towards any claim that emanates from any one of them.
As for Reuters and the other major news outlets, they’re in the business of supplying engaging news copy, striking photos and riveting footage to their editor customers. If Hezbollah supplies all of these things in a nicely packaged form—and if the editors don’t object—then why wouldn’t they pass them on, just as if they were generated by impartial reporters?
And why, in turn, would the editors object? They’re in no position to question the legitimacy of the material in question, and they have column inches or television minutes to fill with juicy stuff. And if anybody complains, who’s going to blame them for trusting a reputable organization like Reuters?
What’s striking about the nonsense we’ve seen exposed lately—like the ambulance incident—is just how laughable a lot of it is: photography and footage that’s so obviously faked or staged that bloggers can recognize it as such just by looking at it. What this demonstrates to me is that the charade has been going on for so long that the whole industry has long since stopped taking any care to make its output even remotely plausible to even the most cursorily-examining eye.
There’s no conspiracy here—just a complete failure of accountability. When criticism of obviously bogus charges leveled by the likes of Reuters and the ICRC can be responded to with Daniel’s retort of, “to impugn the neutrality of the Red Cross is a very serious charge indeed, and ought to only be made on the basis of very strong evidence indeed”—well, it’s no wonder that the ICRC doesn’t take much care to ensure the accuracy of its claims.
Brendan, the Slate version of the article is better, since it includes the photos and links that were dropped in DV Republic’s copy.
It would be strange to take either of the parties to an armed conflict “at their word”. That grey matter in our brains can be well applied to consider critically & (as much as possible) objectively all the evidence presented. Bearing in mind various biases of those offering their interpretations, but not dismissing the factual evidence simply because we don’t share the bias of those, who uncovered that evidence.
In my opinion, ICRC and Reuters (+ many other “liberal” news agencies) certainly are not “organizationally dedicated to hating Jews”. Their noticeable anti-Israeli bias is (again, IMHO) rooted in the fundamental role of the contemporary European intelligentsia: to unconditionally (and, alas, unthinkingly) defend the “underdog” (those exploited, malnourished, persecuted) against the “bully” (those aggressively developing, western-civilized, etc). By projecting their own post-imperialist guilt onto Israelis, many western Europeans intellectuals see them as a party guilty-by-default in all the Middle-Eastern conflicts. (The Israel is stronger, hence it should know better than to quarrel with the “weak”—or something to that effect.)
In practice this organizational bias is often exacerbated by hiring the local staffers/free-lancers, whose allegiances (political & otherwise) are almost always strongly anti-Israeli. [This makes perfect economic/organizational sense – an ambulance worker (or photographer) who does not “coordinate” with the local powers would have much more difficulty operating in Southern Lebanon…]
#31:
“…but there does seems to be a cultural animus in some quarters towards any person or organisation, with the possible exception of the US, who sets themselves up as a moral agent in the world, and this seems to lead to…”
A third possibility is the immoral actors’ response to the prosthetic conscience of these “moral agents”.
Somebody doing bad things who wants to continue doing them unimpeded would naturally attack the legitimacy of anyone who got in their way with accusations of immorality. And since it’s in the nature of immoral actors to disregard the truth or falsity of things, caring only for the pragmatic effect, well, there you go.
#73:
“There’s no conspiracy here—just a complete failure of accountability.”
Yep. Cluster bombs, just sitting there waiting for some kid to stumble across them. The closest thing to accountability is some mealy-mouthed “urging”, here and there, that Israel lighten up. Cluster bombs trump wrecking ambulances, at least a little.
While that’s outside the narrow focus of whether or not the particular ambulance was punched in the particular cross it does point to the immoral character of the bombing agency generally.
#65:
“’hate Israel.’ Which, it should be admitted, a lot of people do.”
It should also be admitted that the word “Israel” has so many interpretations now it’s becoms a term of convenience for almost everyone using it.
Many people in the world these days hate “America”.
If I was an actor in the events that are creating that hatred I could hide my own perfidy behind that shield and pretend I’m hated for my immoral acts because I’m an American, but that would be deceitful.
In fact I am an American, but I have almost no complicity in the actions and events that are causing that hatred.
The big difficulty, not being discussed by the conspiracy theorists is the number of eyewitnesses on the record supporting the legitimacy of the Red Cross claims. These include numerous Western journalists who saw the ambulance and interviewed the driver within a day of the attack. Notable examples cited above are the correspondent for the (Murdoch-owned and strongly pro-Israel) Australian and his photographer.
But note that the story of the said correspondent has changed substantially from his first report to his current account of the event:
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/it_has_become_a_different_story_to_that_reported_on_july_26/
The “substantial changes” referred to are (according to Downer’s representative, Martin Parkinson)
“This time, he reported the ambulance driver as saying he was closing the vehicle’s rear ramp when it was hit, and was not in the driver’s canopy as reported on July 26. Presumably, to be closing the ramp of the ambulance required that the vehicle be stationary, and had not “veered off the road” as reported on July 26. This time, readers were told, the “munitions” had been fired by an Israeli drone, not an Apache helicopter as reported on July 26.”
All this kind of nitpicking shows is that Downer is into Zombietime territory himself.
“fake but accurate”
Where or where have we heard that one before?
“If Hezbollah supplies all of these things in a nicely packaged form—and if the editors don’t object—then why wouldn’t they pass them on, just as if they were generated by impartial reporters?”
Um, because they weren’t. But you are right, they do something similar domestically; Lightly edited press releases frequently go out over the wire services as objective news.
The key point to consider, though, is that the wire services are generally selective about which organizations’ press releases they pass off as objective news coverage. That Hezbollah makes the cut is the thing that’s really damning.
Cluster bombs trump wrecking ambulances, at least a little.
Oddly enough, I don’t remember any coverage of Lebanese civilians hurt by cluster bombs during the fighting. All of the reports I saw talked about civilians killed by building collapses due to bomb blast damage. That’s a striking contrast to the coverage of Israeli casualties, which frequently mentioned the deadly ball bearing-laden payloads of Hezbollah rockets.
Does that mean that Israeli cluster bombs were used carefully enough to prevent significant civilian casualties? We don’t know, because the reporters on the scene were busy parroting Hezbollah propaganda instead of finding out what was going on. It could be that the civilian slaughter wrought by Israeli cluster bombs during the fighting is the big untold story of the war. We’ll never know unless reporters covering the story start doing their jobs properly.
Of course, if you don’t need honestly reported information in order to “know” what happened in Lebanon, then I suppose it doesn’t matter in the least whether journalists are competent, lazy or even fraudulent.
The big difficulty, not being discussed by the conspiracy theorists is the number of eyewitnesses on the record supporting the legitimacy of the Red Cross claims. These include numerous Western journalists who saw the ambulance and interviewed the driver within a day of the attack.
Oh, for pity’s sake….
Nobody’s arguing that there was no ambulance, or that there was no ambulance driver with a story to tell—we’ve all seen numerous pictures of both. The problem is that the story he told—at least the first one he told—so flagrantly contradicts the physical evidence provided by the ambulance that the most plausible conclusion is that they’re both transparent fakes.
That numerous Western journalists were gulled by them reflects on the journalists’ credulity (or worse), not on the credibility of the story.
Dan Simon – Why do you hate America (as well as journalists, the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations)?
Dan Simon – Why do you hate America (as well as journalists, the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations)?
Well, I don’t really hate any of these things (except maybe the UN). But since you ask, I’ll just direct you to my previous critiques of Americans, journalists (especially foreign correspondents), and Amnesty International. I’ve already explained my objection to the ICRC above, so I won’t reiterate it. And I know little about HRW other than the hash it made of its investigation of the “Gaza Beach incident”, so I won’t say any more.
As for the UN—well, if you don’t understand just how corrupt and pernicious it is, you may be beyond hope. But you can start here.
(Sorry, Daniel—but he did ask….)
lol. crookedtimber has lost it on this one. denials and circling of the wagons from bertram, quiggin et al. over a convincing case of journalistic fraud in Lebanon. Yet not a single critic of Zombietime’s article tackles it argument by argument, on the merits. Instead, there is a lot of hand-waving and false ledes on Israel “admitting culpability” (your link shows no such thing). Bull.
Address the actual arguments on Zombietime or don’t claim to have done anything more than engage in elaborate hand-waving. Have a modicum of intellectually honesty or at least try.
From today’s Age
Ambulance attack evidence stands the test
Sarah Smiles, Beirut
September 2, 2006
AHMED Fawaz sits in a wheelchair in a sweat-stained hospital gown, smoking a cigarette in sweltering heat.
He was discharged from a Beirut hospital this week after losing his leg when a Lebanese Red Cross ambulance he was in with his family came under an Israeli air attack in south Lebanon on July 23.
The attack on the ambulance near the village of Qana left his 12-year-old son Mohammed scarred by shrapnel wounds to the head.
The attack on two ambulances ferrying mildly injured people from the village of Tibnin to Tyre was widely reported by international media, including The Age.
But Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has condemned press coverage of the incident, suggesting it was a hoax. He appears to have drawn his conclusions from right-wing US website zombietime.com that debunks all reporting on the incident using available press photos and television footage as “evidence”.
An Israeli army spokesman told The Age yesterday that the army had not yet established what happened and the incident was under investigation.
“We were in a war,” the spokesman said. “It takes time to find out exactly what happened and whose fault it was and why. We are not saying it was an accident or that we take responsibility. We only say that the incident in question occurred in an area used to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel … The army warned the population in the area to stay clear of rocket launching sites because we intended to operate there against activity by Hezbollah terrorists.” It is believed that the Israeli army’s investigation will rely on images and video footage taken by Israeli drones.
While some reporters wrote that an Israeli missile ripped a hole in the roof of one ambulance that was directly hit, the zombietime.com site argues a missile would have caused much wider damage. It argues the hole appears to be where there was an existing circular vent, with rust on some of the exposed metal showing that damage to vehicle happened before the reported time of the attack.
However, Red Cross volunteers manning the ambulances and Mr Fawaz insist the hit was caused by small weapons fired from unmanned drones that they heard circling above after the attack.
The Age visited the yard where the bombed out ambulances are now parked. This reporter saw the ambulance that Mr Fawaz was in. It appeared to have been hit by a weapon that punctured a huge hole through the back. The zombietime.com only shows the picture of the second ambulance that had a smaller puncture through the top where there was a pre-existing vent in the centre of the vehicle.
The holes in the ambulances, parked in the coastal town of Tyre on the Mediterranean, are now covered in rust.
Based on photos of the ambulance’s exterior that do not reveal any blood, the site suggests that Mr Fawaz incurred his injury elsewhere and was “paraded before the cameras as a victim of an Israeli missile”.
While the interior of the ambulance has been gutted, a Red Cross volunteer who was in the same ambulance as Mr Fawaz said he did bleed onto his stretcher, but not excessively as his leg had been cauterised.
At a speech on the Gold Coast this week, Mr Downer relied on the limited and selective images on zombietime.com to criticise journalists for poor reporting on the war in Lebanon.
“After closer study of the images of the damage to the ambulance, it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax,” he said.
For Mr Fawaz, 41, a mechanic from the village of Tibnin, life without his leg is no hoax.
Mohammed Hassan, 35, a Red Cross Cross volunteer in the ambulance with Mr Fawaz when it was hit, said three volunteers fled to a nearby building after the attack.
Mr Fawaz’s elderly mother Jamila crawled out of the vehicle while the volunteers carried Mohammed, Ahmed’s son, who was unconscious. They could not reach Mr Fawaz with rockets from drones hitting around the ambulance and the building they were in.
“If (Alexander Downer) thinks it was a hoax, he should come and see the ambulances himself,” said Sami Yazbek, the head of the Lebanese Red Cross in Tyre.
“What, he thinks we lied?” said Mr Hassan in disbelief. He said he was saved by a helmet and bulletproof armour he was wearing that was strafed at the back. He said his helmet is pocked where shrapnel hit.
The Lebanese Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross have confirmed that two ambulances came under Israeli air attack near the village of Qana on the night of July 23.
Lebanese Red Cross volunteers are certain the weapons were fired from a drone.
Mr Fawaz, who slipped in and out of consciousness after the blast, remembers hearing the sound of a drone whirring above him when he came to. “It sounds like a motorcycle.”
Soon after, through the door of the ambulance that had been blasted open, he recalls seeing a second strike on the ground.
“It was a drone because if it was a warplane we wouldn’t be alive,” he said.
When he came to after the blast, he remembers reaching for his glasses that were knocked to the back of his head, adjusting them and then feeling a sense of malaise. “I put my hand on my leg and I couldn’t feel it,” he said. “I tried to take the cord of the IV drip to tie up my leg to stop it bleeding, but I couldn’t manage it.”
While the Lebanese Red Cross said that Israel had issued a “verbal” unofficial apology for the strike, ICRC spokesman in Beirut Hisham Hassan did not want to confirm it, saying its discussions with Israel were private.
The reader representative for The Los Angeles Times, Jamie Gold said she was aware of internet chatter about the story, but the paper had received no official complaint.
She also said the Israeli Government had not complained about the story, and they were not reluctant to point out errors.
With JONATHAN PEARLMAN
The commenter at 86 must not to have read daniel’s point by point rebuttal to zombietime at 19. One other point is rust. Zombietime has apparently never noticed what happens to metal in an intense fire: it oxidizes, or rusts. Fire is rapid oxidation.
It surprises me how much of this stuff is just a regurgitation of whatever Rush Limbaugh said most recently. I don’t listen to his show so I often miss the connection between troll-fests on comment threads and whatever cyst he last popped on air. As this, his Qana claims and his Abu Ghraib description demonstrate, the man is a truly disgusting human being. His acolytes spew a pale echo of the filth that erupts from him.
Israel deserves better defenders.
Wow. The story changes YET AGAIN. First it was claimed that a missile penetrated the top of the ambulance just where a pre-existing vent happened to be. Now it’s claimed that “small weapons fire” took a different trajectory through a hole at the back of the ambulance.
Then it was planes and apaches. Now it’s an Israeli drone or UAV (btw, which UAV in operation now has a small arms weapons platform – someone enlighten me?).
Then the man who lost a leg claims he couldn’t stop the bleeding: “I put my hand on my leg and I couldn’t feel it,” he said. “I tried to take the cord of the IV drip to tie up my leg to stop it bleeding, but I couldn’t manage it.” Now he claims it was magically cauterized by a missile/fire/small weapons magic laser beam.
So which is it. Missile or “small weapons” (is there even such a small weapons platform on UAVs?)?
Through the hole in the roof or through the back of the ambulance?
C’mon guys, surely you’re not so gullible? :-)
tib, do you see any evidence of “an intense fire” in the photographs? Point it out please. If not, stay your tongue and desist from your self imploding ad hominems. We don’t get Rush whoever in Singapore.
“One other point is rust. Zombietime has apparently never noticed what happens to metal in an intense fire: it oxidizes, or rusts. Fire is rapid oxidation.”
There wasn’t an intense fire. You can see the unburned equipment inside the ambulance.
It seems that whenever someone questions the prevailing liberal orthodoxies and left wing pieties one is automatically regarded as a “troll” when that appellation is better reserved for those who CLEARLY have not read the Zombietime report with any degree of care.
Hi tib!
Ask an honest question, get an honest answer: The US has had armed drones for some time, now there are Israeli UCAVs . Via freerepublic, believe it or not. See Israeli-Weapons for more on the Heron and Spike systems.
As for fire, the rust is evidence of an intense fire from the impact and explosion of a weapon on the top of the vehicle as described in comment 19.
The echo is so distant in Singapore they can’t even tell its origin.
tib you’re funny in that your ignorance prevents you from even understanding my question. No one was asking if there are armed UAVs. EVERYONE knows that Israeli UAVs are armed with hellfires and other missile variants. What was asked was whether there was an operational UAV platform with small weapons fire capability (i.e., a weapons platform with small calibre weapons or a payload less destructive than run of the mill hellfire missiles).
So your response, in an attempt to display erudition, was just a laughably inept non-answer to my question.
“As for fire, the rust is evidence of an intense fire from the impact and explosion of a weapon on the top of the vehicle as described in comment 19.”
LOL! There is rust on my bicycle. Is that evidence of an intense fire? Is that really the argument you’re making?
Give it up tib. You’re hosed. Even trolls don’t persist in self humiliation as you do. lmao!
Incidentally, to lmao and Sebastian et al. You are aware that in providing your objective, scientific, rational arguments against the ‘ambulance was blown up’ theory, you sound exactly like those drones who argue that a plane ‘could not’ have crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 because (insert loonbat argument here). You are aware that’s exactly who you sound like, yes?
Does that mean that Israeli cluster bombs were used carefully enough to prevent significant civilian casualties?
It appears to me that dropping massive amount of cluster bombs (that left tens of thousands of unexploded munitions all over Southern Lebanon) during the last 72 hours of the conflict, was clearly intended as a means of ethnic cleansing, depopulation of the region.
And you sound like someone who believed that there was WMD in Iraq.
See how easy it is? I can do it too.
Yet no one on this blog has managed to refute Zombietime, while 911 conspiracy theorists have been refuted, point for point, ad nauseum. But I suppose that is a subtle difference that less rational minds have difficulty grasping. And so we must make allowances for the likes of “brendan” whose snark boomerangs in his face :-)
Meanwhile, we have humourous commenters like “tib” who make funny arguments like “rust is evidence of an intense fire” – you couldn’t make it up. Really people, stop being a parody of yourselves.
Scott Martens, in comment 2: possibly the American media confuse the ICRC (the custodian of the Geneva Conventions, statutorily composed of Swiss citizens) with the League of Red Cross Societies, a disaster relief network. The latter indeed had a long problem over admitting Israel – something to do with the Star of David symbol as I recall.
“And you sound like someone who believed that there was WMD in Iraq.”
WTF?? Everyone I’ve seen backing this conspiracy theory bought the WMD story 100 per cent (more in some cases, since they persisted even after the Bushies gave up). The kind of stuff Zombietime is pushing now is exactly the same as the way they pushed the ‘germ-lab’ trailers (remember them) that turned out to produce hydrogen for balloons. And no one could you refute them to their own satisfaction then, either.
Is the ITN video on the Zombietime site genuine and verbatim or doctored?
I rather think that the repeated use of Jacob Dallal’s The Israeli army never intentionally targets ambulances to innocent civilians was added for rhetorical effect somewhere between broadcast and posing on YouTube.
Certainly I have never seen UK TV news video edited like that.
“I rather think that the repeated use of Jacob Dallal’s The Israeli army never intentionally targets ambulances to innocent civilians was added for rhetorical effect somewhere between broadcast and posing on YouTube.”
should of course be
“I rather think that the repeated use of Jacob Dallal’s “The Israeli army never intentionally targets ambulances or innocent civilians” was added for rhetorical effect somewhere between broadcast and posting on YouTube.”
Downer seems to have some lucid moments:
But he isn’t really backing down. The last time I noticed Downer was during the debate about whether Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” or “erased from the pages of history”. (No, I’m not suggesting that either version is appealing, but there is a difference; and it’s at least as important as whether a projectile went through the roof of an ambulance or merely knocked something off the roof.) According to Downer, Ahmadinejad wants Israel “wiped off the face of the earth”. AFAICT this is entirely his own translation.
Slightly OT, Bruce R links to a very interesting video of IDF infantry operations in Lebanon. Coincidentally, there is some confirmation for the (uncontroversial) claim that metal corrodes very quickly in that part of the world. (Breaking news: explosions create intense heat, which in turn affects the chemical properties of steel.)
“At the conclusion of the fire-fighting effort, conditions are optimum for rapid corrosion: hot, wet, acidic and highly halogenated. It is not entirely surprising to see moist brown rust appearing on steel surfaces even before the firemen have left the building.”
CSI: Varied War Zones wd be an interesting and instructive TV drama
Yes belle, except for the photos showing no evidence of a fire, let alone an intense fire, for the interior of the ambulance does not look burnt or charred at all.
Is this so difficult to understand? Rust ALONE is not “evidence” that there was a fire, the silly argument that “tib” was attempting to make. And this is doubly so when the photos indicate that the paintwork, interior AND exterior of the ambulance appear unscathed by fire.
John Quiggin, and your point is? I could just as well reply: WTF?? Leftwing liberal loons buy 911 conspiracy theories too!! OMG LOLZ what a retort.
Really. You guys continue to respond anything but substantively, and none have the intellectual backbone to engage Zombietime on the merits. I would say pwned but you already know that. :)
Kevin, and why should he back down if the evidence was anything but conclusive? He is just admitting fallibility, that yes, he might be wrong (a rational admission), unlike those here who have already made up their minds that the strike did indeed occur, and did occur as described, despite the various holes and contradictions in the reportage of the story – about which – I hasten to add – none of you have responded to substantively, choosing instead to babble some irrelevant snark while engaging in fervent hand-waving.
Spare me.
The “ITN” video linked on Zombietime is indeed a remix and not the genuine broadcast.
Zombietime and its readers are obviously only critical when what they see doesn’t fit their worldview.
Harry’s Place, a site which I do not usually regard as a part of the nuttersphere
Well, now you know. It is.
/rather amused/
It’s not every day that I am called a follower of Rush Limbaugh…
The story might be real or fake (we might learn more on this over time), the arguments might be true or false, but their (in?)validity is unlikely to change simply because one or another pundit tries to use them to support his cause.
Kevin, and why should he back down if the evidence was anything but conclusive? He is just admitting fallibility….
Well, that’s big of him, isn’t it? If a government minister chooses to attack the Red Cross, whose members do much more difficult and dangerous work than he does, it seems to me that he should wait until he has some evidence to present which is conclusive. One of the qualities of a statesman is the ability to keep his trap shut when he has nothing worthwhile to say.
Now Lmao, I know from your earlier comments that you would like to presented with the refined style of argument you find persuasive, so allow me to indulge you:
ROTFLMAO! LOL! Spare me! Pull the other one, it has bells on!
In more adult language: if you think Downer has acted responsibly in this instance, please explain why.
substantively, zombietime’s original rust argument has obviously been damaged—where s/he claimed that rust only EVER develops slowly, turns out there are conditions when it develops unexpectedly quickly
whether the damage to the rust argument is fatal remains to be seen—it’s not enough to say “Fire CAN’T have happened INSIDE so this can ONLY be slow rust”: we need to know what are the other possible causes of fast rust in wartime in mediterranean climates, and eliminate them all—until this is done, zombietime’s section two just doesn’t function as a solid part of his argument; it certainly isn’t on its own a clincher either way absent further knowledge
(to be honest i mainly linked that page because i found the facts in it interesting and surprising in themselves, not because i have much of a dog in this race) (which was a v.dumb thing to do on an israel pro or con thread)
But since you ask, I’ll just direct you to [orgy of links to obscure website]
It was a rhetorical question, Dan, not an opportunity for you to try to boost your Google rankings. Still, if anyone is searching for “long-winded wingnut apologetics for state sanctioned atrocities” I’m sure you’ll be near the top of their results.
This discussion might be more productive if we could narrow the focus. Consider the claim that a rocket or missile created the hole in the roof of the ambulance. I find this claim (despite Daniel’s charming ramblings above) to be ridiculous. More commentary here. What are the arguments in favor of a rocket or missile?
Yes, Downer is a moron. He is the foreign minister of a modern first world country. He is supposed to behave diplomatically, with gravitas, and for strategic reasons. Whether you do or do not believe the story, why on earth would he pick a fight with the International Red Cross,at some insignificant trade conference, based without corroboration on the amateur sleuthing of a single website? He is using an example to make a rhetorical point, and it would surely be sensible to use a generally accepted case. He has a large government department at his beck and call to check the story, and advise him on the wisdom of the attack.
Aside from everything else, slagging off a group of journalists on the ground in a dangerous situation is small minded.
The Zombietime argument relies on four pillars. 1.The hole is made by the red light. 2. The ambulance driver is up and about in a variety of places too early. 3. Rust. 4. The van doesn’t look like it has been hit.
On 1, he is right. The hole in the photo is caused because the red light was blown up, either because it is plastic and demolished, or the ordnance went into the mathematical centre of the roof. However, the wounded people were hit by ordnance which went into the back door of the other vehicle, which didn’t have the visually compelling hole in the red cross.
On 2, I don’t believe the photos prove what he alleges. He has confused people. The person moving around is not the ambo.
On 3, we have a journalist saying that he was there the next day and the ambulance was not rusted. Eyewitness account.
On 4, we have eyewitnesses to the wreckage – plural – Western journalists who claim the wreckage compares to other attacked vehicles. Another photo of a Reuters vehicle attacked a month ago shows a bloodstained interior with a similar lack of scorch marks.
It doesn’t wash. We too can play the amateur sleuth, with evidence that points the other way. The confusion about the ambo suggests just how biassed the zombie was.
Oh, and presenting a mashed version of the ITN report is just childish. How are we supposed to see that as evidence?
On my safari browser, the sound track to that account also sounds hysterical and hectoring, because it is running too fast. I am left to wonder if that has been manipulated as well. Sheesh.
The “ITN report” is in fact a mash, I asked the author. I imagine Zombietime picked it up and either preconceptions made it look like the real thing or it worked as propaganda. Fool or liar? Who knows.
The report is a scene setter not part of the argument but it does leave Zombietime looking horribly blinkered and partisan and not a little hypocritical.
Oh, and presenting a mashed version of the ITN report is just childish.
Actually the whole site is childish in the extreme. It’s a guy who goes around stalking and secretly photographing political protesters, so he can later post what he hopes are embarrassing pictures on his website along with his juvenile commentary.
“Look Mom, I’m just like J. Edgar Hoover!”
Daniel Davies: “a missile” is a really quite generic category to be making such statements about.
David Kane: Consider the claim that a rocket or missile created the hole in the roof of the ambulance. I find this claim (despite Daniel’s charming ramblings above) to be ridiculous.
David, it seems to me that Daniel is being more cautious here than you are. I’m no expert, but I gather munitions (the term used by the Red Cross) come in many shapes and sizes. Is there any reason to rule out some sort of cluster bomblet (if that’s what they are called) going off on the roof of the ambulance, driving shrapnel through the roof and blasting away the gadget in the centre of the cross?
Perhaps the word I’m looking for is submunitions:
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/cluster.htm
I’ve no idea really, which I suspect puts me on a par with Andrew Downer. But if I was a minister I’d call the army before shooting my mouth off.
Incidentally, to lmao and Sebastian et al. You are aware that in providing your objective, scientific, rational arguments against the ‘ambulance was blown up’ theory, you sound exactly like those drones who argue that a plane ‘could not’ have crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 because (insert loonbat argument here).
This, I think, is the heart of the question. The title of Daniel’s post is “A Conspiracy So Vast…”, and the thrust of it is that if the “ambulance incident” story is a hoax, then many, many people have to be complicit in it.
Now, we’ve already disposed of Daniel’s claim that the IDF acknowledged the story’s veracity, but there remains a large number of participants—chiefly Western journalists—and one could well ask whether they could really all be, at best, willing dupes of Hezbollah’s propaganda machine. Phrased that way, I concede, the hypothesis really does sound like a wacky conspiracy theory along the lines of the various 9/11 conspiracy theories floating around the Internet.
The key difference, though, is that the portions of Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah are not a free, open society. In a country like the US, one would indeed expect any widely-held “secret”—let alone one as shocking as a 9/11 conspiracy—to leak eventually, and some journalist (or blogger) to pick up the story and disseminate it. In Hezbollah-stan, however, the Party keeps a tight lid on the information flow—including the information flowing to journalists—through intimidation and violence. The rules are simple: accept Hezbollah’s control over your content, or, as the phrase goes, “we can’t guarantee your safety”.
We know what happens in such cases, because we’ve seen it before—in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for example. Foreign journalists with integrity and impartiality simply refuse the deal, leaving the field to those (CNN’s Eason Jordan, for instance) comfortable working under those constraints, out of some combination of sympathy for the news controllers and cynical unconcern for the balance, or even the veracity, of what they report. And once the media have been so self-selected, their pliability follows naturally.
One of the running themes of my criticisms of Crooked Timber postings is Crooked Timberites’ frequent failure to recognize the profound differences between free, democratic societies and repressive dictatorships. (For example, CT posters and commentators routinely place their faith in international organizations, such as the UN, that are dominated by their non-democratic members, as if allowing representatives of the world’s tyrants to vote on various issues made the organization meaningfully democratic.) The comparison of the press’ credulous treatment of the “ambulance incident” with 9/11 conspiracy theories is an example of the same myopia: comparing a Western press corps that has agreed to be shepherded around by Hezbollah handlers with the entire body of American journalists reporting on 9/11 is like—well, like comparing the UN with a democratic government.
Is there any reason to rule out some sort of cluster bomblet (if that’s what they are called) going off on the roof of the ambulance, driving shrapnel through the roof and blasting away the gadget in the centre of the cross?
Sure, the nice round hole. Although I am not a weapons expert, nice round holes are not made with bomblets.
…democratic societies…
…repressive dictatorships…
an Amal-Hezbollah alliance won all 23 seats in Southern Lebanon.
Ah, but with what percentage of the vote? As I recall, Saddam Hussein drew something like 99 percent. I wonder if Hezbollah settled for less…
Are you trying to argue that Hezbollah is less popular in Lebanon than the US congress and US president in the US? If not,