One of the nicest things about people--and one all too very often overlooked in a black-and-white partisan world--is that people are not ideologies. My "Liberal", no matter how assorted pundits may try to make it an all-encompassing smear, does not mean the same as yours. Nor does one person's "conservative" mean the same as another's.
For instance; I am pro-choice, well within the traditional bounds of what is considered "liberal". However, I am also for a death penalty. (Note that I say "A death penalty"; while I feel that there exists a rationale for a state's putting some people to death, the system as we now have it in America is far too bloodthirsty, far too arbitrary, and far too racially-driven for my taste.)
But contrary to perception many have of the raging liberal, THIS raging liberal is pro-Israel. Which, at the same time, doesn't mean I like the manner in which that country is conducting things with regard to the Hezbollah situation in Lebanon.
I believe in Israel's right to exist, as I believe in its right to counterattack when it is attacked. But I believe that its current method is not the best, tactically, humanely, or politically.
So I am pained when I see pictures and stories showing the suffering on either side these days.
But I am angered when I see demagogues and demonizations making one side or the other look worse than it is. Things are bad enough as they are.
And if things are bad enough as they are, a simple argument which cannot be denied, why would anyone go to lengths to make the hells which are being created look worse?
Why, then, would we see pictures like this be made?
(EDIT: The photo has been yanked by Reuters; the above link now shows a screengrab of the original fake. Story here.)
You don't have to be a professional
photographer to see repeating geometric patterns of smoke which simply cannot happen in nature, and a few buildings amid the smoke which are apparent clones (I'm not talking a building which looks the same, but rather, clusters of buildings repeated a couple times which, despite the rules of perspective, parallax, angle, and elevation, all look exactly the same.)
This wouldn't be so bad if it were by some anonymous stringer whose contributions were limited to just this one, or if it were released from some podunk extremist webite.
But this is from Reuters, whose photo editors should damned well have caught this, and it is from one of the first photographers to have taken pictures of the tragedy at Qana. And that bombing was quite bad enough without doing something like this to raise the specter of freaks coming out to say that the whole thing at Qana was faked.
(And yes, I know that this pic is starting to wing its way around extreme right-wing sites, and that dumbass allegations of Qana being "faked" aren't far behind.)
I mean, if it makes even humane and liberal ME think, even for a misguided moment, "Gee--maybe that doubling of the death toll wasn't just an honest mistake," what will the people with sick agendas say?
And just what sort of sick agenda does one have to have to look at a situation which is hell enough as it is, and decide to make it look worse?
(personally, I'm hoping that the ONLY agenda in't was a photographer looking for an image dramatic enough that it would sell--but even were that the only motivator, the guy should be drummed from the press corps.)