Two days ago Honest Reporting brought to my attention the scandal of the Reuters photographer who doctored (at least) one of his photos in order to attack Israel.

Here is the photograph:

That this photo was doctored was shown by Charles Johnson, who runs a blog called Little Green Footballs. About this photo, Johnson explained:

“This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop ‘clone’ tool to add more smoke to the image.

Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There’s really no question about it. It’s not only the plumes of smoke that were ‘enhanced.’ There are also cloned buildings.”[1]

The point of doctoring the photograph was to impress the viewer with a picture of great ‘devastation’ wrought by the Israelis. Honest Reporting explains that,

“Faced with an onslaught of bloggers taking up the case and demonstrating how clearly the picture had been doctored, Reuters finally came clean and admitted that the picture was a lie.”[2]

To control the damage, Reuters issued what is called a ‘picture kill’ telling everybody not to use it.

How serious is this?
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Reuters is “a news service that provides reports from around the world to newspapers and broadcasters.”[3] There are a few such services, such as the Associated Press, United Press International, Deutsche Presse Agentur, and Agence France Presse. These services provide the overwhelming bulk of the news that gets reported, and they are called ‘wire services.’ When a newspaper or TV station reports something, it is very often the case that they didn’t do any research themselves, but simply reported -- without checking anything at all -- what one of these wire services said. What this means is that the Western press is highly centralized, despite the appearance of a multiplicity of independent brands. So, when the wire services lie, the mainstream press lies across the board.

Now, the photograph we are considering here is obviously doctored. The person who did the doctoring was sloppy. With greater care, a more professional job could have been done, and the photo might have slipped through. How many photographs that are more carefully doctored are we being shown? It is impossible to know. What is especially troubling, however, is that Reuters itself did not stop this obviously doctored picture from getting published, and reacted only after a private citizen pointed out the fake. This could mean that Reuters does not mind obviously doctored photographs when they attack the Israelis.

This is enough to give one pause, because Reuters has an effect on the Western press across the board. For example, you have heard of course that the Israelis supposedly killed many civilians in Qana. This accusation had huge consequences, and Israel was vilified all over the media for its supposed barbarity, and under such pressure Israel halted its military operations for 48 hours, which allowed Hezbollah to regroup. This cost Israeli lives. Well, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette now admits, “evidence [has] emerged that the Qana massacre was stage-managed by Hezbollah propagandists,” and there are plenty of good reasons to believe that indeed it was.[4] Especially when you consider that Hezbollah has stated that they are proud to sustain more civilian than military casualties,[5] which means that when they loudly protest that Israel has supposedly killed civilians, our first hypothesis should be that cynics are attempting to manipulate us. Another reason to suspect that Qana was staged, and very a propos, is this: Y-net News explains that the photographer responsible for the doctored photo above is the “same Reuters photographer behind many of [the] images from Qana.”[6]

What are the larger implications of this?
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A surprisingly large number of people are convinced that ‘the Jews’ control the media for their own ends. Like any hypothesis, this one makes predictions. If the media is controlled by ‘the Jews’ for their own purposes, then we expect that the media will produce pro-Jewish content. And yet anybody who reads the newspapers cannot fail to notice the extreme condemnation against Israel for defending itself from Hezbollah, even though 1) Hezbollah attacked first, 2) Hezbollah says publicly it means to destroy Israel via the extermination of the Israeli Jews and, 3) Hezbollah in fact makes a point of directing its attacks against Israeli civilians with missiles packed with ball bearings to maximize the civilian carnage[7]; Israel, by sharp contrast, has taken all sorts of measures to minimize the harm to Lebanese civilians, including the dropping of leaflets over civilian populations to warn of an impending bombing. If under such conditions we see the Western media going out of its way to make the Israelis come out the ‘bad guys,’ what we have is a result that is radically inconsistent with the hypothesis that ‘the Jews’ control the media. So perhaps the widespread belief that ‘the Jews’ control the media is just more antisemitic propaganda.

Seeking to answer this question, HIR investigated who in fact controls the media. What we found is that the people at the very top of the Western media infrastructure are mostly Christians. And the few large media operations that are owned by individuals who claim to be Jewish (such as the New York Times) in fact go quite out of their way to fit in and outdo the other media in their attacks against the Jewish people. Our documentation on this question is in the following piece:

Why has the lie that ‘the Jews’ control the media been promoted? The reason seems to be that, in this way, ordinary people can be convinced that ‘the Jews’ are everywhere secretly in control. We’ve seen this before. Prior to World War II, there was a widespread accusation that ‘the Jews’ in secret controlled not only the media, but the Western governments, including the United States, the socialist movements, the capitalist infrastructure, the banks -- everything. According to this propaganda, ‘the Jews’ would use this power to destroy ‘Christian civilization.’ For example, here below is the cover of a pamphlet that was circulated by the German Nazis:

The pamphlet accuses ‘the Jews’ of controlling US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is the same Franklin Delano Roosevelt who refused entry into the United States to desperate Jews even when they had legally obtained US visas; the same Roosevelt who refused to bomb the Nazi death camps or even the railways leading to the death camps, thus ensuring that the extermination of the European Jews proceeded at full steam until the very end of the war; the same Roosevelt who refused to issue a clear condemnation of the mass killings of Jews, lest it mobilize the American citizenry in defense of the Jews.[9] He was not the exception: The Western governments cooperated closely with the Nazi Final Solution by making it impossible for most Jews to escape Europe. This demonstrated that ‘the Jews’ did not secretly control these governments. The belief that they did, however, was instrumental to the Final Solution itself because it fueled a general hysteria -- a pathological fear of the supposed danger posed by ‘the Jews’ -- which fear became the motivation for many in Europe to assist or directly to participate in the slaughter of an entire civilian population.

Such fears are very old: Western civilization is Christian, and Christians have defined themselves in opposition to Jews. I was raised Catholic, but I cannot deny that Western history is one long series of anti-Jewish massacres and expulsions caused by absurd accusations against the Jewish people, and stemming ultimately from the Gospel accusation that ‘the Jews’ supposedly murdered God, recreated and fueled recently by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ. The same Gibson, the son of Hutton Gibson, a famous Holocaust-denier (i.e. a person who says that the European Jewish population was not exterminated in WWII), recently expressed his drunken opinion: “Fucking Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”[10] This is exactly what Adolf Hitler used to say. HIR has produced a short summary and analysis of such accusations against the Jews throughout Western history, and their consequences, there to impress the point that we have here a recurrent Western cultural pattern, one to which every generation, it seems, falls prey:

And here we are again, with the same absurd fears driving a worldwide renaissance of antisemitism, repeating a pattern we cannot shake. Given the progress of events in the Middle East, the next mass anti-Jewish slaughter cannot be far off (as HIR has shown, the Muslim views of the Jews, and the legal framework to oppress them, were inherited from the Christians[10a]).

Now, but if ‘the Jews’ don’t control the mass media, and if this mass media instead viciously attacks the Jewish people (often under cover of supposedly opposing the policies of Israel, when the thing one ought to oppose are the genocidal policies of Israel’s neighbors), then one is entitled to ask the question: Why? Because if the media were free and independent it would be self-correcting, and antisemitic lies would not last long. So what power lies behind the mass media?

The National Security Act of 1947 gave US Intelligence the power to do anything it wants in secret without informing anybody. Essentially, therefore, the National Security Act gave US Intelligence absolute power, or absolute power within the confines of the US Intelligence budget. But since the size of this budget is itself a state secret, it is in practical terms unlimited. With the power it got in the National Security Act, US Intelligence has naturally corrupted the press, because the ability to create any reality one wishes is the ultimate form of power, as it allows the wire-pullers to produce fictional environments such that the public will demand what those in power wished to do anyway. The United States, in other words, is not a democracy but the theater of one.

This does not yet explain the anti-Jewish bias, however. But an additional aspect of the creation of US Intelligence does. As documented by historian Christopher Simpson in 1988 with documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, US Intelligence was created by absorbing in secret tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals -- the lion’s share of the Nazi war criminal infrastructure, responsible for the slaughter of more than 5 million Jews.[10b] It is to such people, then, that control of the media was given when US Intelligence was given absolute power, and Christopher Simpson in fact documents that the corruption of the media took place almost immediately. Naturally, the controlled media initially obfuscated the significance of Simpson’s research, and then it proceeded to ignore it, as if it had never happened (subsequently, Simpson’s book was taken out of print, but you will find it in libraries). To read about all this, visit:

Once you understand who controls the media, it is not surprising that it should be apologizing for Hezbollah. This organization, after all, proudly models itself after the Nazis:

Hezbollah 'soldiers' saluting in Nazi fashion

The current demonization of Israel in recent historical context
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We’ve been to Qana before. Last time it was called Jenin.

In April 2002, the Israeli Defense Forces were accused of carrying out a massacre against civilian Arabs in the West Bank town of Jenin. No such thing took place, and the accusers have since confessed. Jenin was a nest of terrorists and it had a secret bombs-making factory, an arms-making factory, and from Jenin were issuing the great majority of suicide bombers who killed Israeli civilians in the Second Intifada. But the accusation was highly successful in mobilizing world opinion against Israel, and many people didn’t even notice when it was revealed that the supposed ‘massacre’ had been a PLO hoax. The same is true for the Qana accusation: the evidence that it was all staged by Hezbollah is hardly getting the same kind of play in the news that the accusation itself received.

But Jenin itself was preceded by the accusation that the Serbs had supposedly committed a massacre in the Kosovo town of Racak. Here too, it was obvious that no such massacre had taken place, and it has since been shown that it was a KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) hoax perpetrated in collusion with US Intelligence to give NATO an excuse to start NATO’s horrific bombing of Serbia (unlike the Israelis, NATO did not drop leaflets to warn civilians, but repeatedly dropped bombs on targets that had zero military value, such as a TV station with its personnel in it, and it also bombed entire columns of Albanian refugees who were not cooperating with the NATO propaganda strategy by returning to their homes instead of streaming out of the province to give credence to NATO’s claims that the Serbs were supposedly murdering and expelling Albanians[11]).

It does not seem like coincidence that the Serbs were the fiercest defenders of the Jews in World War II, to the point of giving their lives to protect them from their Nazi enemies (it is only because few people know the history of Yugoslavia that the demonization of the Serbs succeeded).[12] It likewise does not seem coincidental that Helena Ranta, the Finish pathologist whom NATO sent to ‘investigate’ the Racak accusations, and who lied to the world when she falsely accused the Serbs of committing a massacre (an accusation that her own study, published much later, roundly refuted), should be the same Helena Ranta that Israel’s accusers wanted as an ‘investigator’ in Jenin.

To read about all this, visit:

This was certainly not the only fraudulent accusation against the Serbs, and since we began with a phony photograph, take a look at this one:

This photograph was presented as showing a death camp run by Bosnian Serbs who were supposedly executing Bosnian Muslims. Jared Israel and Petar Makara of Emperor’s Clothes have shown in their documentary film Judgment! that this was a hoax: it was in reality a refugee camp where the Bosnian Serbs were protecting, feeding, and giving medical attention to Bosnian Muslims who were fleeing another Iranian-backed Islamo-terrorist movement: Alija Izetbegovic’s Handzar Division (a recreation of the WWII Nazi SS Handzar Division) and related forces.[13] Israel and Makara were able to show this beyond any doubt because the British ITN team, which perpetrated this hoax, was filmed by a Serbian team while it did this, and they are caught red-handed in the Serbian footage.[14] But even without Judgment! this hoax is perhaps even more obvious than the Reuters photo with which we began. The fence, as you can see above, is made of chicken-wire -- a child can kick through it; the man in front is the only one who looks at all skinny; he is not naked, he is holding his shirt in his hand because it was a hot summer day; most importantly: he is smiling. The only reason this hoax succeeded is that most people do not imagine that TIME magazine could publish a hoax on its front cover, and the power of this innocent assumption is considerable, so they look at the photograph and see only what they are told to see.

To read more about how the media -- in collusion with Western PR companies -- purposefully demonized the Serbs in Bosnia, read:

Clearly, something is very wrong with the mass media, whether or not you accept the specific model defended by HIR.

As I said in a previous piece on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the media cannot be trusted to report this conflict fairly, and we should expect many more fraudulent accusations against the Israelis. Over and over again, the Western ruling classes, with their stranglehold on the world media, will tell you that the Jews are monsters, like they have for 2000 years. Don’t believe it.

Take me to the

in this series.

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Footnotes and Further Reading
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