Messages

Everyone living under Israeli rule should have the same rights.

Agreed. Next.....................

I don't know what is going to happen to Israel. The settlers are not going anywhere. I think Zionism will collapse. It is hard to see the younger generation of US Jews continuing to support Israel as it becomes more and more extremist.

Nobody knows, not even Israel/palestinians. The settlers are being used by the Israeli government as leverage. Their thinking is that the more violence there is from the palestinians, the more they're going to build. Wrong way to go about it, but if they stop now, then they are going to look weak. They are caught between a rock and a hard place. Personally I think they should make step by step withdrawls based on the ongoing security situation. The longer there's peace, the more settlers get shipped out. If they won't move then tell them they will be governed by PA. Their choice.
If you want to talk about anyone becoming more extremist, then look no further than the palestinians. They are taught in all the PA schools that all of Israel is palestine and that they are going to drive the jews dogs out. They are taught that martyrdom is virtuous and those that kill jews are heroes. Not very peaceful or conciliatory, is it. 

The outlines of a settlement have been clear since 1967. Get all the settlers out and let the Palestinians have their own state. No land swaps. Compensation for 1948.

The palestinians are in the process of forming their own state. They were offered a state of their own (far larger than what they have now) by the UN in 1947, but refused to accept any jewish state, even at the expense of not having one of their own. Who's fault is that?




Why no land swaps? If it is advantageous for the continued long term security of both sides to swap land, then why not?
Lets be realistic, Israel is not going to go back to the green line. The security wall is roughly what Israel is realistically going to accept, bar a few land swaps here and there.
Compensation for those made refugees by the 1948 war should only be considered if all refugees are compensated. That means anyone forced from their homes in Israel, or in any arab country due to the war in Israel. Many thousands were forced from their homes in neighbouring countries as a direct result of the 48 war. It's only fair, don't you think?

It is not antisemitic to say the settlers should f**k off back to Israel.

If it was, I'd be the biggest antisemite out there.



**edit. map added**

Good. Let's get the whole story out in the open. Warts and all.

What's your solution, oh wise one? Ack sure its only a few rocks.
Children have been killed by rocks thrown at cars.

The solution now is one man one vote. If Israelis don't like it they should get the settlers home.

GHD can't answer, so his lap dog does his fighting for him. Coward.

I agree, get the settlers back into Israel.

I'm an Irishman but can't vote in an Irish election, should I go and buy a shit load of petrol and start a revolution? Should I start throwing bricks at cars going in to loyalist areas in the hope I might kill a  protestant kid for no other reason than "he's different to me?"
Should we creep into the bedrooms of planters and murder them in their beds because they shouldn't be here?
Should we attack Africans, Poles, Chinese or Asians just because they don't belong here and should go back to their own country?
No we shouldn't. It's racism/antisemitism at it's lowest and you are helping to perpetuate it. The very things you accuse Israel of is what you are doing right now. You and GHD aren't pro palestinian, you're anti Israeli. Nothing Israel does will ever be enough to satisfy the palestinians and your blood lust and hatred for a jewish state in the middle east.

All you and GHD do is post up rhetoric and bull. How about you both come out and post up your thoughts on how you think Israel and the palestinians can come to an agreed settlement? I've posted my thoughts up a couple of times in this thread and would love to read yours, in your own words. I don't think GHD is man enough to do it because it might just open a few people's eyes to what he really wants to happen to Israel, but you have already stated that you believe that Israel should continue to have a state (with mutually agreed borders with palestine, am I right?), and that is a good start.

One thing we all agree on is that the settlers should get out.

How about you?

What's your solution, oh wise one? Ack sure its only a few rocks.
Children have been killed by rocks thrown at cars.

Not right now, no.

Is it a pre-requisite for posting?

Oh sweet jesus and all the saints.


Prove to me that the tooth fairy exists. I demand photos and a sisgned confession.

The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf's evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father's lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead? Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if "directing" a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear—based on the length of shadows—to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father's shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, "The boy is dead" before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?

A handful of Israeli and foreign commentators have taken up Shahaf's cause. A Web site called masada2000.org says of the IDF's initial apology, "They acknowledged guilt, for never in their collective minds would any one of them have imagined a scenario whereby Mohammed al-Dura might have been murdered by his own people ... a cruel plot staged and executed by Palestinian sharp-shooters and a television cameraman!" Amnon Lord, writing for the magazine Makor Rishon, referred to a German documentary directed by Esther Schapira that was "based on Shahaf's own decisive conclusion" and that determined "that Muhammad Al-Dura was not killed by IDF gunfire at Netzarim junction." "Rather," Lord continued, "the Palestinians, in cooperation with foreign journalists and the UN, arranged a well-staged production of his death." In March of this year a French writer, Gérard Huber, published a book called Contre expertise d'une mise en scène (roughly, Re-evaluation of a Re-enactment). It, too, argues that the entire event was staged. In an e-mail message to me Huber said that before knowing of Shahaf's studies he had been aware that "the images of little Mohammed were part of the large war of images between Palestinians and Israelis." But until meeting Shahaf, he said, "I had not imagined that it involved a fiction"—a view he now shares. "The question of 'Who killed little Mohammed?'" he said, "has become a screen to disguise the real question, which is: 'Was little Mohammed actually killed?'"

The truth about this case will probably never be determined. Or, to put it more precisely, no version of truth that is considered believable by all sides will ever emerge. For most of the Arab world, the rights and wrongs of the case are beyond dispute: an innocent boy was murdered, and his blood is on Israel's hands. Mention of contrary evidence or hypotheses only confirms the bottomless dishonesty of the guilty parties—much as Holocaust-denial theories do in the Western world. For the handful of people collecting evidence of a staged event, the truth is also clear, even if the proof is not in hand. I saw Nahum Shahaf lose his good humor only when I asked him what he thought explained the odd timing of the boy's funeral, or the contradictions in eyewitness reports, or the other loose ends in the case. "I don't 'think,' I know!" he said several times. "I am a physicist. I work from the evidence." Schapira had collaborated with him for the German documentary and then produced a film advancing the "minimum" version of his case, showing that the shots did not, could not have, come from the IDF outpost. She disappointed him by not embracing the maximum version—the all-encompassing hoax—and counseled him not to talk about a staged event unless he could produce a living boy or a cooperative eyewitness. Shahaf said that he still thought well of her, and that he was not discouraged. "I am only two and a half years into this work," he told me. "It took twelve years for the truth of the Dreyfus case to come out."

For anyone else who knows about Mohammed al-Dura but is not in either of the decided camps—the Arabs who are sure they know what happened, the revisionists who are equally sure—the case will remain in the uncomfortable realm of events that cannot be fully explained or understood. "Maybe it was an accidental shooting," Gabriel Weimann told me, after reading his students' report, which, like the German documentary, supported the "minimum" conclusion—the Israeli soldiers at the outpost could not have killed the boy. (He could not show the report to me, he said, on grounds of academic confidentiality.) "Maybe even it was staged—although I don't think my worst enemy is so inhuman as to shoot a boy for the sake of publicity. Beyond that, I do not know." Weimann's recent work involves the way that television distorts reality in attempting to reconstruct it, by putting together loosely related or even random events in what the viewer imagines is a coherent narrative flow. The contrast between the confusing, contradictory hours of raw footage from the Netzarim crossroads and the clear, gripping narrative of the evening news reports assembled from that footage is a perfect example, he says.

The significance of this case from the American perspective involves the increasingly chaotic ecology of truth around the world. In Arab and Islamic societies the widespread belief that Israeli soldiers shot this boy has political consequences. So does the belief among some Israelis and Zionists in Israel and abroad that Palestinians will go to any lengths to smear them. Obviously, these beliefs do not create the basic tensions in the Middle East. The Israeli policy of promoting settlements in occupied territory, and the Palestinian policy of terror, are deeper obstacles. There would never have been a showdown at the Netzarim crossroads, or any images of Mohammed al-Dura's shooting to be parsed in different ways, if there were no settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect. Gabriel Weimann is to the left of Dan Schueftan on Israel's political spectrum, but both believe that Israel should end its occupation. I would guess that Nahum Shahaf thinks the same thing, even though he told me that to preserve his "independence" as a researcher, he wanted to "isolate myself from any kind of political question."

The images intensify the self-righteous determination of each side. If anything, modern technology has aggravated the problem of mutually exclusive realities. With the Internet and TV, each culture now has a more elaborate apparatus for "proving," dramatizing, and disseminating its particular truth.

In its engagement with the Arab world the United States has assumed that what it believes are noble motives will be perceived as such around the world. We mean the best for the people under our control; stability, democracy, prosperity, are our goals; why else would we have risked so much to help an oppressed people achieve them? The case of Mohammed al-Dura suggests the need for much more modest assumptions about the way other cultures—in particular today's embattled Islam—will perceive our truths.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/06/who-shot-mohammed-al-dura/302735/

It has been widely known for many years that Israel wasn't to blame for the boys "death" but it is the palestinians that continue to peddle the lie that he was murdered by IDF.

Would you like more?

[In short, the physical evidence of the shooting was in all ways inconsistent with shots coming from the IDF outpost—and in all ways consistent with shots coming from someplace behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location of the Pita. Making a positive case for who might have shot the boy was not the business of the investigators hired by the IDF. They simply wanted to determine whether the soldiers in the outpost were responsible. Because the investigation was overseen by the IDF and run wholly by Israelis, it stood no chance of being taken seriously in the Arab world. But its fundamental point—that the concrete barrel lay between the outpost and the boy, and no bullets had gone through the barrel—could be confirmed independently from news footage]

BTW beaver when you get a minute can you prove Mohamed ad Durra was not murdered by Israel?
where does he live now and throw up a few photos as well while you are at it.

I think the Zionist refusal to accept what happened is really fascinating.Like Israel gives a flying f**k about dead kids.  1519 since 2000.
But they can't let the Ad Durra story go for some reason.

The article is too long to post. Here are some extracts.

To watch the raw footage is to wonder, repeatedly, What is going on here? In some scenes groups of Palestinians duck for cover from gunfire while others nonchalantly talk or smoke just five feet away. At one dramatic moment a Palestinian man dives forward clutching his leg, as if shot in the thigh. An ambulance somehow arrives to collect him exactly two seconds later, before he has stopped rolling from the momentum of his fall. Another man is loaded into an ambulance—and, in footage from a different TV camera, appears to jump out of it again some minutes later.

At around 3:00 P.M. Mohammed al-Dura and his father make their first appearance on film. The time can be judged by later comments from the father and some journalists on the scene, and by the length of shadows in the footage. Despite the number of cameras that were running that day, Mohammed and Jamal al-Dura appear in the footage of only one cameraman—Talal Abu-Rahma, a Palestinian working for France 2.

Jamal al-Dura later said that he had taken his son to a used-car market and was on the way back when he passed through the crossroads and into the crossfire. When first seen on tape, father and son are both crouched on the sidewalk behind a large concrete cylinder, their backs against the wall. The cylinder, about three feet high, is referred to as "the barrel" in most discussions of the case, although it appears to be a section from a culvert or a sewer system. On top of the cylinder is a big paving stone, which adds another eight inches or so of protection. The al-Duras were on the corner diagonally opposite the Israeli outpost. By hiding behind the barrel they were doing exactly what they should have done to protect themselves from Israeli fire.

Many news accounts later claimed that the two were under fire for forty-five minutes, but the action captured on camera lasts a very brief time. Jamal looks around desperately. Mohammed slides down behind him, as if to make his body disappear behind his father's. Jamal clutches a pack of cigarettes in his left hand, while he alternately waves and cradles his son with his right. The sound of gunfire is heard, and four bullet holes appear in the wall just to the left of the pair. The father starts yelling. There is another burst. Mohammed goes limp and falls forward across his father's lap, his shirt stained with blood. Jamal, too, is hit, and his head starts bobbling. The camera cuts away. Although France 2 or its cameraman may have footage that it or he has chosen not to release, no other visual record of the shooting or its immediate aftermath is known to exist. Other Palestinian casualties of the day are shown being evacuated, but there is no known on-tape evidence of the boy's being picked up, tended to, loaded into an ambulance, or handled in any other way after he was shot.

The footage of the shooting is unforgettable, and it illustrates the way in which television transforms reality. I have seen it replayed at least a hundred times now, and on each repetition I can't help hoping that this time the boy will get himself down low enough, this time the shots will miss. Through the compression involved in editing the footage for a news report, the scene acquired a clear story line by the time European, American, and Middle Eastern audiences saw it on television: Palestinians throw rocks. Israeli soldiers, from the slits in their outpost, shoot back. A little boy is murdered.

What is known about the rest of the day is fragmentary and additionally confusing. A report from a nearby hospital says that a dead boy was admitted on September 30, with two gun wounds to the left side of his torso. But according to the photocopy I saw, the report also says that the boy was admitted at 1:00 P.M.; the tape shows that Mohammed was shot later in the afternoon. The doctor's report also notes, without further explanation, that the dead boy had a cut down his belly about eight inches long. A boy's body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag but with his face exposed, was later carried through the streets to a burial site (the exact timing is in dispute). The face looks very much like Mohammed's in the video footage. Thousands of mourners lined the route. A BBC TV report on the funeral began, "A Palestinian boy has been martyred." Many of the major U.S. news organizations reported that the funeral was held on the evening of September 30, a few hours after the shooting. Oddly, on film the procession appears to take place in full sunlight, with shadows indicative of midday.

In the fall of last year Gabriel Weimann mentioned the Mohammed al-Dura case in a special course that he teaches at the Israeli Military Academy, National Security and Mass Media. Like most adults in Israel, Weimann, a tall, athletic-looking man in his early fifties, still performs up to thirty days of military-reserve duty a year. His reserve rank is sergeant, whereas the students in his class are lieutenant colonels and above.

To underscore the importance of the media in international politics, Weimann shows some of his students a montage of famous images from past wars: for World War II the flag raising at Iwo Jima; for Vietnam the South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head and the little girl running naked down a path with napalm on her back. For the current intifada, Weimann told his students, the lasting iconic image would be the frightened face of Mohammed al-Dura.

One day last fall, after he discussed the images, a student spoke up. "I was there," he said. "We didn't do it."

"Prove it," Weimann said. He assigned part of the class, as its major research project, a reconsideration of the evidence in the case. A surprisingly large amount was available. The students began by revisiting an investigation undertaken by the Israeli military soon after the event.

Shortly after the shooting General Samia was contacted by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist and engineer who had worked closely with the IDF on the design of pilotless drone aircraft. While watching the original news broadcasts of the shooting Shahaf had been alarmed, like most viewers inside and outside Israel. But he had also noticed an apparent anomaly. The father seemed to be concerned mainly about a threat originating on the far side of the barrel behind which he had taken shelter. Yet when he and his son were shot, the barrel itself seemed to be intact. What, exactly, did this mean?

Samia commissioned Shahaf and an engineer, Yosef Duriel, to work on a second IDF investigation of the case. "The reason from my side is to check and clean up our values," Samia later told Bob Simon, of CBS. He said he wanted "to see that we are still acting as the IDF." Shahaf stressed to Samia that the IDF should do whatever it could to preserve all physical evidence. But because so much intifada activity continued in the Netzarim area, the IDF demolished the wall and all related structures. Shahaf took one trip to examine the crossroads, clad in body armor and escorted by Israeli soldiers. Then, at a location near Beersheba, Shahaf, Duriel, and others set up models of the barrel, the wall, and the IDF shooting position, in order to re-enact the crucial events.

Bullets had not been recovered from the boy's body at the hospital, and the family was hardly willing to agree to an exhumation to re-examine the wounds. Thus the most important piece of physical evidence was the concrete barrel. In the TV footage it clearly bears a mark from the Israeli Bureau of Standards, which enabled investigators to determine its exact dimensions and composition. When they placed the equivalent in front of a concrete wall and put mannequins representing father and son behind it, a conclusion emerged: soldiers in the Israeli outpost could not have fired the shots whose impact was shown on TV. The evidence was cumulative and reinforcing. It involved the angle, the barrel, the indentations, and the dust.

Mohammed al-Dura and his father looked as if they were sheltering themselves against fire from the IDF outpost. In this they were successful. The films show that the barrel was between them and the Israeli guns. The line of sight from the IDF position to the pair was blocked by concrete. Conceivably, some other Israeli soldier was present and fired from some other angle, although there is no evidence of this and no one has ever raised it as a possibility; and there were Palestinians in all the other places, who would presumably have noticed the presence of additional IDF troops. From the one location where Israeli soldiers are known to have been, the only way to hit the boy would have been to shoot through the concrete barrel.

This brings us to the nature of the barrel. Its walls were just under two inches thick. On the test range investigators fired M-16 bullets at a similar barrel. Each bullet made an indentation only two fifths to four fifths of an inch deep. Penetrating the barrel would have required multiple hits on both sides of the barrel's wall. The videos of the shooting show fewer than ten indentations on the side of the barrel facing the IDF, indicating that at some point in the day's exchanges of fire the Israelis did shoot at the barrel. But photographs taken after the shooting show no damage of any kind on the side of the barrel facing the al-Duras—that is, no bullets went through.

Further evidence involves the indentations in the concrete wall. The bullet marks that appear so ominously in the wall seconds before the fatal volley are round. Their shape is significant because of what it indicates about the angle of the gunfire. The investigators fired volleys into a concrete wall from a variety of angles. They found that in order to produce a round puncture mark, they had to fire more or less straight on. The more oblique the angle, the more elongated and skidlike the hole became.

The dust resulting from a bullet's impact followed similar rules. A head-on shot produced the smallest, roundest cloud of dust. The more oblique the angle, the larger and longer the cloud of dust. In the video of the shooting the clouds of dust near the al-Duras' heads are small and round. Shots from the IDF outpost would necessarily have been oblique.

In short, the physical evidence of the shooting was in all ways inconsistent with shots coming from the IDF outpost—and in all ways consistent with shots coming from someplace behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location of the Pita. Making a positive case for who might have shot the boy was not the business of the investigators hired by the IDF. They simply wanted to determine whether the soldiers in the outpost were responsible. Because the investigation was overseen by the IDF and run wholly by Israelis, it stood no chance of being taken seriously in the Arab world. But its fundamental point—that the concrete barrel lay between the outpost and the boy, and no bullets had gone through the barrel—could be confirmed independently from news footage.

You're wasted in Pallywood. 

Any photographer will tell you that the way a photo is framed means a hell of a lot more than the subject matter of the photo. A photo of an open flower with the background blank gathers a whole new meaning and resonanse when it has a background of a wasteland or batlefield for example. The angle, size, shape, colour, framing background and everything around the subject has just as much impact on the photo as the subject.

I know that with Easyjet you only need to give the passport details  before you fly, not at the time of booking.


Ryanair.....

Details of all passengers' travel documents (including those of children and infants) must be entered during the online check-in process. All passengers must present their valid travel document along with their online boarding pass at airport security and at the boarding gate for all flights.

http://www.ryanair.com/en/terms-and-conditions#regulations-traveldocumentation

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155617-how-the-2013-world-press-photo-of-the-year-was-faked-with-photoshop

I see that the guy who analysed the photo is starting to back away from his claim that it was a composite picture.
"Updated @ 7:09am 5/13: The language about the final image being a composite of three separate images has been softened slightly."

And here is the prize winning picture compared with an earlier version.
http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/gunthert/8485283411/sizes/o/
The prize winning picture is clearly not a composite it has just has the contrast and colour balance changed, in other words doing to a digital image with Photoshop what photographers have done for decades in the dark room.

The whole Israeli argument is nuts. They moan about photoshopping while the whole point of the photos was the kids they killed.

No, the whole point of the photos is the way they were portrayed, not the subject matter.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155617-how-the-2013-world-press-photo-of-the-year-was-faked-with-photoshop

I see that the guy who analysed the photo is starting to back away from his claim that it was a composite picture.
"Updated @ 7:09am 5/13: The language about the final image being a composite of three separate images has been softened slightly."

And here is the prize winning picture compared with an earlier version.
http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/gunthert/8485283411/sizes/o/
The prize winning picture is clearly not a composite it has just has the contrast and colour balance changed, in other words doing to a digital image with Photoshop what photographers have done for decades in the dark room.

Which is why I was reluctant to post this story up yesterday when it broke. Unlike some on here, I like to know that any links I put up are true.

[Al-Dura Wasn't Even Hurt: Truth Set to be Revealed]

I was going to wait for final confirmation about this one, but seeing as we're on the subject..........

If you have any information to the contrary, I'd love to see it. It's funny how there were no photos of the funeral or the body, as is usual for this type of story.




Al-Dura Wasn't Even Hurt: Truth Set to be Revealed
May 13, 2013 9:54by Simon Plosker

In what could be a significant turn of events the Jerusalem Post reports:

Not only was 12-year-old Gazan Muhammad al-Dura not killed by IDF fire in 2000 – he was not even hurt.

That was the preliminary finding of a special committee formed several years ago by Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and headed by Brig.- Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the former head of the Research and Analysis Division of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, and the current director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry.

...

In the meantime, 13 years have passed, during which various and sundry conspiracy theories have been suggested, including claims that the boy was never even injured.

A few days ago, MK Nachman Shai met with Ya'alon to give him a copy of his new book, Media War Reaching for Hearts and Minds , which deals with the role of media in current military conflicts, including the Dura affair. Ya'alon then surprised Shai by saying that an investigation carried out by Israel shows that Dura was never hurt.

This theory has been circulating on the Internet for a few years already, but this was the first time that an Israeli defense minister was stating so publicly.

Today, Dura should be about 25-years-old, alive and kicking somewhere (unless he was killed later in a separate incident).

Kuperwasser confirmed the committee's conclusion that that Dura had not been hurt at all and that the video clip, which was filmed by France 2 TV and aired around the world, had indeed been staged. This means that the France 2 TV channel report was erroneous, perhaps even knowingly.

Kuperwasser added that the full results of the investigation would be ready in the near future, and that most of the work had already been completed.
To recall, Al-Dura was the "poster boy" of the so-called Second Intifada and the libel of Israeli responsibility for his death and the iconic imagery of the incident have had a major impact on subsequent events and Israel's image in the media.

We believe that we must never give up trying to find out the truth, even 13 years after the incident, and the same applies to all of those times when Israel has been falsely accused in the media.
We look forward to seeing the full report in the near future and to see if the mainstream media and France 2 in particular, will finally acknowledge their part in propagating a libel.

[There is no question that the funeral itself took place]

Obviously you missed the line in the article which stated

There is no question that the funeral itself took place. But how many times have we seen the manipulation of images from the Middle East conflict?

[Exposed: Award Winning Gaza Image was Photoshopped]

A photograph of two dead children, who were killed in an Israeli missile strike near Gaza City, won the top World Press Photo prize on Friday for Swedish photographer Paul Hansen of newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The photograph shows a group of men bearing the bodies of two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and her brother Muhammad, 3, as they were taken to the mosque for a burial ceremony. Their parents were killed in the same strike.

"The strength of the picture lies in the way it contrasts the anger and sorrow of the adults with the innocence of the children," Mayu Mohanna, a member of the jury, said of the photograph which was named World Press Photo of the Year 2012.

Ammar Awad of Reuters received an honorable mention in the General News single category for his photograph "Israeli Border Police Pepper spray Palestinian Protester".

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=565531

A very striking photo don't you think. But what's wrong with it? Surely it isn't photoshopped...........................


Exposed: Award Winning Gaza Image was Photoshopped
May 14, 2013 14:22by Simon Plosker


It turns out that the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year — the largest and most prestigious press photography award — was, in actual fact, a fake. The World Press Photo association hasn't yet stripped the photographer, Paul Hansen, of the title, but presumably it's just a matter of time. Rather than discussing the politics of photo manipulation, though — is it faked, or is it merely enhanced? — we're going to look at how Hansen managed to trick a panel of experienced judges with his shooping skillz, and how a seasoned computer scientist spotted the fraudulent forgery from a mile off.

The photo, dubbed Gaza Burial, was purportedly captured on November 20, 2012 by Paul Hansen. Hansen was in Gaza City when Israeli forces retaliated in response to rocket fire from Palestinian rocket fire. The photo shows two of the casualties of the Israeli attack, carried to their funeral by their uncles. Now, the event itself isn't a fake — there are lots of other photos online that show the children being carried through the streets of Gaza — but the photo itself is almost certainly a composite of three different photos, with various regions spliced together from each of the images, and then further manipulation to illuminate the mourners' faces.

The remainder of the article reveals exactly how this was done.

There is no question that the funeral itself took place. But how many times have we seen the manipulation of images from the Middle East conflict?

In our Shattered Lens study of photo bias, we took a look at how the use of cropping and angles were used to create a dramatic perception of a funeral.

In general the study identified distortions of images that mostly fell into the following categories:
1.
Deliberate Staging

2.
Use of wide-angle lenses and photographer positions to make photos appear more dramatic than the reality

3.
Photographers choosing positions that affect the events they are shooting

4.
Editorializing in photo captions.


In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, manipulating photos to create a dramatic perception goes far beyond a simple touch up of a nature scene or the removal of red eye from a family portrait. Images are, arguably, more powerful than any headline or text in an article and leave a deep and lasting impression.

When it comes to reporting of Israel, those impressions are important in how the world views the country.

The World Press Photo Association should immediately revoke Paul Hansen's award and demonstrate that unethical and unprofessional photography is unacceptable.


http://honestreporting.com/exposed-award-winning-gaza-image-was-photoshopped/

I was just posting last night about palestinian propoganda, and lo and behold..........................

Virtually every news item that comes out of Gaza is manipulated to show Israel in the worst light possible. Palestinians are renowned for their acting skills and will use anything they can to exaggerate the suffering they endure.


PALLYWOOD