If, as the old saying goes, “every picture tells a story,” then the recent pictures coming out of Gaza tell a terrible tale. A story of just how far Europe and the West have now gone in abandoning the Israelis and effectively siding with Islamists in the war between civilisation and barbarism.
A picture of a starving Palestinian baby in Gaza becomes the biggest news story on earth, thanks to the efforts of the ‘fact-checked’ Western liberal media led by the BBC and the New York Times. They didn’t bother checking—or anyway they didn’t report—that the child was really suffering from a terrible congenital disease, or that his rather chubbily healthy little brother had been cropped out of the picture.
Then Hamas proudly release a video of an emaciated Israeli hostage, Evyatar David, whom they have held captive in a tunnel under Gaza for 22 months, digging his own grave—just as the Nazis made Jews dig the trenches into which their bodies were tossed at the start of the Holocaust. No splashed breaking global news headlines from the likes of the BBC or the NYT this time, nothing to see here, move along, let’s get outraged about a blonde woman wearing jeans in an advert instead.
Then the US media institution Time Magazine publishes an instantly-famous front-page image of desperate Palestinian women begging for food with empty cooking pots, under the headline ‘The Gaza Tragedy.’ But this time, the German tabloid newspaper Bild does some actual journalism and graphically exposes how the photographer Anas Zayed Fatiyeh—a favourite of the Western media, with a documented history of anti-Israeli postings—staged the picture and directed the women to depict what the paper rightly calls “Palestinian suffering in service of Hamas and its propaganda.” That is indeed a tragedy, if not necessarily the tragic story that Time tried to feed us.
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