7 August 2006 @ 4:03PM >> Congratulations to Little Green Footballs and the blogosphere in general for once again exposing fraud in the establishment media.

Over the weekend, the Reuters news service—the one that wouldn’t allow the term terrorist to be used when describing the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks—was caught running a doctored photo that tried to make Israeli airstrikes on Hizbollah look broader and more devastating than they actually were.

In one picture, Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj used image manipulation software to make a plume of smoke look much larger. The fake smoke covered nearly the entire frame of the picture, making it appear as if a wider attack had taken place.

The obvious manipulation of that picture led bloggers to start checking other Reuters photos that carried Hajj’s byline. It turns out, this guy’s been busy. Another suspicious photo shows an Israeli military plane launching what are labeled as “missiles.” Three such missiles are shown, although evidence suggests that (1) they are simply flares designed to confuse Hizbollah’s anti-aircraft weaponry, and (2) there was only one such flare in the photograph, but it was replicated twice to make the image look more menacing.

The hyping of Israeli “atrocities” that aren’t seems to be a bit of a pattern in the media. Hizbollah’s propaganda machine is quite effective at getting its message out through the supposedly skeptical editors of the Western media. Hizbollah agents parade dead bodies in front of eager cameramen for the likes of Reuters, and the Western media laps it up and broadcasts it around the world without question.

It’s bad enough that an outfit like Reuters can’t even recognize terrorism for what it is, but it is shameful that Reuters allows itself to be used by terrorists as they try to win the propaganda war. I hope the Western media are simply dupes. To think that they are willing accomplices is simply too depressing.

7 August 2006 @ 3:37PM >> Last week, I wrote:

[T]he Middle East would be much better off if there were more countries like Israel, the region’s only stable, functioning democracy where Jews and Muslims are even allowed to serve side-by-side in the legislature.

A reader responded to point out that the Iranian parliament sets aside one seat for a Jew, who represents the approximately 25,000 Jewish residents of Iran. (Before the Islamic revolution in 1979, some 100,000 Jews lived in Iran.)

As blogger/law professor Eugene Volokh notes:

Naturally, this doesn’t mean that Jews in Iran have equal rights, or are treated well by the government or by fellow citizens — the presence of a non-set-aside Jewish politician would be much better evidence of social tolerance than the presence of a set-aside one — but only that Iran’s Islamic legal system sometimes yields things that are unexpected to the uninitiated.

True indeed.

And while this doesn’t invalidate my original assertion—I don’t think Iran can be rightly called a “stable, functioning democracy“—it was worth noting.