The Controversy

It's a pretty established fact that the news have officially proved that the phrase "a picture says a thousand words" really means "a picture tells what I want it to tell". It doesn't tell truth. This fact was the reason Honest Reporting got started over 5 years ago. The latest controversy to land in Israel as a result of a photo is the picture of Israeli girls writing messages on missiles. Has the fact that this photo-op was staged changed peoples' minds about the picture? Well, no, because blogs are the only news "source" reporting the truth behind the picture. I assume Honest Reporting will come out with something soon. However, this one picture has become the "proof" that there is no difference between Israel and Hamas, between Israel and Hamas. They have and will use this picture as proof that Israel is also teaching their children hate just as much as the Palestinian Authority. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. But, never let a little thing like facts get in the way of a good argument. The girls didn't write any hate messages to Lebanese people. They didn't write anything against the innocent, nor did they write any messages of hate. They wrote little messages directed at Nasrallah, the "man" that has forced these girls to live in bomb shelters for days on end, the "man" who is trying to kill them, the "man" who is trying to wipe their country of the map. And, their messages to HIM are not hateful. They just say hello, or Israel is here to say, things of that nature. How this equates them with little Palestinian kids learning that Jews are descendents of pigs and monkeys, that it's their religious duty to kill Jews, that get paraded and picture wearing suicide bombing uniforms and AK-47s, maybe the more "logical" among you can explain the moral equivilane between the two.

Well, thanks to blogs like LGF and Media Backspin, the truth about this picture has come out. Here's the real story:

Excerpt: (emphasis added)
The image above caused a huge storm of outrage in the Arab blogosphere. Huge. You wouldn't believe how huge. The widely-read Gulf-based Palestinian blogger who was the first to post it received so much traffic that he had to move the photo to another server. Many others, including several I know personally, posted it and expressed their disgust. Israeli children taught to hate! Lebanese children are dying and they're happy! They're no better than... (fill in the blank, I don't want to go there).
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The little girls shown drawing with felt markers on the tank missiles are residents of Kiryat Shmona, which is right on the border with Lebanon. And when I say "on the border," I'm not kidding; there's little more space between their town and Southern Lebanon than there is between the back gardens of neighbouring houses in a wealthy American suburb.
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Kiryat Shmona has been under constant bombardment from South Lebanon since the first day of the conflict. It was a ghost town, explained Shelly. There was not a single person on the streets and all the businesses were closed. The residents who had friends, family or money for alternate housing out of missile range had left, leaving behind the few who had neither the funds nor connections that would allow them to escape the missiles crashing and booming on their town day and night. The noise was terrifying, people were dying outside, the kids were scared out of their minds and they had been told over and over that some man named Nasrallah was responsible for their having to cower underground for days on end.
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Apparently one or some of the parents wrote messages in Hebrew and English on the tank shells to Nasrallah. "To Nasrallah with love," they wrote to the man whose name was for them a devilish image on television - the man who mockingly told Israelis, via speeches that were broadcast on Al Manar and Israeli television, that Hezbollah was preparing to launch even more missiles at them. That he was happy they were suffering.

The photograpers gathered around. Twelve of them. Do you know how many that is? It's a lot. And they were all simultaneously leaning in with their long camera lenses, clicking the shutter over and over. The parents handed the markers to the kids and they drew little Israeli flags on the shells. Photographers look for striking images, and what is more striking than pretty, innocent little girls contrasted with the ugliness of war? The camera shutters clicked away, and I guess those kids must have felt like stars, especially since the diversion came after they'd been alternately bored and terrified as they waited out the shelling in their bomb shelters.
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Read the whole thing...

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