The German magazine ZAPP has a video of Green Helmet, whose name has been revealed as Salam Daher, taken in Qana when it was bombed ten years ago. He oversees a dead boy being put into an ambulance. The sequence is not good enough. He gives stage directions. The boy is taken out again, transferred pointlessly to another stretcher, put back in the ambulance. Daher makes sure there is a clear field of view for the camera and the blanket over the boy is pulled back so that his face can be seen.
The video is on You Tube.
EU Referendum promises to provide an analysis soon. This should be worth reading, as it was EU Referendum’s Richard North who first noted Daher’s surprising prominence If you care to you can also read a translation of an article from Stern magazine saying that the whole thing is just a bizarre conspiracy theory.
The picture from 1996 briefly shown on the left of the Zapp footage shows Daher holding up a dead baby dressed in blue. The baby’s head is blurred, and that is not surprising. Zapp’s picture was taken within minutes of this one showing that the baby’s head had been blown up. (Needless to say, this is a disturbing image.) That picture is fairly famous – for instance it appears as the fourth picture down in this series of pictures from the “Main Gallery Of Zionist Massacres” of a website called “Resistance.” It was also, I seem to recall, at one time the cover picture for Warblogger Watch (http://warbloggerwatch.blogspot.com, although if you try the link it is immediately covered up by sex adverts.) Daher has had a successful career.
The dead children from both 1996 and 2006 were really dead. Almost certainly they were really killed by Israeli munitions – although I have no doubt Hizb’Allah reassigns casualties from “friendly fire” whenever it gets the chance, let us not pretend that in what I take to be a worldwide war our side will not also kill innocents. The much mocked defence that an image is “fake but accurate” does have some validity.
However from now on it will be impossible to forget that these famous images tell not one but at least three stories. The dead child. The man holding him. The man behind the camera.
Natalie Solent writes:
“The much mocked defence that an image is “fake but accurate” does have some validity.”
Only in a work of fiction, Ms Solent. Only in a work of fiction.
I’m not so sure. Gathering (mostly female and child) corpses of people killed elsewhere and planting them in a soon-to-be-collapsed building to give the false impression that the Israelis are deliberately targeting civilians is very clearly duplicitous and to be condemned. If, however, the building collapsed as Hezbollah said and the civilians really are victims of an Israeli miscalculation, then holding up a dead baby for dramatic effect isn’t really misleading. It’s manipulative, I suppose, but there’s a difference between staging a scene that didn’t happen and emphasizing aspects of a scene that happened, the emotional weight of which you are concerned won’t be apparent to readers in foreign countries.
I realize this example doesn’t apply to the issue at hand, exactly, but imagine that a reporter goes to film a protest which is in the process of dying down as he arrives. However, the reporter definitely saw a vigorous protest, just failed to capture the most exciting moments on film. If he then frames his shots so that the most agitated in the remaining crowd are featured, has he really lied about the nature of the protest? I’m not so sure. The timestamps on the pictures technically are a lie because the protest being filmed at that moment isn’t as vigorous as the framing would have you believe. However, moments before the reporter saw a protest which more or less conforms to what he shot. Whether or not this counts as “fake but accurate” would depend a great deal on whether the scene the reporter saw when he arrived was, in fact, representative of the character of the protest as a whole, no? In any case, I don’t think that framing one’s shots for effect or emphasizing dramatic elements of an event is necessarily wrong in cases where such techniques capture the scene as the reporter experienced it.
When I said, ‘The much mocked defence that an image is “fake but accurate” does have some validity’ I meant that in this case the image, though staged, still contained some truth. The child on the stretcher was really dead, and was (probably) really killed by the Israelis.
I did not mean to validate the motives of the fakers. Liars should be exposed and condemned.
We should not forget that, as I said, even the right side in a war kills innocents like these children. (The difference between the right and the wrong side is whether the killing of innocents is desired.) I still want – in fact in case of doubt, I demand – to know how accurate the images is. Where was it on a spectrum from:
– a spontaneous, unselfconscious, genuine snapshot;
– to a selected picture from many genuine snapshots;
– to a picture showing events that were changed by the presence of the cameraman;
– to a staged overlay on top of real events (this case);
– to an all-out Potemkin village fake from beginning to end.
Joshua, in your examples, holding up the baby is manipulative but legitimate (leaving aside questions of whether the parents consented etc.) The issue in the case of Green Helmet man even before proof of him faking emerged is why he was always where the dead babies were. Who is he working for?
In your second theoretical example the photographer at the demonstration really ought to face the fact that he missed his chance to get the picture he wanted and not try to recreate it. Still, much would depend on whether he claimed to be making a fair sampling of the character of the demonstration, or only claimed to be snapping what interested, delighted or appalled him. When Brian Micklethwait snapped that guy with the warlike poster at the “peace” demo a few posts down he wasn’t obliged to “balance” it with a more peaceful peace protester.
…And re-running the scene when the child’s body is put in the ambulance goes beyond holding up the baby. That crosses the line from “emotional manipulation” to “lying.”
Apologies for all the errors and typos in this batch of comments. Too much staring at a screen.
“fake but accurate”
Wasn’t that the defence of Piers Morgan when the Mirror’s faked piccies of British troops “abusing” “prisoners” in “Iraq” was rumbled?
For a long while I’ve regarded Pallyvision’s footage as being a sort of war-pornography. They’ve become so blatant now (images of a “corpse” rolling off a stretcher and then getting back on spring to mind) that I regard it as war-pantomime.
Look behind you!
There is another thoughtful analysis of this general issue here on L’Ombre de l’Olivier.
Best regards
Dog bites man.
I have never seen Hizbollah partisans in sackcloth and ashes wailing over the innocent Israeli women and children they have killed with their terrorist rocket and bomb attacks. Man bites dog!!!