Quote:

Original post by Dmytry Geez, there's thousand+ dead (even by israeli's statistics only half of whom is hezbollah) but they're (whoever makes fake photos) still making images and stories up just for "better effect".

Quote:

Original post by Evil_Greven Guess what? It was a hoax. Be sure to watch the video, as well.

Quote:

Original post by Evil_Greven Looking back on the thread that talked about the crisis and mentioned the attack, you can easily see how misinformation spreads. For instance, one GameDev poster mentioned an ambulance driver carrying her leg (even though in the hoax, it was reported a male patient had had his leg severed).

Quote:

Original post by Evil_Greven Even worse, that's not the only misrepresentation that has been perpetuated by the media. Remember the badly photoshopped smoke photo?

Quote:

... To the best of my searching, it appears as though the right-wing website Israel Insider coined the word. It's snappy, though, and essentially punctuates any argument that claims the Israel military is not killing civilians in Lebanon, at least to the extent being reported. Rather, the Hezbollywood thesis rests on the notion that Hezbollah itself is employing tactics reminiscent from the 1997 Dustin Hoffman film Wag the Dog, in which Hollywood types team up with shady U.S. government officials to manufacture a fake TV war to distract the voting public from a White House scandal with pedophiliac overtones. The movie's premise was fairly ridiculous. As anyone who lived through the Clinton administration knows, people are far more willing to follow the delicious details of of an Oval Office sex scandal than spend time thinking about how many bombs the U.S. is dropping on foreigners or selling to foreigners to drop on other foreigners. But Hezbollywood was something new. The war was real enough. The attempt now was to come up with a fake story about the real story - the massacre at Qana- being faked. While someone at Israel Insider may be clamoring for a bonus for thinking up "Hezbollywood," the idea that all these civilian casualties were somehow forged was making the rounds elsewhere as well. It seemed as though neo-con bloggers and right-wing pundits had all received their talking points and were on message. ... All of a sudden, every right-wing blogger and broadcaster was a character in the television show CSI. They all analyzed photos and footage, offering commentary on structural integrity, wounds on bodies, the amount of time it reportedly took for emergency workers and the press to arrive and so forth. My favorite theories incorporated elements, sometimes contradictory, from other theories. The website PipeLineNews.org, for example, says that the "The Israeli Air Force was not responsible for the collapse of the building in question" and that Hezbollah was using it to fire rockets from "at the time of the IDF air strike." The same article alleges that those civilians in the building "were not permitted to leave" by Hezbollah, and thus were killed as "human shields" in the attack, but that the corpses brought out of the wreckage looked as though "they died much earlier and under different circumstances." No one who actually witnessed the attack was saying these things. The accusations come from those pecking at computer keyboards or speaking from radio studios far from the scene. So it was weird that the conspiracy theorists gained enough traction to spur the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse to make public statements on August 1 in defense of their work. "Do you really think these people would risk their lives under Israeli shelling to set up a digging ceremony for dead Lebanese kids?" Patrick Baz, Mideast photo director for AFP, was quoted as saying in a story about the controversy. "I'm totally stunned by first the question, and I can't imagine that somebody would think something like that would have happened." ...

Quote:

Original post by Evil_Greven Consider the implications from these false reports. Citizens begin to detest Israel's actions, and pressure their governments. Their governments, in turn, pressure Israel. And then, Israel is forced to back down, leading to the current cease fire.

Quote:

Original post by Evil_Greven Is this a bad thing? It's definately bad to carry out such manipulations, but I can't say I like seeing fighting and war. Yet it's also bad for Israel, if the attacks on its cities and populace are renewed.

Quote:

Original post by Evil_Greven Consider the implications from these false reports. Citizens begin to detest Israel's actions, and pressure their governments. Their governments, in turn, pressure Israel. And then, Israel is forced to back down, leading to the current cease fire.

Quote:

Original post by Evil_Greven Consider the implications from these false reports. Citizens begin to detest Israel's actions, and pressure their governments. Their governments, in turn, pressure Israel. And then, Israel is forced to back down, leading to the current cease fire. Is this a bad thing? It's definately bad to carry out such manipulations, but I can't say I like seeing fighting and war. Yet it's also bad for Israel, if the attacks on its cities and populace are renewed.

Quote:

Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies. ... The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told the National Assembly, “As an English general has very truly said, the German army was ‘stabbed in the back.’” Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the-back myth, this claim was disingenuous. The “English general” in question was one Maj. Gen. Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal Erich von Ludendorff—the force behind Hindenburg—was characterizing the German army's alleged lack of support from its civilian government. “Ludendorff's eyes lit up, and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone,” wrote Hindenburg biographer John Wheeler-Bennett. “‘Stabbed in the back?’ he repeated. ‘Yes, that's it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.’” ... Yet it was necessary, for the purging that the Nazis had in mind, to believe that the national degeneration went even further. Jerry Lembcke, in his brilliant work, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, writes of how the Nazis fostered the dolchstosslegende in ways that eerily foreshadowed returning veteran mythologies in the United States. Hermann Göring, the most charismatic of the Nazi leaders after Hitler, liked to speak of how “very young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore the insignia off our best front line soldiers and spat on their field gray uniforms.” As Lembcke points out, any insignia ripping had actually been done by the mutinous soldiers and sailors who would launch a socialist uprising shortly after the war, tearing them off their own shoulders or those of their officers. Göring's instant revisionism both covered up this embarrassing reality and created a whole new class of villains who were—in his barely coded language—homosexuals, sexually threatening women, and other “deviants.” All such individuals would be dealt with in the new, Nazi order. * * * The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations—supported by many liberal Republicans—had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth. ... This sort of determined naiveté had Taft and his movement teetering on the brink of political irrelevance. They saved themselves by grabbing at an unlikely rope—America's very own dolchstosslegende, the myth of Yalta. No reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta conference that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy. Yalta was, in fact, originally considered the apogee of the Roosevelt Administration's accomplishments, ensuring that the hard-won peace at the end of World War II would not soon dissolve into an even worse conflict, just as the botched peace of Versailles had led only to renewed hostilities in the years after World War I. The conference, which took place in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, was the last time “the Big Three” of the war—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—would meet face-to-face. The U.S. negotiating team went with specific goals and was widely perceived at the time as having achieved them. Agreements were reached on the occupation of the soon-to-be-defeated German Reich, the liberation of those Eastern European countries occupied by or allied with Germany, the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, and, most significantly in Roosevelt's eyes, on the structure of a workable, international body designed to keep world peace, the United Nations. ... Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang's defeat, conservatives in Congress demanded to know “Who lost China?” and Robert Taft, discarding his much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt against the Truman Administration, urging him to “keep talking and if one case doesn't work out, he should proceed with another.” Yet it would take another hot war—and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende—to permanently enthrone the idea of a vast, treasonous left-wing conspiracy in the American psyche. ... United once more, Republicans brought this compilation of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies before the American people—who swallowed them willingly. Once in power, Eisenhower and Dulles immediately returned to managing the Democratic system of containment. Dulles met with MacArthur, listened respectfully to his plan to nuke Manchuria, allowed that it “could well succeed,” then shelved it without another word. No “secret understandings” to “aid Communist enslavements” were repudiated because, of course, they did not exist. The idea of “rolling back” Communism from Eastern Europe was taken seriously solely by the Hungarian people, who launched a brave rebellion against their Soviet occupiers in 1956, only to find that Dulles and Eisenhower were willing to offer them nothing more than sympathy. ... Vietnam was the sort of war Republicans had been clamoring to fight for two decades. A liberal administration had started it, with misplaced bravado, but it had been egged on—even dared—to take the plunge into full-scale war by prevailing right-wing dogma. When the war soured, Republicans first tried to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy of the Kennedy Administration or the near-universal American failure to recognize Vietnam's boundless desire for self-determination—no, it was the old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places. Once again, we were told that American troops were not being “allowed” to win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal when you do not lose a battle. ... If the power of the stab-in-the-back narrative from Vietnam is beyond question, it still raises the question of why. Why should we wish to maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men? The answer, I think, lies in Richard Nixon's ability to expand the Siegfried myth from the halls of power out into the streets. Government conspiracies are still culpable, of course; ironically, it was Nixon's own administration that first “left behind” American POWs in North Vietnam. Yet this makes little difference to the American right, which never considered Nixon ideologically pure enough to be a member in good standing, and which has always made hay by railing against government, even now that they are it. What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics. On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan's mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace's “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater's characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year. ... Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as usual, by the right's media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page opined, “Where the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington, D.C.” and noted that General John Abizaid, of the U.S. Central Command, had said, “When my soldiers say to me and ask me the question whether or not they've got support from the American people or not, that worries me. And they're starting to do that.” Again, the link was made. Soldiers of the most powerful army in the history of the world would be actively endangered if they even wondered whether the folks at home were questioning their deployment. The right was looking for a target, and it got one when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), appalled by an FBI report on the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, compared them to those run by “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings . . . ” ... All of the crucial elements of the stab-in-the-back charge were now in place. Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were traitors and “revolutionaries,” individuals who were “conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops,” and “excrement” who could now be safely incarcerated “immediately” or even “eliminated.” ... Once again, criticism of the war in Iraq had been adroitly linked to criticism of the administration, and then to treason—something that would, somehow, magically empower the enemy and demoralize our own troops. Once again, unnatural enemies were striking at the heroic, Siegfried figures at the top of the administration, who struggled to get out their great truth that no intelligence had been manipulated and the Democrats were engaging in “revisionism.” ... What has really robbed the conspiracy theories of their effectiveness is how the war in Iraq has been conducted. Bush and his advisers have sought to use the war not only to punish their enemies but also to reward their supporters, a bit of political juggling that led them to demand nothing from the American public as a whole. Those of us who are not actively fighting in Iraq, or who do not have close friends and family members who are doing so, have not been asked to sacrifice in any way. The richest among us have even been showered with tax cuts. ... And yet, a convincing national narrative, though it may be the sheerest, most vicious fiction, can have incredible staying power—can perhaps outlast even the nation that it was meant to serve. It is ironic that, even as support for his war was starting to unravel in May of 2005, George W. Bush was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as “one of the greatest wrongs of history.” The President placed it in the “unjust tradition” of the 1938 Munich Pact and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which together paved the way for the start of World War II in 1939. Bush's words echoed his statements of three previous trips to Eastern Europe, dating back to 2001, during which he had pledged, “no more Munichs, no more Yaltas,” and called Yalta an “attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability,” a “bitter legacy,” and a “constant source of injustice and fear” that had “divided a living civilization.” The ultimate irony of Bush's perpetuating this ageless right-wing shibboleth is that for once it wasn't intended for home consumption. The Yalta myth has finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary America. Nor did Bush make any special attempt to let his countrymen know he was apportioning them equal blame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest calamities of the twentieth century. ... An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces, denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret prisoners. Our heroic age surely has come to an end.

Quote:

FALLON NAVAL AIR STATION, Nev. -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday he is deeply troubled by the success of terrorist groups in "manipulating the media" to influence Westerners. ... "What bothers me the most is how clever the enemy is," he continued, launching an extensive broadside at Islamic extremist groups which he said are trying to undermine Western support for the war on terror. "They are actively manipulating the media in this country" by, for example, falsely blaming U.S. troops for civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. "They can lie with impunity," he said, while U.S. troops are held to a high standard of conduct. Later, at a Reno, Nev., convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Rumsfeld made similar points. "The enemy lies constantly _ almost totally without penalty," he told the veterans group, which presented him with the Dwight D. Eisenhower Distinguished Service Award. "They portray our cause as a war on Islam when in fact the overwhelming majority of victims of their terrorism have been the thousands and thousands of innocent Muslims _ men, women and children _ that they have killed." He added, "While some at home argue for tossing in the towel, the enemy is waiting and hoping that we will do just that." Rumsfeld often complains about what he calls the terrorists' success in persuading Westerners that the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of a crusade against Islam. In his remarks at Fallon he did not offer any new examples of media manipulation; he put unusual emphasis, however, on the negative impact it is having on Americans in an era of 24-hour news. "The enemy is so much better at communicating," he added. "I wish we were better at countering that because the constant drumbeat of things they say _ all of which are not true _ is harmful. It's cumulative. And it does weaken people's will and lessen their determination, and raise questions in their minds as to whether the cost is worth it," he said alluding to Americans and other Westerners. ...

Quote:

Original post by flangazor This thread will be of interest.

Quote:

source The main competition to BBC television comes from the Channel 3 companies, known as Independent Television (ITV). Fifteen regionally based franchisees provide both local and national (network) services. In addition, GMTV operates a breakfast network service. Cross-ownership has developed significantly since government restrictions were eased in 1996, and the entire Channel 3 service is largely dominated by two companies, Carlton and Granada. They own or control 12 of the ITV franchises and claim to reach more than 100 per cent of UK households (there are two overlapping London Channel 3 broadcasters). ITV's share of the television audience in 2000-2001 was just a little under 29 per cent.

Quote:

even nerve gas in heavily populated cities

Quote:

Original post by Diodor Quote: even nerve gas in heavily populated cities The proof for that piece of disinformation was an image of a canister looking projectile carried by an IDF soldier that a german television interviewed specialist described as a mine clearing device with a range of 50 yards.

Quote:

Original post by skulldrudgery But that is all just speculation.

Quote:

Original post by skulldrudgery There are a lot of other much more likely explanations of the incident than a media/hezbollah conspiracy theory.

Quote:

Original post by owl Israel aknowledges the attack

Quote:

Israel apologised for the incident but made no admissions

Quote:

THE International Committee of the Red Cross has rebuked Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for relying on an unverified internet blog to claim an Israeli missile strike on one of its ambulances in southern Lebanon was a hoax. A spokeswoman for the ICRC in Geneva said yesterday there was no evidence to support Mr Downer's assertion that the international media had been duped in reporting that Israel had deliberately targeted the ambulance.

Quote:

Original post by Diodor Quote: even nerve gas in heavily populated cities The proof for that piece of disinformation was an image of a canister looking projectile carried by an IDF soldier that a german television interviewed specialist described as a mine clearing device with a range of 50 yards.

Quote:

For example, many places it has been claimed that Isreal has destroyed civilian infrastructure such as electricity, roads and bridges, and has used "evil" weapons such as phosphor bombs ("shake n' bake"), cluster bombs or even nerve gas in heavily populated cities.

Quote:

Isreal has repeatedly warned the civilians in these areas to get out or else, so either it's Hizballah holding civilians hostage as "live shields" and it falls back on them, or these civilians aren't so civil at all.

Quote:

Original post by Don Carnage This certainly proves that Isreal doesn't control the media at all! I'd suspect it's really the Hizballah, backed by Iran or other evil countries that in some way have influenced ITV. Of course the terrorists also have agents at NY Times, Boston Globe, etc., so the stories won't get fact checked at all before being printed. This just proves that the whole conspiracy about war crimes and attacks on civilians is a big hoax by Iran.

Quote:

Original post by Emmanuel Deloget Quote: Original post by Don Carnage This certainly proves that Isreal doesn't control the media at all! I'd suspect it's really the Hizballah, backed by Iran or other evil countries that in some way have influenced ITV. Of course the terrorists also have agents at NY Times, Boston Globe, etc., so the stories won't get fact checked at all before being printed. This just proves that the whole conspiracy about war crimes and attacks on civilians is a big hoax by Iran. Terrorrists have agents at NY Times? Stories about serious stuff like this are not fact-checked? All this story had been created by Iran? I'd like to see some proof for these incredible claims. (That doesn't make your whole point false: maybe this attack is effectively a hoax, but you go way too far in your conclusions - it really looks like you are the effective supporter of another conspiracy theory). Regards,

Quote:

Original post by meh I posted this into the Middle East thread yesterday. Really I think it shows the dangers of relying on a media controlled by the drive for ratings and sales as a primary source. That all seems pretty well researched and analysed to me. LessBread - Your borrowed CSI analogy works for anyone analysing anything when they aren't a subject matter expert. However few 'paranoid conspiracy theorists' cite sources, objectify their opinion and proove themselves wrong or admit to evidence being inconclusive. So unless you are a SME in diagnosing paranoid psychosis I call 'CSI' on your analysis of the articles author. Edit - Interesting the Red Cross seem to have taken down the hi-res image of the ambulance!

Quote:

Original post by Iftah I live in Israel where the air is just as warm and salty and moist, and I never seen rust cover metal in a few days. Maybe a few months at worst. I'm no chemist so maybe there is some possibility I'm not aware of, but it seems to me the rust around the holes is the single simple proof this ambulance was punctured long before this war.

Quote:

Original post by Iftah These days public opinion matters more than ever and can change the direction of nations. News companies rush to publish anything juicy and truth is secondary. A successful hoax can have a great effect, much more than forums or academia studies or even a good politician's speech. In parallel to the physical war there is a PR war, and it is another battlefield the ordinary army is outmatched against the terrorist style force.

Quote:

Original post by Iftah Special note about Ambulances - the Palestinians terrorists have been using ambulances and fired from within ambulances at soldiers. Today ambulances in Palestinian land need special permissions to travel, but even without permissions they are not fired on, just detained for checkup.

Quote:

Original post by Iftah I am sure Holland or Belgium or whatever will drop some of the Geneva convensions if it is being attacked by terrorists from within civilians, there is just no other way to respond. The general view of some of the Geneva conventions in Israel is that it is outdated and following it leaves you heavily outmatched when fighting those who don't follow the conventions.

Quote:

Original post by Iftah Mistakes happen. Now compare that to the deadly rockets that were aimed into Israeli cities...

Quote:

Original post by skulldrudgery He's parodying a strawman mock-up of the conspiracy theorists claims.