Anatomy of a Palestinian Funeral

Change font size:  A |  A

When a lie makes it into print once, it's happenstance. A mere accident, no doubt, due to a lapse of judgment in editing the news feed. What, then, is it called when a lie is repeated countless times without apology? Apparently, it's called "business as usual" for the media. Whenever a funeral is presented by photographers embedded in the Palestinian territories, we're faced with dozens of photographs of crowds of weeping, screaming, shouting people parading around in the streets. We're also inevitably presented with a caption describing how the Israeli occupiers are responsible for the deaths, and how Israel is pouring out suffering all over the innocent, helpless Palestinian people. While these photos always make for a powerful statement, and are picked up by news organizations worldwide for their raw emotional appeal, the information presented along with them isn't always what it appears at first glance to be. Take this latest case, for instance. We're told by our intrepid photographers that Msoud Sbouh was found, shot dead in a remote region of the Gaza Strip. Msoud died, according to our photojournalists, as a result of a brief Israeli raid near the area. Later on in the day, however, the story presented in the captions began to change. Suddenly, we're told, the IDF has released a statement indicating that no soldiers were in the area at the time. We're also presented with a picture of the deceased, lying in the hospital next to a machine gun of questionable origin. Did our "investigative" photojournalists bother to find out where it came from? Of course not. It doesn't fit into their pre-canned, simplistic storyline, so it barely merited a mention. So what's the point that I'm trying to get to here? Well, in a nutshell, it's that it is near impossible to trust any coverage coming from the Palestinian territories, since the reporters sent to cover the "issues" there are so doggedly bent on depicting Israel as a cartoonish thug, enslaving the "poor, innocent" Palestinian people, that they couldn't possibly disengage themselves from their own inherent biases enough to present the facts fairly. (With a few notable and very honest exceptions, of course.) And if you can't trust the press to represent the Palestinian situation fairly, who's to say where else they're lying. Trust. But verify.