Thursday, April 17, 2008

Pallywood Agitprop from Al-Beeb

Keep the Muhammad al-Dura hoax in mind when you watch this BBC news video about yesterday’s incident in the Gaza strip in which a Palestinian video cameraman was killed, allegedly by “indiscriminate” Israeli shelling.

Pallywood in GazaI’m no video expert, and the BBC segment is brief, tiny, and very jiggly, so I’ll leave it to analysts more experienced with video forensics to dig out the technical details from this news clip.

Richard Landes at Augean Stables has experience with Pallywood and its staged news. Here are his questions about the BBC video sequence:

My puzzlement is:

  • whether the injuries displayed on the young men are compatible with a tank shell
  • whether a tank shell could have hit both the youngsters and a car 100 meters away
  • why the car is not on fire in one image and is very prominently in flames in the other

These are good points. You see a kid lying on the ground next to his bike, with a splodge of blood on his side and his shoes some distance away, like Calvin after a surprise attack from Hobbes. Is that how a victim of overhead shelling would appear? And what about the lack of any other evident damage nearby from the shell?

This whole thing smells fishy to me, but then I’m paranoid after years of fauxtography and Pallywood “news” footage.

I noticed another discrepancy in this video, and I welcome feedback from technically-minded people who know more about videography than I do.
- - - - - - - - -
For more than twenty years I was a landscape painter, and spent a lot of time outdoors in the variable light and weather plying my trade. One of the trickier aspects of the job was to get the “time of the painting” exactly right, to fix the moment of the day represented by the light in the painted image so that it was consistent throughout the depicted landscape. Learning to do this made me acutely sensitive to the length and direction of shadows.

The subliminal skills honed by all those years of painting kept niggling me as I watched this video over and over again, until I eventually became conscious of what was bothering me.

The first minute or so of the video consists of a brief segment allegedly shot by the dead cameraman, followed by three segments shot subsequently along the road where the bike-riding kids and the burning truck appear. The first and third of these segments are part of the same general video sequence, but the second one — about fifteen seconds, from 00:42 to 00:57 — is from different footage. It shows the mourning spectators milling about next to the roadside fence.

Pallywood in GazaIt’s difficult to be certain, because the camera angle is from the opposite direction, and the sequence is very brief and jiggly. However, the shadows look distinctly longer in this shot, and the cast of light is more orange, as if it were a half an hour or so closer to sunset. In the other sequences, the shadows of the brush on the other side of the road do not cross the road entirely, but in the middle segment they appear to intersect the opposite bank a short distance beyond the spectators.

I’ll go out on a limb here and offer a very amateur opinion: the middle segment was shot a half an hour to forty-five minutes later than the “dead” children and the burning truck.

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Even if none of this video was staged, even if all the events actually occurred as described, this report has all the earmarks of a classic Pallywood production. The events are drawn entirely from Palestinian accounts, presented from the Palestinian point of view, and transmit uncritically all the conclusions and value judgments of the Palestinian stringers who supply the material.

In contrast, anything that would reflect badly on the Palestinians is invariably preceded by the phrase “Israel says”. Palestinian accounts are reported as fact, while Israeli versions are alleged, and obviously meant to be questioned. This is typical of MSM reporting on Gaza and the West Bank, particularly by the BBC.

Staged or not, this report is a disgrace.


Hat tips: TB and Augean Stables.

14 comments:

Stephen Gash said...

The BBC only knows about the Palestinians.
Thet are reminded every week that Muslims are murdering non-Muslims in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia the Phillipines and India every day.
The BBC is a propaganda and censorship outfit, nothing more.
It even ran an article today about Obama's Indonesian connection, describing Indonesian as a multicultural and tolerant society.
It also is running a series called The Medievel Mind, in the first episode it gave out the usual pro-Islam propaganda about "the golden age" of science blah blah blah.
In the future there will be a series called the 21st Century Mind decribing the congenital dhimmitude of the BBC. Naturally it won't be on the BBC because it will have been closed down.

Steen said...

True, there are a few fishy tihngs you notice at once : at 00:40 sec. the jeep is NOT on fire, though the shell is supposed to have landed already. At 00:58 sec. - same scene - its burning fiercely.

As for the two youngsters, if the shell has killed them, it could only be pieces of shrapnel, but honestly,at first sight it looks more like gunwounds

Findalis said...

Who's taking the film. I saw the film and it went blank, you saw 2 bodies face down on the ground and a tank in the background.

The car wasn't even hit. The 2 bodies laying comfortably down, hands covering around their heads, and no blood. Look at footage of attacks from Sderot, there is a multitude of blood, and that is just one rocket.

The bodies are recognizable. I showed this footage to a friend who fought in WW2 and was subjected to Tank fire from the Germans. He said to me that: "No tank shell would have left them in that pristine condition. They would have been in pieces!" He went on to add, "Where is the crater? A tank shell leaves a crater."

The victims (I use this term loosely) clothing is not in disarray. Actually just the shirt is raised, as you can see in the picture as the effect of the arms being raised over the face. The feet are relaxed.

This is a fake, just like that French film.

JG27 AD said...

At the BBC story site if you scroll down a bit you will see a photo of the dark shirted boy lifting himself up and looking at the camera.

Obviously not dead...

AD

ole said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Baron Bodissey said...

ole --

Gates of Vienna's rules about comments require that they be civil, temperate, on-topic, and show decorum. Your comment violated the last of these rules. We keep a PG-13 blog, and exclude foul language, explicit descriptions, and epithets. This is why I deleted your comment.

Use of asterisks is an appropriate alternative.

--------------------------

ole said...

Why should we care whether the BBC fottage is fake or not ?
I live less than 40 km from the place where it happend, and one of my sons knows a soldier who was there.
What actualy happenend is this :
Hamas terrorists were spotted trying to put a roadside bomb close to the border. A small group of israeli soldiers went after them across the securityfence (this might have been more brave than smart). Inside enemy teritory the soldiers ran into an ambush ,and had a hard time fighting their way out of it. 3 soldiers died , and the local comander called in tank-fire upon the hilltop from which his soldiers where attacked.
If some palestinian children where driving around on their bycycles on that hiltop ,ther'es only one thing to say about it :
SO F***ING WHAT !

Bilgeman said...

Baron;

I don't buy it. Until the Palis field tanks, the only ordnance a tank is likely to fire is a "beehive" anti-personnel round,(unless they're bunker-busting, and that would call for a HEAT shaped-charge round).

If it was a beehive round that zapped those people, pretty much all that would be left would be strawberry paste...with a LOT of spattered blood. not a nice tidy little belly wound.

If that bicyclist was supposed to have "bled-out" there, then where's the pond of his blood?

I note a marked lack of shrapnel damage to the camera...shrapnel would not only have busted the lens, but ripped right through the camera body. Lenses can be swapped easily, camera bodies are expensive.

There is also a marked absence of shrapnel damage to the hood and fenders of the "TV" vehicle, pretty nifty shell those IDF tank boyz have that only damages an easily replaceable windshield.

(I wasn't a tanker, but an anti-tank missile gunner, so don't take my opinions as expert advice)

wildiris said...

I've looked at the posts on a number of other sites. Although several different tank rounds have been suggested as the fatal shot, one thing is apparent. That is, that the damage to the truck is not consistent with the expected damage from any of the proposed rounds.

After all of my review, my humble opinion of the incident is as follows. The film crew was already up there to film a staged civilian death scene. That explains the bicyclists, “actors”. The truck was already damaged and towed up there from some other location. Possibly to recreate the “news service attack” that, that particular Reuters cameraman has staged before. While up on the road, they saw an IDF tank in the distance and decided to film it for some extra footage, the camera crew was mistaken for Palestinians readying an anti-tank weapon, and was fired upon. The rest is history.

A small book could be written on all of the discrepancies contained within the reporting of this incident. The one thing I don’t understand is the beginning of the video. You can clearly see the tank firing directly at the camera. The time of flight for a shell would be a second or two, plenty enough time to drop below that hillside, which is clearly visible in all of the pictures, and into safety. But the cameraman just keeps the film rolling anyway? Must have been a really, really, really dumb individual.

Also, any kind of cluster weapon, besides the damage to the truck and individuals, would have also left scars in the pavement. But none are to be seen.

X said...

It's like the Zionist Rust Bombs...

Zenster said...

a Palestinian video cameraman was killed, allegedly by “indiscriminate” Israeli shelling.

Let's get a few things clear. First off, Israel has demonstrated almost saintly restraint in its dealings with the Palestinians. Second, if rather than the exception, the rule was "'indiscriminate' Israeli shelling", Gaza would no longer exist.

With their fauxtography, the Palestinians have cried "wolf" for so long that nothing short of a block-by-block rolling artillery barrage should be given more than passing notice.

If anyone feels even a slight pang of sympathy for the Palestinains, I urge you to watch the video, "Relentless". It is a detailed compilation of how the Palestinians have violated nearly every single pact, promise, accord and truce ever agreed upon. These maggots have NEVER signed anything worth the paper it was printed on. The oft repeated observation about them continues to hold true that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Even a block-by-block rolling artillery barrage would be more humane that what these lying, duplictous scumbags deserve. A majority of Palestinians knowingly voted for their self-declared terrorist government and the time has come for them to pay the piper. Somewhere along the line they must have forgotten that the Devil calls all the best tunes.

Tuan Jim said...

Some articles I saw mentioned that it was a flechette round (presumably that "beehive round" mentioned earlier). While he might have ended up a bloody smear, that would really depend on the range - much like a shotgun shell (only with needles instead of balls).

wildiris said...

A few more thoughts on this incident. Comparing the shadows as seen in the video with those in the published photos, one can conclude that the tank that fired the round, seen in the video, was behind and back down the road from the scene. That is, the truck was hit from the rear. There are only a few photos that show the truck from the rear, but the ones you can see do show considerable damage. This would not be characteristic of a flechette round. Also, a flechette round would have left steel darts stuck everywhere, some of which would have been visible to the camera crews filming there. It was a cluster munition of some sort, but not a flechette round.

Findalis said...

As I said earlier, the wounds on the bodies are non-existent. If they got hit with a flechette round, they would have been in pieces and a regular shell would have left a crater in the ground, no burning wreckage, and only body piece. The bodies look too pristine, as if posed.

This is definitely a fake. But then again most of the footage from the Palestinians are fakes.

wildiris said...

One last bit of info. If you go to picture 192 of the sequence posted on Yahoo and look, through the smoke, to the far horizon, halfway between the firefighters and the burning truck, you will see the location where the tank fired from.