War Porn

“The Qana Massacre Hoax.”

The first hint of this meme that I noticed was a Powerline post on Sunday about the Condoleeza Rice banner, the one with text referring to the Qana incident, the one that appeared with such suspicious rapidity on the streets of Beirut.

The banner was certainly very timely — it was hung on the morning after the “massacre”, just a couple of hours after the death of the victims in Qana.

And then it turned out that the Israeli airstrike that damaged the building had actually occurred some seven or eight hours prior to the building’s collapse. Curiouser and curiouser.

[Warning: some of the images in posts linked below are graphic.]

Israel Matzav, EU Referendum, and Confederate Yankee have followed up with analyses of the timing of the banner and the sequencing of the Qana photographs. EU Referendum has focused on the suspicious and mysterious “Green Helmet” and “T-shirt”, the two supposed rescue workers who changed clothes and positions so many times carrying the same two miraculously clean and un-bloody bodies to the waiting ambulance.

The “massacre” at Qana may well have been staged. This is not to say that Lebanese children did not die in Israeli airstrikes; they certainly did. This is not to say that the parents of these children do not mourn; I believe that they do.

But this is all very reminscent of Mohammed al-Dura, the boy whose “murder by Israeli fire” has been conclusively shown to be a hoax arranged by the Palestinians, with the complicity of the France 2 television network. Mohammed al-Dura may have been accidentally killed by Palestinian fire, or he may have been deliberately killed for propaganda purposes, or even not killed at all, but he was most definitely not killed by the Israelis.

Yet his murder attained an iconic “truth” which has transcended and outlived the mere facts of the situation. He is visual proof of Israeli (and, by implication, Western) brutality and indifference towards Muslims. He has even been made into a postage stamp in Tunisia.

So the truth doesn’t really matter.

Qana is the latest in a long series of iconic images, an extensive collection of photos and video that might be entitled The West Always Commits Atrocities Against the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. The first in the series was Eddie Adams’ famous photo of the the summary execution of Nguyen Van Lem during the Tet offensive in February of 1968. The uses to which the photo was put ignored all context — namely, that it was taken in the middle of an enemy offensive in a brutal war, and the victim was identifiably an enemy soldier, and an officer of the Viet Cong. The image was eventually enshrined as the visual symbol of America’s guilt towards the “brown people” of Vietnam, and was soon joined by other familiar icons such as Kent State and My Lai.

Eddie Adams’ photo was very disturbing. The newsreel footage of the same incident — which I saw in Britain in the late 1960s, when it was aired by the nascently anti-American BBC — was even more disturbing. But the film was suppressed in this country for many years, because graphic atrocity images were generally not shown in the media.

Times have changed. The mainstream media are nowadays all too ready to show graphic images. Provided, of course, that they illustrate the dominant paradigm: America, Israel, and other Western nations always behave in a barbaric fashion towards the Third World and people of color.

For guilt-ridden liberal Westerners, looking at such images is a form masochistic voyeurism. “Oh, look at that! We’re so bad! We’re so awful! We deserve whatever we get!”

With a ready market like that, the brutal culture of the Arab world has plenty of supply to satisfy the demand. Muslims are the “brown people”, the victims of the moment, and they obligingly supply the forbidden images that we are so hungry to see.

And doing so suits the strategy of the Islamists, so there is a perfect synergy of effort: We want to hang ourselves; they hand us the rope. What could be better?

Staged or real, the prurient images of victimization are a precision-guided missile that strikes the target perfectly.

The dead bodies of children are props; the “rescue workers” are actors and stagehands. And the directors of the drama seem to be the media, who have lately become knowingly complicit.

Take a look at the Qana photo at right (to dampen the voyeuristic aspects, I have cropped out the most disturbing parts). See that guy crouching in the background?

He’s not a rescue worker. He’s another photographer. The photographer who took the this photo was not careful enough to keep his colleague out of the picture. Or maybe it didn’t matter to him — the Potemkin process is so far along that no one really minds if the secret is revealed.

Qana and other similar incidents are, regardless of authenticity, primarily media events. They are managed and delivered as weapons by the enemies of Western Civilization, with the connivance of our own media.

This is War Pornography, delivered to the greedy and guilt-ridden consumers of the West by our ruthless opponents. The couch potatoes of our intelligentsia are sitting here, sweating in a darkened room, with a raincoat over the engorged self-righteousness in their laps.

I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.


Hat tip: Olivia Smith.