The photos, graphic and brutal, streamed onto the NYC Indymedia newswire, under the headline "Photos from Lebanon You Won't See in the New York Times." Trite, but true. A trip through Monday's newspaper demonstrates the Western media's calculus of suffering.
Additional photos, shot by AP photographers and dispatched by Hanady Salman of the As-Safir newspaper in Beirut, have appeared on the Angry Arab blog. They are heart-wrenching and stomach churning. Childrens’ blackened bodies lie in the rubble of a burned out jeep. A man with a stream of blood and a ghostly white powder running down his face staggers out of rubble.
Today's New York Times has 9 photos related to the current war between Lebanon and Israel. The color photos on the front page of the paper sum up the Times' view of the distribution of death as well as anything; entirely above the fold are scenes of shrouded Israeli corpses killed in rocket attack on Haifa being removed from the wreckage of a train station. Parly below the fold is a second photo, captioned "a night of bombing produced rubble in a neighborhood that is a Hezbollah stronghold." A single man stands with his hands at his sides, staring at the wreckage.
At once we see the take from the Times-- simultaneously able to claim "balance" ("we showed destruction on both sides") and the subtle non-balance at play-- there are no dead Lebanese on the front page of the paper. There are, certainly, dead Israelis. A true balance would show corpses on both sides ... and, as Hanady Salman has shown, there are corpses on both sides to display.
Actually, the entire visual panorama is rather bloodless. The dominant photo (four column, color) after the jump is an Israeli family grieving over the death of a family member in Haifa. No other corpses are shown, and, apparently, the Lebanese do not grieve. The "equivalent" photo, on page 8, in black and white and below the fold, show several Palestinians grieving at a Gaza morgue (for a "militant," of course). The other photos on page six show Lebanese families fleeing through rubble (again, no death) and Syrians in Damascus watching a TV broadcast. The small page 8 photos show various pictures-- a Lebanese refugee family, the destruction in Haifa. And that’s about it.
The death of innocent civilians on either side of this conflict is a terrible tragedy. Neither Israeli civilians nor Shi'ite Lebanese innocents deserve to die for the crimes-- "justified" or not-- of their governments. The point here is not to assign blame for the current war-- I'll leave that others smarter than me. Rather, it is once again to point out the skewed view presented by the Western media when it comes to who dies and who lives in the Middle East. This lack of understanding has very real consequences. It is easy-- though no longer in any way justified by history-- for New Yorkers to sit in their cool, air conditioned rooms and marvel at the "perennial stupidity" of the Middle East. We've certainly acted that way during every other "third world" conflict over the past quarter century.
Let's remember that Osama bin Laden himself watched the 1982 bombing of Lebanon and first conceived his plans to demolish American towers. "While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women," he said in 2004. If destruction visits our shores again, we must never be able to ask, in perplexed innocence, "why do they hate us?"
Additional photos, shot by AP photographers and dispatched by Hanady Salman of the As-Safir newspaper in Beirut, have appeared on the Angry Arab blog. They are heart-wrenching and stomach churning. Childrens’ blackened bodies lie in the rubble of a burned out jeep. A man with a stream of blood and a ghostly white powder running down his face staggers out of rubble.
Today's New York Times has 9 photos related to the current war between Lebanon and Israel. The color photos on the front page of the paper sum up the Times' view of the distribution of death as well as anything; entirely above the fold are scenes of shrouded Israeli corpses killed in rocket attack on Haifa being removed from the wreckage of a train station. Parly below the fold is a second photo, captioned "a night of bombing produced rubble in a neighborhood that is a Hezbollah stronghold." A single man stands with his hands at his sides, staring at the wreckage.
At once we see the take from the Times-- simultaneously able to claim "balance" ("we showed destruction on both sides") and the subtle non-balance at play-- there are no dead Lebanese on the front page of the paper. There are, certainly, dead Israelis. A true balance would show corpses on both sides ... and, as Hanady Salman has shown, there are corpses on both sides to display.
Actually, the entire visual panorama is rather bloodless. The dominant photo (four column, color) after the jump is an Israeli family grieving over the death of a family member in Haifa. No other corpses are shown, and, apparently, the Lebanese do not grieve. The "equivalent" photo, on page 8, in black and white and below the fold, show several Palestinians grieving at a Gaza morgue (for a "militant," of course). The other photos on page six show Lebanese families fleeing through rubble (again, no death) and Syrians in Damascus watching a TV broadcast. The small page 8 photos show various pictures-- a Lebanese refugee family, the destruction in Haifa. And that’s about it.
The death of innocent civilians on either side of this conflict is a terrible tragedy. Neither Israeli civilians nor Shi'ite Lebanese innocents deserve to die for the crimes-- "justified" or not-- of their governments. The point here is not to assign blame for the current war-- I'll leave that others smarter than me. Rather, it is once again to point out the skewed view presented by the Western media when it comes to who dies and who lives in the Middle East. This lack of understanding has very real consequences. It is easy-- though no longer in any way justified by history-- for New Yorkers to sit in their cool, air conditioned rooms and marvel at the "perennial stupidity" of the Middle East. We've certainly acted that way during every other "third world" conflict over the past quarter century.
Let's remember that Osama bin Laden himself watched the 1982 bombing of Lebanon and first conceived his plans to demolish American towers. "While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women," he said in 2004. If destruction visits our shores again, we must never be able to ask, in perplexed innocence, "why do they hate us?"
Add your comments