Despite seeking photos or videos that would showcase the alleged brutality and wanton violence of the Israeli military, he could find precious few bona fide images of the carnage.
Gaza City, August 5 – Ahmed Sinni, a Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporter, cannot decide which images to alter or reuse from unrelated conflicts for propaganda purposes, the 24-year-old reported Friday.
Looking for ways to spread his movement’s take on recent developments – mainly today’s retaliatory and preemptive Israeli strikes on Palestinian Islamic Jihad positions and personnel in the Gaza Strip – Sinni was frustrated in his inability to find appropriately heart-rending images of the carnage. Despite seeking photos or videos that would showcase the alleged brutality and wanton violence of the Israeli military, he could find precious few bona fide images of the carnage.
Sinni then decided to take images from the Syrian civil war and recaption them to suit the situation. But the collection of bloody images available from Syria has put the young activist in a dilemma, as many of the images have already been recycled for similar purposes by Hamas over numerous previous rounds of violence. Palestinian militants waged their own propaganda campaign when the coastal territory was under assault by Israel last year, frequently showing photos of dead Syrian children and claiming they were Gazans killed by indiscriminate Israeli rocket and artillery fire.
“I’m not entirely sure I want to go there,” said Sinni, who dismisses any notion of self-defense for Jews. “And although I know in my heart the Zionists are evil and cannot be trusted, I cannot risk my own credibility by using photos that were already employed for similar purposes. What if we get called out on it?”
“We’d love to do what we’ve always done and just toss all reasonable realism to the wind,” lamented Sinni’s colleague Habbig Layah. “But things seem to be shifting. We used to be able to count on NGOs such as Amnesty International wielding their reputation to run propaganda interference for us, but since last year, when Amnesty chucked any pretense of expertise, credibility, or objectivity with its ‘Apartheid’ report, and its recent distortion of all values with its statements on Russia-Ukraine, that’s not an assumption I think we can make anymore. We might have to look for actual images of Israeli atrocities, and those seem to be in short supply for some reason.”
Layah then suggested to Sinni a compromise in which he stick with photoshopped, staged, or ambiguous images, and thus spare himself the need to address any previous uses of the powerful images in other theaters of war or disaster.
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