Staged photograph of Arafat donating blood
Remember this picture from the aftermath of 9/11? (Hat Tip: Power Line) I'm sure many of you do. Speaking at Harvard University on January 17, France 2's Charles Enderlin disclosed that the picture was staged. Arafat never donated blood for American victims of the 9/11 terror attacks. Given that the source was Enderlin - not exactly a reliable source - it needed to be confirmed elsewhere before anyone would really run with it. Now it has been confirmed. Scott Johnson of Power Line explains in a column in the current issue of the Weekly Standard how we can all now rest assured that Yasser Arafat never donated blood for the American victims of 9/11: Should we take his word for it? Enderlin is certainly an experienced and knowledgeable reporter on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But taking Enderlin's word for the hoax is a bit like trusting the paradoxical assertion of Epimenides, the Cretan philosopher who famously declared that all Cretans are liars. At the least, we should demand to see what Othello called "the ocular proof." Do the photographs conform to Enderlin's description of them? In short, the anwer is yes.Read it all. In the Corner, Andy McCarthy has the obvious comment:
Two photographs of a reclining Arafat are credited to the AP's Adel Hana. Both photos ran with a caption that reads like a press release: "Arafat, along with hundreds of Palestinians, participated in a blood drive for the victims of the deadly airline hijackings in the United States, which he condemned as a 'horrible attack.' " We all know how much Arafat disliked horrible attacks by Arab terrorists.
In neither photo is a needle in evidence. In the first AP photo, Arafat is prostrate. His blood has not yet been drawn and no blood is in evidence. Rather, Arafat stares warily at the tourniquet placed around his bare arm. The donation is about to be made. A nurse with a head scarf is about to search for the chairman's vein, Arafat looking on at his arm.
In the other AP photo, Arafat has apparently given his blood. The nurse with the head scarf is nowhere to be seen. In her place, a kneeling male medical official with his back to the camera jointly holds a nearly bursting bag of blood together with a uniformed security officer. With Enderlin's gloss, the photo takes on a comic aspect. Heavy lifting is required; it takes two hands to hold all the blood donated by the chairman to the beloved American people!
Reuters photographer Ahmed Jadallah also took a widely disseminated photograph of Arafat giving blood on September 12. Jadallah's photograph provides a wider view of the scene depicted in Hana's second photograph, with the male medical official displaying Arafat's voluminous blood donation with the assistance of the uniformed security official. The Reuters caption also reads like a press release covering talking points: "Palestinians said they sympathized with the victims of the attack in the United States despite their criticism of U.S. support for Israel during the Palestinian uprising."
So Enderlin's description of the photos as staged comports with "the ocular proof." But what about the photographers? What does the record reveal about them?
Given what's been confirmed about the terror master's health at the time of his death, I'm not sure this non-donation was such a bad thing ...No, it wasn't. And given all the photos of 'Palestinians' dancing in the streets to celebrate 9/11, I don't think it helped much anyway.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:05 PM
1 Comments:
It is just as well Arafat's blood was unfit for human use. A mass murderer gets punished one way or another. Nothing in this world happens without G-d intervening in it. And we all know how he died.
Incidentally, the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas has decreed a three mourning period for the late PFLP terrorist George Habash, who died in Jordan. Just the man Ehud Olmert calls his "peace partner."
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