Dismantling a liar: The bankruptcy of the Left

To be honest with you, I try to ignore people on Twitter who don't have a lot of followers. Normally, it's not worth the time or the exposure I give them to respond to them. But this one has gone too far.

I'd like to introduce you to one @JamesMArcher. Here's his bio - a panoply of causes of the extreme Left, with the Democratic party being too far to the right for him.


A short while ago, Mr. Archer tweeted this at me:

#buddhism #StopSabalTrail #NoDAPL #SmallBusiness #SinglePayer #WarIsARacket #UnblockCuba

@IsraelMatzav pic.twitter.com/A3MX7l6wSM

— Mike Archer (@JamesMArcher) February 26, 2017

He seems to use this picture fairly regularly - it's not the only time it's in his timeline.

There's just one small problem. Like so many other symbols of the Left, the picture is a fake.

The Israeli boy in the yarmulke is Zvi Shapiro, the son of two secular American-Israelis. The Palestinian boy is Zemer Aloni, an Israeli Jew. The only real aspect of the photo is that the boys were indeed friends and that the picture was taken in their Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor, which straddles the 1949 armistice line and contains both a Jewish and an Arab section. The boys grew up on the Jewish side of the neighborhood, and while they both recall interactions with Palestinians, neither counted close friends on the other side of the line.

The picture was taken by Ricki Rosen, an American photojournalist who has been covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for 26 years. Rosen snapped the photo on assignment for Maclean’s, the national news magazine of Canada, for a cover story about the Oslo Peace Accords. Rosen said that the magazine’s art director was so specific in what he wanted that he even drew her a picture — one boy in a yarmulke, the other in a keffiyeh shot from the back walking down a long road, which was supposed to symbolize the road to peace. He didn’t care whether the boys were actually Israelis or Palestinians, nor did it occur to him that the Palestinian’s keffiyeh would be styled in a way more typical for elderly Palestinian men than for young boys.

“It was a symbolic illustration,” said Rosen. “It was never supposed to be a documentary photo.” She also took other real-life photos for the same article.

Oops.

Read it all.