Stringers and collaborators: Hamas and elsewhere
This is unconscionable behavior:
On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.
What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.
Pretty much all reporting from that area depends heavily on Palestinian stringers. This has been going on for a long long time. For example, the al Durah hoax (2000) was spread to Europe by a Palestinian stringer cameraman named Talal Abu Rahma, whom the French journalist in charge, Charles Enderlin, trusted implicitly. Enderlin should have known better – and maybe he did, so perhaps he was a mere fool rather than a knave and a fool.
So I have no trouble believing these more recent photographers were tipped off by Hamas and embedded with them, and kept quiet about it. More:
Eslaiah, a freelancer who also works for CNN, crossed into Israel, took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza. …
Ali Mahmud and Hatem Ali were positioned to get pictures of the horrific abductions of Israelis into Gaza.
Mahmud captured the pickup truck carrying the body of German-Israeli Shani Louk and Ali got several shots of abductees being kidnapped into the Strip. …
Is it conceivable to assume that “journalists” just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?
Even if they didn’t know the exact details of what was going to happen, once it unfolded did they not realize they were breaching a border? And if so, did they notify the news agencies? Some sort of communication was undoubtedly necessary — before, after or during the attack — in order to get the photos published.
To go back even further in time, perhaps you remember this – when during a discussion of a Vietnam-like situation, Mike Wallace replied the following to a question about what he would do if he was embedded with the enemy and learned of an impending ambush of American soldiers:
Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t [he and] Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”
I really suggest you read the whole thing. This occurred during a 1987 panel discussion that aired on television, and Jennings first disagreed but then ended up agreeing with Wallace. And they weren’t even stringers; they were highly respected reporters at the time.
During the Vietnam War itself, there was also the case of Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent:
During the Vietnam War, Time reporter Pham Xuan An befriended everyone who was anyone in Saigon, including American journalists such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, the CIA’s William Colby, and the legendary Colonel Edward Lansdale—not to mention the most influential members of the South Vietnamese government and army. None of them ever guessed that he was also providing strategic intelligence to Hanoi, smuggling invisible ink messages into the jungle inside egg rolls. His early reports were so accurate that General Giap joked, “We are now in the U.S. war room.”
So there’s a long tradition of this sort of thing.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/dogs-war-israel-hamas-antonio-garcia-martinez
The photojounos of Hamas will be found. It will be unwise for anyone not involved to stand anywhere near such a one, even for a moment.
Honestly it was never conscionable, and it is horrifying that it has taken so long. I’m of the opinion that those guilty need to be identified as terrorists if not traitors liable to summary execution (which is a problem since not even armed terrorists caught red handed are really subject to such). Which is one reason why I’ve honestly been in favor of treating Al Jazeera as a terrorist entity whose agents and stringers are liable to be shot on sight.
Since it’s obvious many modern “reporters” and “journalists” do not feel any higher duty or calling pushing them to act, there needs to be other measures for it. Such as stricter libel laws and draconian punishments for people acting like Mike Wallace. I’ve been of the opinion that some examples need to be made for a long time. Especially since let’s not doubt that these things can be deadly. Goebbels is one of the most infamous people in history for a reason, and propaganda for totalitarianism, genocide, and terrorism has been found legally liable in cases like the Rwandan Genocide tribunals.
don’t call them shirley,
https://twitter.com/omriceren/status/1722682567990579349
its rather striking, I don’t think they ever had a stringer in the khmer rouge, although edward herman and noam chomsky did a very good whitewashing job,
even during the iraq war, there was not this level of complicity in butchery,
Rule 303
“Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t [he and] Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”
“Article III, Section 3, Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
@Geoffrey Britain
Exactly. It would be hard to get stick (one downside of the lacks of Declarations of War) but it’d be good. And I’ve become convinced people like Jennings and Wallace need to have more “tragic accidents” happen to them. Especially in warzones where the lines are blurred.
Ernie Pyle vs Wallace and Jennings. How far they have fallen. Not fit to carry his canteen.
a small subset of this, terry anderson’s unhinged daughter, salome, wrote a memoir where she seemed to trust her father’s hezbollah captures, to Mossad, because reasons,
I have talked about this for forty years! When I spent my junior year on Israel, I met a ton of foreign journalists. I found a great bar in Jerusalem near an office building that housed many, many news agencies’ offices. From hanging out there, I learned that:
Few of the “journalists” knew any Hebrew and almost none knew Arabic.
They rarely got off their a**es to cover anything, preferring the comfort and safety of that bar in Jerusalem.
They relied VERY HEAVILY on local stringers, almost all of whom were Arab, and most of whom were also on the payroll of the PLO (or one of its affiliates. Now, they might also be on the payroll of Hamas or Hezbollah, or the PA)
For years, people just kind of nodded in response to me saying this, “Uh huh, sure, r-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ght…” It was as of people didn’t believe me, or thought it just didn’t matter.
Truth is out there now.
Time Magazine, with the help of a Baathist stringer, faked up the Haditha massacre. The Marines, to their shame, treated the accused horribly for some time. Not heard there was an apology from Time or from the USMC to their guys.
They rarely got off their a**es to cover anything, preferring the comfort and safety of that bar in Jerusalem.
They relied VERY HEAVILY on local stringers,
–Someone Else
Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo 60s/70s journalist, is an understandably tough sell for conservatives.
But he never portrayed his fellow journalists as much beyond hacks hanging out in comfortable bars and passing on whatever their stringers reported as Final Wisdom.
Talk about ingratitude…
“Hundreds of anti-Israel protestors break into New York Times building;
“Protestors calling for destruction of Israel, accusing Biden and the Times of supporting “genocide,” occupy NYT lobby.”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/380060
The NYP demonstrating why it is currently the nation’s “paper of record” (to be fair, the NYT has been in the toilet for a long time now, and the WaPo is a joke; only the Babylon Bee is giving the NYP a run for its money…):
“What’s really at the root of anti-Jewish hate on college campuses”—
https://nypost.com/2023/11/09/opinion/whats-really-at-the-root-of-anti-jewish-hate-on-college-campuses/
“The week in whoppers: Barack Obama justifies terror, the NYT slurs US, Israel and more”—
https://nypost.com/2023/11/09/opinion/the-week-in-whoppers-barack-obama-justifies-terror-the-nyt-slurs-us-israel-and-more/
“Antisemitic hate crimes soar, exposing lunacy of Biden team’s lectures on Islamophobia”—
https://nypost.com/2023/11/09/opinion/antisemitic-hate-crimes-soar-exposing-lunacy-of-biden-teams-lectures-on-islamophobia/
When I read of this I also thought of that old, Mike Wallace interview.
What an awful philosophy! I hope, if Mr. Wallace actually found himself in such a situation, he would act differently. Sometimes we hold extreme beliefs at a philosophical level that don’t dictate how we act in the real world.
Imagine a photographer at a house fire. A mother sees him from a window and drops her baby towards him. The photographer snaps a photo of the baby hitting the ground, or the photographer drops his camera and catches the baby? I think 99.99% of us drop the camera.
they were not this extreme in iraq and afghanistan, well except for bobby ghos and yousafsai, who always an in with the latest savage celebrity
https://www.frontpagemag.com/ap-was-warned-in-2018-about-its-hamas-journalist/