One Headline, Two Photographs
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I was intrigued by the BBC World Service’s top story this morning which was accompanied by this image.
What, I thought, could the story be? The answer was Israel ‘will not strike at Hamas.’ But why choose to illustrate the story with a photograph of an armed Israeli soldier practically taking aim at three, stone-throwing boys?
I know that the Tel Aviv suicide bombing is yesterday’s news, but I don’t see what stone-throwing boys has to do with a suicide attack that killed nine people and with Israel’s possible retaliation for it.
The juxtaposition was enhanced when I opened the New York Times to the following picture on its front page. Now judge the impact of the headline Israel ‘will not strike at Hamas.’
UPDATE: RELATED
The international governing body for soccer [FIFA] condemned the Jewish state, and announced that it was considering possible action over the Israeli air strike last week on the Gaza soccer field that had been used for terrorist training exercises. The field, which had also reportedly served as a missile launching pad, was empty at the time; the strike itself came in response to the continuing barrage of Qassam rocket attacks directed at Israeli towns and villages.
[...]As FIFA meets in the next few days to decide what action to take against Israel, the double standards involved could not be more obvious. Up to now FIFA, which sees itself as a purely sporting body, has gone out of its way to avoid politics, and has refrained from criticizing even the most appalling human-rights abuses connected to soccer players and stadiums.
When Saddam Hussein’s son Uday had Iraqi soccer players tortured in 1997 after they failed to qualify for the 1998 FIFA World Cup Finals in France, FIFA remained silent. Uday, who was chairman of the Iraqi soccer association, had star players tortured again in 1998. And in 2000, following a quarterfinal defeat in the Asia Cup, three Iraqi players were whipped and beaten for three days by Uday’s bodyguards. The torture took place at the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters, but FIFA said nothing.
Again, FIFA simply looked the other way while the Taliban used U.N.-funded soccer fields to slaughter and flog hundreds of innocent people who had supposedly violated sharia law in front of crowds of thousands chanting “God is great.” (Afghan soccer coach Habib Ullahniazi said that as many as 30 people were executed in the middle of the field during the intermissions of a single soccer match at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium.)
[...]Meanwhile FIFA (and other sporting bodies) continually turn a blind eye to boycotts of Israeli sportsmen.
In February, Tal Ben Haim  the Israeli national soccer team captain, who plays his club soccer for the English Premiership team Bolton Wanderers  was banned from joining his Bolton teammates for their training matches in Dubai. FIFA pointedly ignored this. So did Bolton despite the fact that the team claims to be among the leaders of the campaign to “Kick racism out of football” in the U.K.
Only last week, another English club, West Ham, left their two Israeli players, Yossi Benayoun and Yaniv Katan, at home when they went to Dubai. FIFA naturally had nothing to say.
(Tom Gross Via Clive Davis)
8 Comments
April 18th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Paul, you’re from the land of BBC, you know why they did it.
April 18th, 2006 at 10:35 am
But the US is ‘on the side’ of Israel which makes the choice of photos even more interesting. My bro and his wife are off there to do surgery for Palestinian bomb victims in a few months.
April 18th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Oh, it’s too early. I read your piece wrong and attributed the photos to the wrong papers. I always come across as retarded on your comments section.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
as i can now attest, being a newspaper editor, the BBC used the photo …. because it is a great photo! wrong for the story sure, but great nonetheless. and this form a former paid israeli propagandist.
April 27th, 2006 at 9:24 am
I don’t think so. I think it was laziness.
It just looks like a stock pic that could have been taken any time in the past ten years or more. They could have used any pic they wanted from the bombing.
I think the use of this photo is a good insight into the mindset of staff at the BBC. This photograph sums up everything that Israel is to them–men shooting at stone-throwing boys.
May 15th, 2006 at 8:02 am
The two pictures used by the different news sources indicate two different, each quite partisan, mindsets that one can bring to the Israel-Palestine crisis, and, to that extent, both are biased. But both come from reality. It is not any more biased for the BBC to show the picture they did – it is well documented that Israeli soldiers have shot and killed small boys with nothing but stones, or even small boys who have mistakenly entered the wrong zone. The BBC report obviously comes from a mindset of being at least slightly suspicious of Israel, but then the BBC has a tradition of being suspicious of all sides, quite a good tactic, I think. I haven’t seen a BBC report taking anything that Hamas says at face value, but when the same rules apply to Israel claims of bias abound.
Even in the Falkland’s war, claims from both sides about the number of casualties, etc., were reported as exactly that.
To imply that one is biased and the other is accurate is really strange. Obviously, the New York Times were emotionalising the debate in a very different way. It’s a very traumatic picture to see, and it makes you feel angry at the people who did that horrible thing, in turn making you angry at Palestinians in general and less able to really take part in a rational appraisal of the situation. I have yet to see footage of atrocities committed by the Israeli side, which are surprisingly more numerous than those committed by suicide bombers, given the same kind of attention. Even the BBC picture is one that, while showing a particular (true) aspect of the conflict, does not seem to be about scrambling the emotions of the reader to an extent where they react with anger where perhaps a bit of thought is required.
May 15th, 2006 at 8:14 am
Matt, my point is that the story is about Israel’s response to the Tel Aviv bombing.
The BBC picture has nothing to do with the bombing whereas the New York Times picture does.
Alas, there is no such thing as “a rational appraisal of the situation” when it comes to Israel/Palestine.
May 15th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Well, I fully agree that rational appraisals are in short supply on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. Understandable when you think about the trauma that both communities have undergone in the relatively recent past.
But when the NYT reports a murder, or a response to a murder, it doesn’t show a bloody picture of a dissected corpse. The equivalent is to accompany the headline “Police Have No Leads In Last Week’s Murder” with a similarly gory picture. There’s a lot of political capital in doing what the NYT did, in choosing that particular picture. In wars it is always advantageous to portray one’s own atrocities in as cold a way as possible, while playing up as much as possible those committed by the opposing side.
Both pictures seem to be conscious editorial decisions to portray the conflict in a particular light. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think the BBC is coming totally out of left field with its picture, it is not a story specifically about the bombing but about the Israeli response to the bombing, and the picture is essentially about Israeli response to terror. It’s a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I don’t think any more of a stretch than NYT’s decision.