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Sunday, July 10, 2011

Joseph Dana's dishonesty (updated)

Here is a tweet from anti-Israel activist/self styled "journalist" Joseph Dana, referring to a video of a protest this morning in Nabi Saleh:

Minute 5:00, soldiers physically attack a female Israeli protester. Welcome to the wasteland of democracy
However, if you look a few seconds beforehand, you see a female protester pushing an IDF soldier first.


Then there is an edit.

In fact, there are dozens and dozens of edits in this video, no doubt an attempt to whitewash the violence of the "non-violent" protesters. Many of the edits clearly excise only a few seconds of video at a time, right in the middle of the action. Why?

The answer is simple: The entire video is theatre, a lie to give the impression that IDF soldiers initiate violence against peaceful demonstrators. Of course, Dana swallows the video whole, because its edits conform with his existing vicious biases.

Let's see the unedited version! That's what a real journalist would demand. Dana no doubt knows the videographer - lets see if he ever asks for the raw footage to see what really happened.

UPDATE: Dana insisted that there was no shove, so I looked again full screen at the moment at 4:57 where I thought I saw it. It is possible that she was shaking off her friend. Even so, the video is a textbook example of how editing is used in videos like these - notice that every single example of IDF "aggression" is preceded by an edit so we cannot see what happened immediately prior. In other words, it is still theatre, and Dana has no clue what specific event may have precipitated the "wasteland of democracy" outrage..