The Elder has a recent piece entitled, Aw, what a cute little stone thrower, which highlights the work of Reuters' photographer Abed Omar Qusini.These examples of Qusini's work project the image of a cute, sympathetic and innocent Palestinian-Arab "David" slinging rocks with his little slingshot at... something... with the world blowing up behind him. What that "something" might be is open to question. It could be an image of Leon Klinghoffer with a bullseye on the back of his head or it could be a squadron of Kosher Klingon Storm-Troopers preparing to destroy an indigenous village filled with bunny-rabbits strictly for the fun of it... but whatever the child is flinging hatred at, it is Jewish.
Of that much, you can be certain.
This kind of material has at least two effects. It inspires young Arabs to hate Jews and it inspires young western progressives to sympathize with young Arabs who hate Jews.
The eternal enemy of Jews - in the eyes of Palestinian-Arab anti-Semitic anti-Zionists such as Mr. Qusini - always seems to be innocent children. This is what Europeans often told one another during the Middle Ages and this is what even allegedly sophisticated westerners sometimes tell one another today.
Jewish Militarist Fascistic Monsters with American-Made Heavy Weaponry versus innocent, thumb-sucking indigenous children with sling-shots.
This is what Abed Omar Qusini peddles to Reuters and what Reuters peddles to consumers of news throughout the world. If you were an average news consumer - you're not, are you? - you might come to think that the Israeli Occupying Power is murdering perfectly innocent native children who are standing up for their family, friends, and village.
The artist is giving you an emotional choice. You can relate to Jewish Zombie Nazi Murderers or to little, doe-eyed "Palestinian" Davids with a slingshots.
You get to choose whether you want to be a good person or a bad person.
If you are a good person you side with the child against the Machine. If you are a bad person - such as myself, apparently - you side with the Machine against the child.
It is for this reason that, after decades of this kind of stuff, we see pieces in "liberal" venues with titles like Israeli Army Shoot Dead Another Child, This Time A 14 Year-Old US Citizen, with the clear and obvious implication that Jewish Israelis shoot Palestinian-Arab children like they are ducks in an arcade and that this needs to anger Americans against those heinous and cruel Jews, with significant consequences.
It is also for this reason that Hamas and Fatah have launched the Children's Intifada.
Essentially what we are witnessing is the manufacture of hatred, via the blood-libel, just as we see every generation. Every generation they tell us just why we need a good beating before they go forth to deliver. In previous generations we allegedly killed Jesus and "the prophets." We were also apparently greedy and thus invented capitalism, which got us into trouble with a bunch of people who used the fact of capitalism as a reason for murderous rage toward us. We also invented socialism, apparently, and were therefore responsible for whatever miseries, great and small, that came from that particular economic system. We were also, of course, condemned for being a rat-like inferior race that feeds off of the blood of the children of the clean, dominant Aryan majority in northern Europe.
What fascinates me is that most western-progressives would agree that previous persecutions of the Jewish minority were unjust... but this time, or so they seem to think, we honestly do have it coming.
It just so happens that while previous generations of Jews were largely innocent and did not deserve the pogroms and expulsions and defenestrations and the throwing of Jews down of wells, but - Ta Da! - this generation we honestly do deserve it for being mean to our former Arab and Muslim masters.
If you follow the link at the top of the piece you will see that it goes to Qusini's Facebook page.
Reuters pays this man.
I wonder what they pay him to do?
Well, Qusini could hardly be more open about what he does because he has it splashed directly on the top of the page:
The man, whatever else he might be, is a "Pallywood" photographer who is so utterly comfortable in his role that he even indicates it on his Facebook page and, yet, is still employed by Reuters. After all, if you click through to that page - the page through which he promotes his work - the image above is front and center. The clear and obvious indication is that the photographer is filming a staged rock-throwing incident by a young, righteous Palestinian-Arab child against the vicious Jews who make his mother sad... because they are mean to her.Here is a little more of his stuff. It might even be the same kid from the clearly staged shot directly above. Notice also the photographer in the background snapping photos of the cute, little murderous waif.
{I have to say, there is just nothing in this world like Palestinian-Arab Murderous Cute. It is an entirely other genre of cute that the makers of Hello Kitty would never have conceived of. It would be as if during World War II the Japanese turned Hello Kitty into an adorable Kamikaze Kitty.}
And we are supposed to believe that this was a spontaneous act of brave and righteous push-back against an occupying power by an "indigenous" youth?
Is not violence against Jews fun? It's good to get them into practice at an early age, that way when they are full grown anti-Semites they'll just be so much better at it and, thus, make even greater incitement, greater violence, and greater profits for whatever replaces Hamas in the next generation.
When I was a child we played baseball and sometimes we even played "war" wherein the neighborhood boys would chase one another around with long sticks yelling "BANG! BANG!"
Of course, we never singled out minorities for pelting with rocks... otherwise I would have been pelted, as would have my old friend Wesley Chang. It's just not the way that we were raised in good old New England, neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Muslim, nor anybody else. And, needless to say, if the Palestinian-Arabs want the "occupation" to end the only real thing that they need to do is tell their children that hatred toward Jews is wrong and tell Israel that what they mainly want is trade because what they desire is peace and prosperity for their children and grandchildren.And voila, I promise you, conflict over.
That is all it would require for a two-state solution to honestly emerge or even an amicable single-state solution.
Sadly that is not what they want and, in truth, it is not up to us. It is up to them. What they want is Jews off of Jewish land because they think it violates the Koran and because they think that they have been historically wronged. They honestly believe that they have been robbed of their heritage and their land because the Palestinian Authority and the PLO and Hamas and the Soviet Union and various Swedes told them this - decade upon decade - and now we have western "liberals" believing it and the facts of history be damned.
What they want therefore is to make life so uncomfortable for the Jewish minority in the Middle East that they simply give up on our ancestral home and once again we all live or die according to the whims of non-Jewish majority populations... who have shown themselves to be just so accommodating throughout the centuries.
Kerry and Obama and the EU and the UN can harass the Jews in the Middle East day and night and it will not make a wit of difference. The reason for this is because the problem here is not the Jewish presence or behavior on Jewish land. The real problem is highly racist Arab political and religious cultures that too often, for centuries, taught their children to despise Jews and a western media that helps them to spread those messages of hatred for ideological reasons.
It is this that Mr. Qusini does for a living, at least in part, on Reuters' dime.
It becomes difficult, therefore, to consider prominent left notions of "social justice" seriously when so many of the left insist on harping on Israel while almost entirely ignoring the 5.5 million dead in the Congo or the ongoing atrocities in Darfur, not to mention the howling-at-the-moon head-choppers of the Islamic State rampaging throughout Syria and Iraq.Muslims are killing Muslims throughout the world like its a video game. Call it Muhammad's Revenge, or something along those lines, and then X-BOX or Playstation can come out with a cool new title for their current platforms.
The contemporary Arab and Muslim war against the Jews, from the middle of the twentieth-century until now, has resulted in around 50,000 dead. Heck, current Muslim-on-Muslim violence in western Asia and Africa can probably reach that number by a quarter past next Tuesday. When it comes to war and violence the Jews are absolutely pikers compared to their more excitable neighbors.
Also that whole head-chopping thing never became much of a fad for us.
My friends and I considered giving it a whirl when we were kids, but then along came spring-time and baseball, so we went outside and threw the ball around instead.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.