Thomas Wictor

Boy, the crap has hit the fan! First I was interviewed by Ali Gharib of the Nation Institute about my Pallywood posts, and then I learned that David Frum of The Atlantic had tweeted about them, and then I found an uncredited article by BagNews(?) excoriating Frum and me. You can excoriate me. Ali Ghraib was very candid that he’s going to present me as an unreliable source, since I wrote a post about taking two photos of what I believe was my dead cat Syd the Second. But people need to learn how to read too. That would help.

The writer at BagNews says this.

Defending Israel with the objectivity and intensity of the Bush speech writer he once was, David Frum, the Senior Editor at the Atlantic, alleged to his 100k Twitter followers on Thursday (not once, but eight times) that the NYT, Reuters (and AP, apparently in collusion, too) had staged a photo in a Gaza hospital.

That’s not what Frum said. Here’s what he said.

BagNews goes on.

Frum’s allegations were based on a post by an idiosyncratic blogger named Thomas Wictor who has been lobbing similar allegations of visual conspiracy. This is the Wictor post Frum was so impressed by.

The charges in question come from Wictor’s interpretation of two photos taken on July 23rd at Nasser Hospital in Southern Gaza. The photos feature a pair of brothers who, according to reporting, arrived at the hospital with their father after an airstrike destroyed the family’s house in Khan Younis. One brother in particularly[sic] was soaked in his father’s blood.

Comparing the Reuters portrait above (#2) with an AP photo from the hospital someone randomly sent to him (#6 below), Wictor noticed that the brothers in the portrait no longer had blood on their hands and face and concluded that there must be some Palestinian, as well as media trickery going on.

That’s not what I said either. I said the Crying Man no longer had blood on his face and hands. Read the post yourself. There’s no mention of the other guy’s appearance, nor did I accuse the media of staging anything. I said the Palestinians staged the scene.

This is how Pallywood works: The Palestinians present the western media with a tableaux, and the western media uncritically reports it. The BagNews piece itself confirms this. Now we’re told that these are two brothers, but we don’t know their names. The non-screaming brother seems calm enough. Whey didn’t any of the journalists ask them who they were?

Back to BagNews.

So, where should I start on Wictor’s conspiratorial analysis and his conclusion that these brothers must have posed first for the “clean handed” portraits, then applied fake blood to their hands for the photos in the corridor?

Should I start with Wictor’s inability to find, let alone sequence and read the relevant news photos in a logical timeline, instead basing his assumption of foul play (perpetrated spontaneously, by four different photographers and three different news organizations) in a scene he sees coming first that logically happens last? For you to appreciate what I’m talking about, let me offer you four published photos in the most likely chronology, photos #3 through #6 likely taking place before the New York Times and Reuters photos (#1 and 2) leading off this post.

Again, I never said there’s a conspiracy between the Palestinian “victims” and the photographers, reporters, and news organizations. This is a straw man. People use straw men when they can’t argue convincingly. I didn’t go looking for more photos because—to be honest—I simply don’t believe this story. BagNews itself doesn’t know the sequence of photos, as it admits. This is what it assumes to be the first.

That’s a hell of a lot of very fresh blood. The blood on the man’s right hand is glistening. How did he get so soaked in blood? The story now is that the father was killed in an Israeli air strike on the house. That means tons of debris and dust fell on him. The bloody man isn’t even slightly dusty. He got soaked in his father’s blood, but none of the unavoidable dust from the exploding bomb or missile landed on him.

Also, why are there no photos of the father’s body?

BagNews again.

Then we have three photos of the brothers, now inside the hospital (via AP). This photo looks to involve the father’s body being taken in, and to the right, the one brother tracking it.

I see no evidence of a body, and how does the writer know that the other brother is tracking it? Although Ali Gharib is a very nice man, he was clear that his article on my posts will be dismissive. He doesn’t find me convincing due to the fact that I only make suppositions. Like saying the son appears to be tracking the father’s body.

Notice that the Crying Man has no concrete dust on him, and he isn’t actually crying. The unnamed writer of BagNews says this.

As a clinician myself, I can’t say that emotional trauma has any one way of presenting, although shock and extreme grief, if excruciating, can often be absent tears. On the other hand, if there is a more obvious set of behavior evident in all this, it’s Frum’s eagerness to impugn the Palestinians, these media organizations and photojournalism on top of Wictor’s ineptitude.

Has anybody ever seen a person wailing and screaming nonstop due to grief, but not crying? I haven’t. Look closely at that face: No moisture anywhere near the eyes. And whoever this clinician writer is, he or she doesn’t understand Pallywood. It’s not a cabal of Palestinians and journalists conspiring. It’s what we see in these photos. A bloody man races in, and journalists take it at face value.

To me this is a weird image.

People are just standing around or leaning on counters, blank faced, while the blood-soaked man screams. The “comforting brother” just doesn’t look…comforting.

He seems to be simply going through the motions: “Uh…there, there. There, there.” This is supposed to be the Crying Man’s brother, right?

BagNews says the Crying Man washed his face and hands after his father was admitted. One of my father’s hobbies was going to the emergency room; we took him as many as six times a year. I’ve seen every kind of mayhem you can imagine, along with the reactions of the victims’ relatives. The longest time we spent in the emergency room was eighteen hours.

This Palestinian family was just bombed from the air, and the father bled all over his son. Although the son never stopped screaming, he took time out to wash his face and hands?

Sergey Ponomarev—the photographer who took a photo for the New York Times—wrote this.

In one ambulance there was a heavily injured older man and two younger men, and one of them was covered with blood and really upset. He fell on his knees, calling on Allah and gesturing.

There was a huge crowd around those people arriving, including guards and medical personnel. They went to the operating room and I followed them. The same upset man was yelling and gesturing, and we were all kicked out from the operating room so as not to distract the doctors.

Then he was gesturing and crying in the hospital corridor. I believe he was the son of the older man who was injured. So I photographed other people and then came back after the other media left him alone. I saw his brother take him to a nearby room and he must’ve washed him off because afterward there was no blood on his face and his hands were clean. He was sitting on the chair and seemed calmer, and that’s when I took the photo.

So, an ambulance arrives, and it’s immediately surrounded by guards, medical personnel, and bystanders. Why? Because that’s what they do. It keeps clear photos and video from being taken. Someone is rushed into an operating room, and the media is allowed to accompany them. Into an operating room. Why? Because it’s much more dramatic. But still no photos of the dead father.

Let me throw more gasoline on the fire. Here’s a photo of the “brothers.” Notice that the one man never showed even the slightest trace of emotion. His affect was utterly flat throughout. Does he seem in shock to you? In my eyes he appears unmoved.

The Crying Man not only made time to wash his hands and face, he also rolled his trouser legs up almost to his knees. Remember, here’s what he looked like coming out of the ambulance. Look at his pant leg.

His brother wears gym pants with the trouser legs rolled or cut off above the ankles. You know who does that?

Salafist Wahabbists, the most fanatical of Sunni radicals.

Errors in Prayer That Must be Avoided

1) Wearing pants, or garments that hangs below the ankles. 
This is one of the greatest sins.

His father was just brutally killed, he’s covered in the man’s blood, but he has the presence of mind to roll up his trouser legs.

Put that in your conspiracy pipe and smoke it.

Update

I just figured out why we never saw the father’s body.

The Crying Man arrived in a Toyota Landcruiser Hardtop ambulance of the Red Crescent.

Here’s what this ambulance looks like on the inside.

The bench on the right is for the paramedics and family. It holds six people.

I found a larger photo of the Crying Man arriving at the hospital. Indisputably, he got out of the left side of the vehicle. I enlarged and lightened the image a bit.

The green arrows show two calm female passengers sitting in the seats closest to the door. The violet arrowhead at the bottom marks the gurney that holds victims being transported.

Did the Crying Man ride to the hospital lying on top of his mortally wounded father? You can see that when the doors were opened, the Crying Man got out on the left. You can see the gurney. And you can see two women in the seats closest to the door. Was the Crying Man sitting further into the vehicle, and did he leap over his father to be the first one out?

No. The Crying Man was on the gurney. There is no dead father. Look at the inside of the ambulance, and then look at the photo below.

Supposition, yes. Sue me.