Thomas Wictor

Our press is absolutely worthless. Journalists are partisan hacks, but even worse than that, they’re lazy, credulous fools. Don’t let them influence your worldview. There are tons of tools you can use to painlessly disprove the lies and fantasies we’re being fed.

Something called The Blaze recently posted a piece titled “See the Quintessentially American Equipment Islamist Militants Have Allegedly Nabbed in Iraq — and What They’re Doing to Claim It.” The author is Sharona Schwartz, a perfect name for an imbecile.

Besides the armored vehicles, American-made helicopters may have also fallen into the jihadi group’s hands, though it’s unclear if the ISIL fighters have any helicopter pilots in their ranks.

Charles Lister with the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center and tracks the militant groups, noted that when ISIL captured parts of Mosul airport on Tuesday, they may have seized Blackhawk[sic] helicopters.

Sharona linked to an ISIL tweet.

That particular photo caused a hell of a lot of consternation because the helicopter is a Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk. It’s used by special operations forces for clandestine insertions or search and rescue. Because of its specialized missions, it’s fitted with incredibly sophisticated electronics. If ISIL got their Bronze Age paws on a Pave Hawk, the Chinese or Russians would offer them millions for it. Here’s a Pave Hawk on a strafing run.

The gunner has a remote station I’ve never seen before. Pave Hawks are decades ahead of what our adversaries have.

I don’t take ANYTHING at face value, and neither should you. My gut told me that ISIL was lying, so here’s what I did. First I took a screen grab of that tweet showing the “captured” Pave Hawk. I cut out the photo of the helicopter and went to Google.

See where it says “Images”?

Click it and you’ll see this.

Now click the little camera.

This is Google Images “search by image.” It’ll tell you if the image in question was used anywhere else. What I always do is download the image and then drag it over to that camera. When you do that, a box will appear. Here’s the photo of the Pave Hawk going into the box.

And here are the search results. The image HAS been used before, multiple times.

The first time I did this search today, I found the photo of the Pave Hawk in a Pakistani conspiracy theory blog.

The Pakistani post is from 2011, so that automatically proves that the ISIL tweet is a lie, and Sharona Schwartz’s report on The Blaze is bullshit. But it turns out that people much smarter than me had already debunked this story days ago. I didn’t see it until I recreated my search for this post.

“Iraqi Insurgents Using Recycled Photos to Hype Captured Military Gear.”

The Pentagon used the precise method I described above of putting the photo into Google Images “search by image.” Not only did they debunk the notion that ISIL had captured a Pave Hawk, here’s something no other media outlet is reporting.

If genuine the picture would have been proof that the insurgent group had captured a major piece of American hardware used by the Iraqi military.

But a bit of research showed the picture was probably not real since the United States has not sold Iraq any Black Hawk helicopters. Furthermore, a defense official said Thursday “We don’t have any indication that any military aircraft were seized in Mosul.”

Why didn’t the Fourth Estate—as our journalists pompously call themselves—tell us right away that the US never sold Iraq any Black Hawk helicopters? Here are the answers.

1. Our journalists are addicted to cheap sensationalism.

2. Our journalists are lazy, passive bastards who prefer to simply repeat what they’re told.

3. Our journalists are ignorant buffoons who possess no factual knowledge.

4. Our journalists have a pathological need to present Iraq in the worst light possible in order to defame George W. Bush, their eternal boogeyman.

Bush isn’t my eternal boogeyman, so I’ll tell you what’s going to happen in the Middle East.

Iraq will be divided into Western Iran, Kurdistan, and Death-Circus Land. The Iraqi Shi’ites and Sunnis are hopelessly tribal and backward, so they can’t abide differing views. They’re currently ethnically cleansing each others’ asses out of their precious, arbitrarily delineated tracts of wasteland. Imagine how primitive you have to be that you’d try to murder your neighbor because they practiced a different version of the same religion you practice.

The Iraqi “army” has completely fallen apart, so the US should stay the hell out. Ugly cavemen in Toyotas have routed entire divisions armed with tanks, artillery, mortars, heavy machine guns, and armored personnel carriers. These gutless Iraqi twerps had the training, weapons, and equipment to prevail, but they didn’t even try. There’s no excuse for their behavior.

General Ferdinand Foch was the best officer in the French army during World War One. He was one of the few commanders who understood that nineteenth-century tactics could no longer be used against twentieth-century weaponry.

On September 8, 1914, during the First Battle of the Marne, the Germans smashed into Foch’s position with speed and firepower that the French hadn’t anticipated. In response Foch sent the following legendary message to Paris.

My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.

ISIL is an organization of childish, psychopathic murderers who believe their own propaganda. Once they cause enough mayhem, the adults will step in and send them to their room by killing them in their thousands. The main sender-to-hell will be Israel. Our press is in love with ISIL because perpetual teenagers admire those who break the rules. When Israel begins to slaughter these subhumans, the press will bleat in outrage.

What I’ll do is watch in the name of Constable Ayyub Khalaf, a thirty-four-year-old Iraqi father of two. On December 18, 2013, Constable Khalaf saw an ISIL suicide bomber about to detonate his vest in a crowd of Shi’ite religious pilgrims. Khalaf threw himself on the creature and embraced it, shielding the pilgrims from the explosion. Only five died instead of dozens. Constable Khalaf didn’t survive.

Do you know what ISIL puts in their suicide vests? Explosives, of course. Also ball bearings to rip open the victims, rat poison to keep their blood from congealing, and human feces to infect the wounds.

God bless you, Constable Khalaf. You ran toward the danger instead of away from it. In time your value system will become universal. I’m sure of that. And I fervently hope Ferdinand Foch welcomed you as a brother.

Tell me not in mournful numbers
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art to dust returnest
Was not spoken of the soul.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow