superyooser's Journal: Reporting Through Warped Lenses

The anti-Israel press has always warped its textual reporting, but now the AFP (Agence France-Presse) has stooped to using camera lenses specifically designed to distort reality. Check out this fishy photo by the French.

The photographer used a wide-angle (fisheye) lens to generate an effect of broad, exaggerated destruction [...] Nikon describes use of its fisheye lenses in this way: "In normal photography these lenses are employed to achieve dramatic effects due to their 'unreal' distortion."

Now, let's examine what the photo is really about. The AFP's caption is:

A Palestinian woman expresses her anger after Israeli Defence Forces detonated an explosive belt they found in her house, destroying the ground and first floor of the building, in the village of Hizmeh near Jerusalem (AFP/Atta Hussein)

Hmmm... "an explosive belt they found in her house." Well that's no big deal. Doesn't everybody have a few explosive belts lying around the house? Like... for deer hunting? Yeah, that's it.

The Jerusalem Post, however, reported the essential context that was entirely omitted by AFP: Acting on intelligence, the IDF captured this woman's husband, who then admitted that he had planned to carry out a suicide bombing with an explosive belt that he had hidden under his baby daughter's bed. This size of explosive belts killed above 22 people in Jerusalem in August and 23 in Haifa in October this year.

Soldiers rushed to the house, evacuated its inhabitants, and safely detonated the explosives. The blast caused the first story of the house to fall -- testimony to the force of its impact that was intended to massacre Israeli civilians.

So an event that illustrates yet again the appalling Palestinian use of children as human shields for terrorist activity (and the quality of IDF intelligence, under constant terror threat), gets twisted around by AFP lenses and caption-writers, who present yet another act of "cruel Israeli aggression." A classic case of anti-Israel media bias.

Thanks to HonestReporting.com. Also, check out CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) and Palestinian Media Watch.