Keep Babies Out

I have only one problem with this article which is, on the whole, top drawer. What about the dead Palestinian children we see? The wounded and maimed? The dead baby down on the lower right of this screen if one scrolls down?
When Operation Cast Lead took place, only a few great photos of children of war received international attention. The photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc OOnt, the Napalm girl,definitely helped turn the tide of the Vietnam war. But when Cast Lead took place Western media was a clean medium visually ~ no blood, or if so, a nice little pool somewhere, not directly attached to flesh and bones.
That is why I began to blog more specifically on Gaza, to show the world the visual truth of Operation Cast Lead. And I posted ugly ugly truths. Maybe I was manipulated by emotion at the time as Shamir mentions; well it was primarily just decency and a burning need to get those images out there so people could see what war did to the people and children of Palestine. I still wonder if some of those children I can still remember are alive today.
The point is, within a few years, such imagery of torn babies and broken bodies became commonplace in Western media ~ “war porn”. By then I had stopped using such shocking visuals except for specific instances because the point had been made. Now the stuff is propaganda on a huge international scale.
But children suffer in war. The children of Gaza and the West Bank are targets of sharp shooters even as they pick radishes in the family plot. This stuff just never makes the Western media.
These manufactured images of children used by, for example, the White Helmets, or the little Syrian boy (Canada CELEBRATES the family story BIG time by the way), focus the hoi poloi right where the JMSM wants them to be. The internet now busts these fake photos open within days but by then the damage has been done, as per the child on the cover of Time Magazine with President Trump. We now know that child was basically stolen from her family by a mother who had a decent life but dreamt of more, a woman already once removed from the US. The father has gone very pubic about her since then, relieved to know his wife was ok. Time even posted an apology over this. But, as usual, the political points had been made.
It is up to us to know when we are being manipulated or not. The media is, as we know, a major tool but we cannot allow their excesses to keep us from using children as a manner of protecting them as well. Our enemy may use them as bait, drink their blood, burn them, etc, but we also have to remember some people do these things to our young and offer them to their bloodthirsty god routinely. Visions from Cast Lead flood into my mind as I type this, visions burned forever into my brain. Visions that I will never ever ever forget, and there are so many of them. There are times I wished I had not been so ~ dedicated.
I remember one young Palestinian baby crying for her dead mother, a wretched photo. Several months later that same photo of that same crying little girl showed up in Haaretz as a poster on the side of a bus in Jerusalem for an international drive to help feed “Poor starving Israeli children, victims of Palestinian aggression.” The ad disappeared very quickly. As always, look to source.
As for the current immigrant photos in the US. The author is so bang on and it is embarrassing to see how people fall for it.
***Steps down off soap box.*** Knees creak.