He didn’t give at the office

This week we’ve seen the news services become pure instruments of terrorist propaganda on behalf of Hamas. As Noah Pollak and Pajamas Media pointed out, even Time jumped in to lend a hand. Rest assured that the organs of the mainstream media will not pause to let their readers know how they have been used.

On September 12, 2001, variants of the photo above taken by Reuters’s Ahmed Jadallah were disseminated around the world by the major news services with captions indicating that Yasser Arafat had participated in a blood drive for the victims of 9/11. Last week the controversial France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin spoke at Harvard and exposed the photographs as a staged hoax. Looking around on the Internet to see if Jadallah might lend himself to a stunt such as the one described by Enderlin, I found Reuters’s own description of Jadallah as a photographer who sees it as “his mission to have the world see the despair of the Palestinian people.” I also found a revealing incident involving the AP photographer who took similar 9/12 photographs of Arafat.
The witting complicity of the news services with the terrorist organizations they cover nevertheless by and large remains a deep secret of Internet obsessives. Enderlin’s remarks at Harvard were reported on the Internet by Joel Pollak and noted by a few others including Noah Pollak (no relation). Enderlin’s Harvard remarks have not otherwise been reported (see a Google News search here).
Thinking that Enderlin’s disclosure should not remain a deep secret of obsessive observers of terrorist propaganda on the Internet, Weekly Standard deputy editor Richard Starr invited me to write a brief article about Enderlin’s remarks for the magazine. My article on the 9/12 Arafat photos is “He didn’t give at the office.”