The reason that the West remains ignorant of the views and goals of the likes of Hamas and Iran is not that the latter have hidden their views and goals. It is because the leading political leaders and foreign policy practitioners in the West refuse to listen to them and deny the significance of their actions.
A great op/ed from an Israeli writer concerning the Iran/Hamas vs. Israel conflict.
Seriously, read this story and mark it down on your calendar.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran’s stonewalling of his agency was a “serious concern.”
I have the sneaking suspicion that in the coming years, half the country will over-react to this report and the other half will pretend the report never existed.
Yet another catch by the blogosphere that will take the media days to “break”. Iran released photos this morning of several missile test launches. The following is the image the super fact-checking media released to us without any hesitation:
Of course, readers from Photoshop Disasters and Little Green Footballs figured it out within minutes, and now we see this:
Ah yes, quite lovely, isn’t it? Good to know the Western media, holder of all that is truth, is quickly becoming the radical Islamic world’s very own PR wing.
Update: Interestingly, even when the media does pick up on it, it’s not a major story, but rather relegated to the “blog” section that nearly every major media outlet has in the last few years found necessary to keep on their website. The New York Times. The Daily Telegraph.
Update II: And now, apparently, the original image:
See the truck that wasn’t there before? And the dark mound to the right of the truck? Now go back to the faked image. Notice the dark mound has been partially reconstructed, most likely using the clone tool, to cover up the truck.
Update III: Well that didn’t take long. Apparently it doesn’t take much information for Americans to immediately assume it’s the U.S. Government’s conspiracy. Too bad the faked image came from Iran’s state run media. Come on people, this is obviously Iran continuing to posture. They’ve seen how the international community reacts when the U.S. or Israel goes on the offensive. I’m not saying Iran won’t ever initiate aggressive operations, but I know they’d really prefer to just taunt us until we attack them. They want war, they just don’t want to have to start it.