Photo: The scream

Max Fisher at Washington Post has an article titled “The Israeli-Palestinian politics of a bloodied child’s photo” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/11/16/the-israeli-palestinian-politics-of-a-bloodied-childs-photo/?hpid=z1 — which reduces questions of justice & violence to a “bickering” over the politics of photos of dead children — which I think ends up making a false equivalency — as if the conflict is a tit for tat problem — where (he says) each side is trying to prove to the world “how badly “we” suffered, and how much “they” are faking it.” Something about Fisher’s framing bothers me. It’s a sort of marriage counseling frame, as if what’s going on are two parties who need to learn to empathize, to feel each others pain. It psychologizes war — pre-balances everything, so the two parties seem to be sitting on a playground seesaw, equally balanced. It seems to me to be an attempt to defuse the incendiary power of new media that are bringing direct experience of things in Gaza — by containing any new insights into Gazan suffering in a discourse where people have to immediately ‘balance’ it w/ Israeli suffering…(altho’ I guess this is progress for MSM in that it’s including something like a Gazan perspective, however, pre-framed…unlike the total ‘disappearance’ of Palestinian voice & perspectives in much).

Plus, these sentences are jarring to me — (emphasis added)

When Kandil and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived at a Gaza hospital just as an ambulance pulled up with the body of a local boy, and a photographer captured the two reaching compassionately for the body, Web discussion quickly turned to two questions: Was it posed? Was it populist showmanship? Though anyone who has spent time covering Egyptian politicians might doubt their ability to elaborately stage a photo op with this degree of precision.

those dumb A-rabs — can’t blame them for staging this — they’re too dumb (seems to be what he’s saying). To me, this sounds racist, or at least, ethnocentric, or at least, inappropriate for a journalist reporting on this terrible tragedy.