I spent the day with my kids, deliberately unplugged from the news. Through a series of clicks that began with a tart tweet by counterinsurgency expert Andrew Exum, the Israel Defense Forces tweet pictured above happened to be my first update in several hours about the Israeli raid on what the New York Times describes as “a flotilla of cargo ships and passenger boats … carrying 10,000 tons of aid for Gaza.”
Anybody who read my January 2009 HuffPost called “Israel, Hamas, Gaza: Plenty of Us in America Just Need to Shut Up” knows how hesitant I am to take sides in any of this. Anybody who read my June 2009 post called “Netanyahu v. Obama (Judge Judy Presiding)” knows that I occasionally overcome my better judgment.
My better judgment tells me to shut up right now. My better judgment is right. To a point. So I will keep this tight, focused. To that end, I am writing this post before even trying to catch up on the news. This is not about the news. This is about the aforementioned Twitter update and the video it links to.
WHO?: The tweet comes from the Israel Defense Forces’ Twitter account. Twitter lists it as a “Verified Account,” meaning “we’ve been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved.”
WHAT?: The IDF tweet reads, “Close-up footage of Mavi Marmara passengers attacking IDF soldiers (with sound): http://ht.ly/1S8Jp”
WHAT DOES http://ht.ly/1S8Jp LINK TO?: It brings up a YouTube video titled “Demonstrators Use Violence Against Israeli Navy Soldiers Attempting to Board Ship.”
The tweet triggered high expectations in me. As I waited for the video to load, I found myself impressed at the IDF’s media savvy, at its foresight in shooting this “close-up footage” that would show new facts and bring me and others around the world to Israel’s defense. But then I watched the video. Now the tweet and the video both strike me as an insult to our collective intelligence. Judge for yourself.
I will leave it to you to decide if “close-up footage” is the best phrase to describe the wrong-end-of-the-binoculars view in this video. I will leave it to you to decide whether “footage of Mavi Marmara passengers attacking IDF soldiers” is the best phrase to describe the human speck labeled “attack using metal pole.” I will leave it to you to decide whether you would have been able to spot an alleged attempted kidnapping without the label marked “tens of rioters hit an IDF soldier and try to kidnap him.” I will leave it to you to wonder why the IDF released this particular 1 minute and 4 seconds of edited video rather than footage showing the killings of nine passengers, rioters, activists, terrorists, martyrs, whatever other labels they’re wearing posthumously.
