Every Picture Could Be Telling a Fairy Tale
By Marcia Jaffe | mjaffe@atljewishtimes.com
The Republican Jewish Coalition flew in Chicagoan Gary Kenzer, the North American executive director of honestreporting.com, for a talk Sunday, April 19, in Sandy Springs.
Kenzer began his talk with two suppositions:
- Israel is innocent until proved guilty, not the other way around.
- Israel is not perfect.
Kenzer said he often shares his topic — “Does a Picture Paint a Thousand Words?” — with colleges as he tours the country to speak to chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, “most of whom surprisingly are Jewish.”
An animated, turquoise-clad Kenzer showed slides of slanted or openly anti-Semitic cartoons (always with an extended nose) and news stories with deceptive photographs.
He offered two quotes for consideration:
- Ansel Adams — “You don’t take a photo; you make one.”
- Mark Twain — “If you don’t read a newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read one, you are misinformed.”
Kenzer showed famous media photos in which an Israeli flag appears to fly directly over a mosque when, in fact, the flag is on a building a mile away. Selfies taken by a Palestinian that are labeled “Israeli army chasing young man” are actually a mob scene from a rock concert. Another photograph shows a teen thrusting a rock, but the original photo shows the teen posed in front of 120 reporters with cameras.
“You see,” Kenzer said, “this is not a gag. Churchill said a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.”
When five Israeli Jews were slaughtered in a Jerusalem synagogue in November, CNN mislabeled the terrorist act as “Deadly Attack on Jerusalem Mosque.” Only 20 people called CNN to complain.
Photography delivers emotion, blood and the deaths of Arab children the world. “We Jews can’t compete,” Kenzer said. “We are above that. We do not publish pictures of our dead.”
He showed a photo of Egypt’s construction of a gigantic wall to distance itself from Gaza. “The media has castigated Israel for building a fence, but nothing about Egypt. Do we see this in the media or just hear about Israel’s ‘apartheid’ wall?”
“It’s disheartening to see so much media bias and untruths against Israel and Jews, and much of it in Jewish-owned media or by Jewish reporters,” said Chuck Berk, the local RJC chapter’s co-chair. “We need to speak out and hold the media accountable for the truth.”
Kenzer provided dramatic advice on the effects of social media. “On Twitter, everyone is a correspondent.”
He said someone stuck a death threat in Kenzer’s home mailbox. When the FBI came, agents explained to him to that his Facebook photos included GPS data with which their address of origin could be tracked. “Delete this function,” Kenzer said, “and also go ‘incognito’ setting on Goggle to not be tracked.”
Remember, according to Kenzer, what Napoleon said about the media: “I fear three newspapers more than a hundred bayonets.”
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