Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand lies

Israel and the United States have been routinely criticized in the Muslim world - and the greater global press for the deaths attributed to the wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of the criticism is a product of a robust Muslim led PR strategy that depends on misused slogans like "dis-proportional force, apartheid, occupation, holocaust"etc., that have been repeated so often that the terms have become an accepted part of the narrative of this complicated long-term conflict. On a separate track, the Muslim PR campaign also heavily depends on the press to repeatedly display pictures of the dead and wounded in order to gain sympathy. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture taken out of context – or even diabolically staged - is worth a thousand lies.

The absurdity of this highly successful Muslim PR campaign is that Muslims commit atrocities against fellow Muslims and the press doesn't seem to even want to connect the dots to add context. According to the United Nations Population Fund, the worldwide total of just Muslim honor killing victims may be as high as 5, 000 women a year. Try putting that into context against a war where Israel is defending its civilian population – and many of the 1670 Lebanese dead were Hezbollah fighters or civilians that Hezbollah put in the line of fire.

In Iraq alone, tens of thousands are being killed in a frenzy of Muslim on Muslim sectarian violence, and those who criticize Israel (especially the far left) for defending itself find themselves deaf, dumb and blind. Evidently It's OK for Muslims to slaughter other Muslims for the smallest of perceived grievances (honor killings, religion), but g-d forbid if a Jew kills a Muslim in self-defense.

Death during war is bad, but it's even worse when the war stops and the violence that is defining Muslim societies continues to grow unabated. The global press should be ashamed at the abusive way in which it contributes to the mis-information campaign of the Muslim extremists, and in turn helps to re-inforce anti-Semitism in certain parts of the world that has reached levels reminiscent of the Nazi era.