Reuters Fake Photographs and Media Misleads the Public.
Prophecy and Reutersgate: Discerning the Truth.
What is a prophet?
If you do a web search on this question, you tend to find that a prophet is described as someone acting as a mouthpiece of God; a person who foretells the future; a person who stands between God and Man.
Many years ago I was taught that a prophet is really just a person with enough commonsense and willingness, to speak out and warn people of the consequences of their behaviour. You might call this action foretelling, and there are plenty of writers at Magic City Morning Star News who fit that category.
One Jewish View of a prophet is that he/she is a person who has reached "a sufficient level of spiritual and ethical achievement" that the Divine Spirit rests on them, and they are therefore able to know the divine will and therefore to 'speak forth' the Divine warnings and advice.
Of course, most people imagine a prophet to be someone who foretells the future. If you look at the old testament, you will find that the major work of a prophet was to criticise both the national civil and religious leadership and the social behaviour of the general populace. They were social critics who could both 'see' (what was happening) and 'foresee' the consequences of such behaviour.
Well, I make no claims to be a prophet, except perhaps by way of Balaam's ass, but I would draw your attention to recent world events and to a social critique of the media and politicians, that I published 2 weeks before these events sparked off a war. Right now you want to quit this article! - See I know human behaviour!
The first thing I want to draw your attention to is the Reutersgate scandal; the recent revelations that Reuters were using doctored photos to provide distorted images in the Lebanon/Israel war. [If you are a blissful person still unaware of this scandal go to : Don't Trust If They Won't Verify By Glenn Harlan Reynolds.]
Some people seem to be very shocked by what Reuters "allege" was inadvertent or unnoticed, blaming the whole thing on an individual correspondent. Tim Rutten writing in the Los Angeles Times draws attention to the "U.S. news media's grudging response to the revelation... and its utter lack of interest".
But what this scandal really reveals is that for far too long we have simply believed everything we've been told, especially if it suits our own personal agenda, and I made this point two weeks before the recent Israel/Lebanon war broke out.
Truth should be acknowledged, even if it does not suit our agenda. No where is this lack of honesty in supporting political agendas more obvious, than in the Middle East, in relation to Israel, Iraq and terrorism.
I made those remarks in an article I published on July 1st 2006. I published the introduction and ending (2000 words) at Magic City, and the full article on my own website under the title " What is Truth? A Political Camera Angle!"
That article was quite long, quoting and citing dozens of news articles on the issue of truth and prejudice. In the members' newsletters dated June 19th 2006 not only did I mention that I was writing it, but stipulated the name under which it would be published. Now two months later we are reading that the media has been deceiving us with photographs and news reports that are not just false, but fabricated with the intent to deceive us.
So am I a prophet as a couple of religious fundamentalists requested to know? If I am, then I don't understand why many more are not? My "prophetic vision" does not come from thunder and blinding lights, accompanied by supernatural voices, it comes from a mind that has learned the hard way not to trust people who claim to have the truth, and one that prefers to look at everything honestly while totally aware of the human preponderance toward prejudice.
Was this particular instance just a one off? On December 12th 2005 in an article entitled: Sydney's Racial Violence which was a commentary on the violence that had just erupted in Australia, I wrote:
Who could have predicted this violence?
I DID!
In the Article I wrote for the 'Newcomers Network : Living in Harmony Australia', I wrote...
It's like being in a pressure cooker, and one day, there will be a violent explosion, as average Australians refuse to be told what to think and believe and feel about just about everything.
One of the results of these constant accusations that 'we Australians' are racists, is that 'we Australians' feel that 'we' in fact, are the victims of 'reverse racism'.
The 'Newcomers Network' article (published 3 weeks before the violence), came about because that organisation, having read some of my articles, asked me to write 'specifically' for them.
So that makes two prophetic utterances out of two! Certainly not enough to qualify as a prophet. (I didn't even forsee my recent 6 weeks of encephalitis). But it does not take someone connected with the Divine, to divine the results of certain types of behaviour. It is just commonsense.
Unfortunately today we live not in a commonsense world, but a fast food world that dishes up predigested food that is spooned into our mouths and eagerly consumed without care or consideration. Mother just spoons it in and we swallow it straight away. Unfortunately, as I wrote in the 'What is Truth?' article, "We live in a world with competing ideologies that routinely seek to win us over, and which never let the truth stand in the way of a good philosophy". Whatever philosophy we follow, we just swallow what they feed us.
The tragedy of Reutersgate, is not that an organisation accidentally or deliberately deceived us, but that we willingly make ourselves vulnerable to deception. We live in a world that wants the "bottom line"; that wants everything in "black and white"; and more importantly, we live in a world in which, despite all our protestations to the contrary, we just want someone to tell us what to do and think.
It's really time for us to start thinking for ourselves, and, putting philosophical, religious, and political agendas aside, seek the truth. But then again, "What is Truth?"
Post Script As I was posting this article, I received the following email. I couldn't access the hyperlinked text, so I don't know where it comes from.
CBS: Sixty Minarets?
CBS newsman Mike Wallace last night interviewed Iran's ruler, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Sixty Minutes. The famed tiger of "gotcha" journalism turned tabby cat with the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. Wallace fairly swooned in Ahmadinejad's presence: "He's an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He's obviously smart....You'll find him an interesting man." Wallace later said. "I expected more of a firebrand...He comes across as more rational than I had expected." Wallace didn't ask questions about Iran using Hezbollah to murder 241 U.S. Marines and Navy Corpsmen in Beirut in 1983. Nor about Hezbollah's murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem in Beirut in 1985. No questions either about Hezbollah's hanging of Marine Col. Rich Higgins in Beirut in 1988--and broadcasting grainy, grisly pictures of Higgins' body swinging from a rope. Mike Wallace and CBS have joined forces with the pacifists. A better journalist wrote this in The Washington Post: "If Americans do not fight, the terrorists will attack America again. And we now know such attacks can kill many thousands of Americans. The American pacifists, therefore, are on the side of future mass murderers of Americans. They are objectively pro terrorist. There is no way out of this reasoning. No honest person can pretend that the groups that attacked America will, if let alone, not attack again. Nor can any honest person say that this attack is not at least as likely to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people. Not to fight in this instance is to let the attackers live to attack and murder again; to be a pacifist in this instance is to accept and, in practice, support this outcome." Those are the words of Michael Kelly, prize-winning author, editor, and columnist. He died on the road to Baghdad in 2003. Let's honor his memory, by heeding his warning.
R.P.BenDedek is from Brisbane Australia and is the author of 'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran' at http://www.kingscalendar.com His academic articles set forth Apologetics for and results of his discovery of an "artificial chronological scheme" running through the Bible, Josephus, the Damascus Documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Seder Olam Rabbah.
He writes photographic 'Stories from China' and social editorial commentaries, both at KingsCalendar, and as a contributing newspaper columnist. He currently teaches Conversational English in China and in addition to his English Lessons at KingsCalendar, he has created specific sites for Students of English.
