They Shoot Photographers, Don't They?

Perhaps the most disgusting images following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the ones of Palestinian men, women, and children dancing in the streets in east Jerusalem, celebrating the death of thousands of Americans, yelling, "God is great," and enjoying some celebrato-ry sweets.

The jarring scenes—so at odds with the familiar images of aggrieved Pales-tinian victimhood that are a staple of international news broadcasts—infuri-ated Americans, and, for a different rea-son, the Palestinian Authority. Frantic apologists for Yasser Arafat, who have spent years toiling in the propaganda vineyards, saw their long work souring before their eyes. Yasser Arafat rushed off to give blood for shipment to America— and the gesture got him almost no credit. By the end of the week, though, some media sympathizers were cluck-clucking that too much had been made of this footage, that the video is atypi-cal— that, after all, we have been shown the same images over and over. But there’s a good reason for this last fact, that also does no credit to the Palestinian Authority. Anyone who tried to film or photograph cheering Palestinians after that first disastrous bit of footage was released might have gotten himself killed. Hence AP footage of similar celebrations in Nablus was never released.

According to the AP, which protest-ed to the Palestinian Authority, Arafat- allied Tanzim militia made death threats to an AP cameraman who recorded the Nablus footage. "Several Palestinian Authority officials spoke to AP in Jerusalem urging that the materi-al not be broadcast. Ahmed Abdel Rah-man, Arafat’s cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority ‘cannot guaran-tee the life’ of the cameraman if the footage was broadcast." This is why no one has yet seen the AP’s video of the Nablus rally, which reportedly num-bered 4,000.

The only thing atypical about the video that was shown was that it some-how managed to escape the censorship-by- death-threat that the Palestinian Authority otherwise imposes on unflat-tering photography.  

The Times’s Bad Timing

Lots of people said and wrote and published things in the days before September 11 that look foolish or taste-less or worse in retrospect. For the most part they deserve to pass in silence. But the New York Times’s crashingly taste-less profile of an American terrorist would have been egregious whenever it was published, and therefore deserves special mention. Dinitia Smith wrote the piece, which was headlined "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen." It appeared in Tuesday’s paper, as the world was crashing in around America.

Some excerpts: "‘I don’t regret set-ting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’ Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on let-ters taking responsibility for bomb-ings. . . .
Val:Y