Sami Elmansoury Just want to put this out there after weeks of seeing it. There is an importance to raising awareness about the toll the I-P conflict is taking on civilians in a desire to save lives and to restore calm, but before clicking Share, please check your facts and verify your sources. It is never ok to callously spread fallacies - even once - and regardless of the intended target of that fallacy. There are many tragic and verified images coming out of Gaza, yes. For example, when four children were killed on the beach, I shared the image and it impacted me and others deeply. I have tried to internalize this: The dead cannot cry out for justice, it is a duty of the living to do so for them. -Lois Bujold However, there are also numerous falsely captioned images and videos that have taken the issue a step further - some that I have seen shared thousands of times - including by multiple people on my feed. Two quick examples. The caption of the first video below reads: This Jewish girl is encouraged to hit this Palestinian child by her parents who also take turns beating him. It has been shared almost 2,000 times. https://facebook/photo.php?v=10152569037717287&fref=nf Firstly, both sides in the video are speaking Arabic. Searches for more solid verification suggest that this was a Lebanese family tragically encouraging their daughter to beat a Syrian refugee boy that they had taken in, and that they were later arrested in Lebanon when the video emerged online. And yet, the word Jew is thrown around conveniently in the caption, with comments underneath that deeply cross the threshold of Anti-Semitism. Or this video, which is captioned in Spanish as Jews bury Palestinian children alive. This one has been shared almost 6,000 times. https://facebook/photo.php?v=654618034622467&fref=nf Searches for more solid verification suggest that while this video may have taken place in an Arab desert conflict zone, perhaps Syria, perhaps Iraq, perhaps elsewhere - neither the uniforms nor the logos match those of Israeli soldiers. And yet again, the word Jew is thrown around conveniently, with comments underneath that also deeply cross the threshold of Anti-Semitism. Notwithstanding the fact that no one would readily accept the word Muslim being thrown around in such a generalized way - without calling Islamophobia - let alone on a false video, a bit of journalistic integrity for those who are sincere in their desire to bring about peace and justice is not limited to journalists. We as human beings are accountable for spreading lies and propaganda about other human beings - even if it is just once - as much as it is of a common human justice to elucidate true stories of those who suffer in the cross-hairs of war and conflict. Please work much harder to be just and to verify your facts and your sources before hitting Share, because everyone else is doing the same thing. There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts. -Mahatma Gandhi
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 14:56:10 +0000
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