Dead children of the war and the photographs

Yesterday one of the most horrific photographs I’ve seen appeared on a picture service we subscribe to. The Getty picture shows the bloody head of a dead girl exposed, the rest of her body is buried in the rubble of a four story house that collapsed when struck by an Israeli air strike yesterday. The picture makes a point. The war is killing children. And the killing should stop.

We decided not to print the picture – it’s just too brutal. Instead we used this horrific but less graphic AP picture. I thought briefly of posting the bloody head picture on my blog. But didn’t. Today The Daily Dish used the picture. With the picture, Andrew Sullivan quotes from an article by Jeffrey Goldberg, The World’s Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure, on Hamas, children and photographs. Here is the excerpt:

One more thing, speaking of pornography — we’ve all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It’s a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn’t matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.