Photos That Lie: Building the Case Against Israel, Article by Article, Day After Day.

For fifteen years, (1993-2008), Charlie Bernhaut of Americans for a Safe Israel has been sending Open Letters to the staff at the New York Times. Charlie loves Jewish cantorial music and Jewish jokes. He is an amiable, sociable man. So, what has driven him to launch such a lonely, one-man crusade?

I doubt he can stop himself. Perhaps the Biblical bush burned for him too, perhaps, like Moses, he could not refuse the mission-which consists of documenting and protesting the newspaper’s contemporary “use of photographs to prejudice their readers against Israel.” He was at this long before CAMERA, MEMRI, or HonestReporting saw the same burning bush. The Times has never acknowledged Bernhaut’s letters-nor have the Jewish media and organizations who also received copies.

Of course, as the author Laurel Leff, (Buried By the Times. The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper), has documented, the Paper of Record did not cover the Holocaust either, they did not document Jewish suffering or genocide.

The photos Charlie brought me were all taken by Rina Castelnuovo. Google her and you will find sixteen pages devoted to her photos in the Paper of Record, and to her gallery exhibits and prestigious awards. Castelnuovo was born in Tel Aviv but her focus is mainly upon the suffering of Israel’s non-Jewish Arab citizens and that of Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. A minority of her photos focus on positive Israeli realities but there is no real balance or complexity to her photojournalism. Of course, the articles that accompany her work are similarly unbalanced. One might conclude that she has been asked to focus only on Palestinian grief and to avoid Israeli grief altogether.

Castelnuovo’s photos enjoy prominent placement and sometimes occupy an incredible one-third of a page. Obviously, so do the articles that her photos illustrate. Bernhaut believes that some, if not all of her work, is staged; it therefore pre-dates the kind of faux-tography that characterizes the full-steam-ahead Arab, Palestinian, and Islamist visual and narrative brainwashing of the world’s masses that gathered force during the al-Aqsa intifada.

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