Thursday, August 03, 2006

That’s Hezbollywood

I found this article at the Israel Insider and the cheek of it had me spilling my tea all over my keyboard.

Despite extensive coverage in the blogosphere, one key fact has been missing: the identity of the person prominently posing many of the corpses for the international press. Against the powerful images of dead children, facts and reason don't stand a chance.

Later in the AP report we learn about the circumstances by which Jradi said he was summoned to the scene. "Jradi said he got the call to rush to Qana from Tyre. But he couldn't go immediately, with Israeli warplanes still overhead. 'It was too dangerous,' he said."

Abu Shadi, it turns out, has a very distinctive form of transportation.

He was also photographed in Qana holding a dead child while in full rescue worker gear in one picture. But in another he is holding the same child dressed just in a black t-shirt, without his flak jacket, flourescent vest, radio and helmet. In the widely distributed blog entry Milking It, EUReferendum exhaustively examines the photographic evidence and time-stamps of the "rescue" operation.

But here's something new, which may explain a great deal:

Mark MacKinnon of The Globe and Mail reported from nearby Tyre, Lebanon on July 26, describing the many difficulties caused by the rising death toll in that city. "Abu Shadi, the mortician at the government hospital in the city, agrees. He's processed 100 bodies -- many of them grotesquely mangled and burned -- and on his pickup runs has been forced to leave behind many more that he can't recover from cars and destroyed buildings.

"It's much more [than the official count]," he says. "There are many trapped under the rubble. The death toll will reach 1,000."

"Mr. Shadi was standing in front of a refrigeration truck that was packed with 20 bodies, days after he helped bury 74 bodies in a mass grave. When he opened the door to show the black body bags haphazardly piled on top of each other, a staggering stench came out, despite the refrigeration. Next to the truck stood 40 empty wooden caskets, waiting for new arrivals."

Based on these descriptions, it seems highly likely that Abu Shadi the mortician and Abu Shadi the green-helmeted "civil defense worker" are one and the same. And, in the double role, Abu Shadi was among the first to arrive, before the media did, with his refrigerated truck that in recent days had been carrying around corpses.

"The refrigerated truck that bodies are stored in had just emptied the day before with a mass burial. It is already filling up again, with the bodies of children. "

We have pictures of Abu Shadi Jradi standing by the refrigerator truck, corpse in hand, and then, in different dress, posing with the same corpse in a different location.

Complicating the naming issue is a video which shows him at Qana, addressed in Arabic by a journalist by the named of "Abdel Qader" although -- as in the case of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Yasser Arafat (Abu Amar) and many others -- the "Abu" may be a nom de guerre.

The tantalizing question, which may never be answered, is this: was Abu Shadi's refrigerated truck empty when he arrived at Qana that morning? One might also ask: why was a "mortician" was among the first to be called to a presumed rescue situation, the very same "mortician" who ten years ago was posing headless child corpses?

Mr. Shadi had claimed much numbers twice as high, repeated -- even to this day. "Green Helmet" says in the video that fifteen bodies have been pulled from the wreckage, and he estimates that there were 210 (!) total victims.

The Red Cross and Human Rights Watch now confirm that the quantity of deaths has been greatly exaggerated, nearly double what was claimed by Lebanese officials. There were not "dozens" of children killed, as early reports have claimed.

And there really is no way to know by how much the deaths have been "padded" with refrigerated and transplanted corpses from Tyre or other locations.

And there remains the horrific possibility, as reported in a Lebanese publication but not confirmed, that Hezbollah placed rocket launchers on the roof and brought disabled children and the aged to be sacrificial victims, precisely as they became, possibly after a detonation of explosively charges long after the Israeli attack.

Mr. Green Helmet is a traveling mortician. Oy vey. Read the whole article here.

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