Webloggin » Rage Boy has a new friend, Anguished Woman

Remember Rage Boy, the Mick Jagger of Pakistan, who showed up at every rally, with his wide mouth screaming its outrage at America?

Turns out that Rage Boy has a friend, Anguished Woman. She’s the one who roams around in the middle of chaos screaming, and she’s now got the shiny new bullets to justify her pain. American Thinker first published her false bullet story, a story that quickly got updated as sharp-eyed readers recognized the owner of those nice, neat bullets. Here’s the story as Thomas Lifson first reported it:

Rocco DiPippo, AT contributor and blogger at The Autonomist, spotted enemy propaganda in the press, as delivered by the incompetent information warriors at French news agency AFP. Although we don’t like to post news agency photos out of respect for copyright laws, this particular photo is the subject of the news story, so we violate our normal policy and post it.

The caption run by Yahoo News, and presumably supplied by AFP states:

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more.

Now anyone who has actually held a gun and fired ammunition understands that a bullet which has been fired looks nothing like the unfired cartridges the woman holds. If I recall, the difference between bullets and cartridges was the first thing taught in the NRA firearms safety course I took decades ago when I first took up shooting as a sport and bought my first guns.

To help understand the story, Mr. DiPippo also sent along pictures of bullets that have actually left a gun. You can see them here.

But wait, there’s more. It turns out that a month ago, this same woman found that the evil Americans, without using a gun, had thrown shiny new bullets at her bed. The poor woman is being deluged with shiny, unshot bullets. What are we to think?

The excitement about this pathetic new bullet victim picked up as people started feeling that this woman looks remarkably like the woman from photos purportedly taken in Lebanon during last summer’s war. (Although it’s easy to confuse elderly women in burqas, isn’t it?) What made those Lebanese photos interesting was the fact that they purported to show two separate women, on two separate dates. In these photos of two allegedly separate women, each is shown with her head flung back and mouth wide open, as she screams out her anguish about the horrors of the destruction Israel wrought against her home(s) in Lebanon. Again, what are we to think?

Well, one of the things we might think is that, once again, Arab stringers are selling the credulous American media a bill of goods and that media, perfectly content with its fairy tale narrative about the Iraq War, is passing on manifestly silly stories and photos to the American public as if they are actually real news. We can also be concerned that, because most people scan stories quickly, without thinking too deeply about them, these manifestly false images are nevertheless creating the operative paradigm that will force our foreign policy in dangerous directions.

Hat tip: Rocket’s Brain Trust

Others blogging:
Blackfive
Little Green Footballs
’Victim’ Of US Sadr City Raid: American Troops Are Now Throwing Ammunition At People!
Hot Air: Credulous photojournalism of the day
The Autonomist: Terrorist Propaganda Picture of the Week
Dang! - snapped shot
Confederate Yankee: What is It?
Gateway Pundit: BUSTED!… Bogus Baghdad Bed and Bullet!

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE: From Confederate Yankee (who’s got good coverage generally):

The picture seems to show common commercial 55-grain civilian ball ammunition patterned after the Vietnam-era M193. With this in mind, I’d state that this ammunition wasn’t even dropped by American forces, as they don’t carry such ammunition.

This isn’t just a a photo that just shows ignorance. It appears to show a willful deception using civilian ammunition.

Webloggin Editor Update: Michelle Malkin received an e-mail from an ammo specialist in the military also indicating that the bullets aren’t used by the U.S. military:

I’m over here in Iraq right now. I’ve seen that picture of the Lady with the two unspent rounds. To me they don’t look like the stuff we use, I swear those are AK-47 rounds. I work in AMMO and I have inspected and handled thousands of 5.56mm ammo, M-16 ammo. It’s thinner than those rounds. Those aren’t even ours.

Ace notes that the AFP has corrected the story with protectionist deceit:

“CORRECTS BULLETS TO UNSPENT An elderly Iraqi woman holds up two unspent bullets at her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, 14 August 2007.”

Ummm… that’s not all that was corrected, AFP. The old caption said those bullets hit her house.

Now that you acknowledge they were never fired, of course you admit they could not have hit their house.

Funny how you just omitted that part without actually acknowledging your error there.

Why not just let that caption remain? The woman claimed these obviously-unfired cartridges hit her house. Why protect a liar from being exposed?

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