We're almost half-way done with today's posts on the tricks of the anti-Israeli journalistic trade. Here's the thing about most of these dishonest weasel tactics - they're neither subtle nor sophisticated. It's just pathos-soaked propaganda. In some ways, it's just formulaic, cookie-cutter stuff: a biased opinion-as-quote here, a personal detail about the victim there. So far this morning, we've talked about the following memes and tactics:

(1) Rage and Tears - The Palestinians are sad, but they're also genocidal. The Israelis made them that way.

(2) No Seriously, The Palestinians Are Really Pissed Off - Pictures of dead babies in the interests of showing just how much rage and how many tears there are.

(3) Stupid Headline Tricks - Got an opinion you want to express as news? Do it in a quote!

(4) The al-Athamnah Family - If you personalize one side and keep the other anonymous, it doesn't matter who's really at fault. The personalized side gets sympathy, and everything else follows.

For the rest of the day, we've got stuff about double standards, faux-sophistication with a purpose, and demonstrably false descriptions of Israeli reactions. All of these posts deal with how journalists generate plausible deniability and cling to "neutrality", all the while deliberately framing their stories in anti-Israel ways. But there's a reason why the examples are in the context of memes - of the phrases and ideas that are getting circulated.

The tricks aren't the things that are doing the damage. We can point out how and when a quote smuggles in a journalist's real opinion - but it's the content of the quote that's doing the anti-Israel propaganda work. And - more importantly - the way that memes spread means that it's the content that goes out and digs into the public consciousness. The weasel tactics are just how the meme gets off the ground - they're the tools and evidence of bias, but it's the bias itself that's the real concern. It's the spread of the disgusting omissions and implicit suggestions that is of concern - that the Palestinian thirst for genocide is somehow as natural as mourning for a dead wife, that barbaric mistreatment of dead babies is just something that people will do when they're angry, or that there was a tragedy and people should focus on that instead of thinking about how it happened. They spread and then they condence into little clusters of anti-Israel incitement and propaganda, where shockingly barbaric image meets shamelessly biased text:

"Weeping in anguish and screaming for revenge". Don't pay attention to how those two things are actually kind of different from each other, and that in your personal experience people who weep in anguish don't usually scream for revenge. Just focus on all the crying people. And the dead baby in the center.

Previously: Ignoring Inconvenient Facts, Palestinian Civil Society Watch - Just Wait Till They Try to Open a DMV!, Israeli Arab Girl Victim of Honor Killing