Center for Strategic Communication

[ by Charles Cameron — propaganda via the misquoting of an image ]
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The two images are the same — as above, so below. Their contexts, however, are different: one image is preented with the comment:

Muslims burned in Burma … by Buddhists idolaters?

The other:

An ethnic Tibetan monk throws the body of a child onto a funeral pyre in a ditch in Jiegu Town of Yushu County, Qinghai province, after an earthquake registering 7.1 on the richter scale hit the area. April 19, 2010. Over 1,400 people died in the disaster.

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Sources:

I used only one copy of the photo, since different people have cropped it differently, but the two quotes can be found with their respective versions of the same image here:

  • Forum voices Yemen, Muslims burned in Burma
  • 2Wall, The Most Shocking Pictures of 2010
  • **

    While the violence encouraged by Buddhist monks against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma is tragic and important for us to recognize [1, 2], borrowing the photo of a monk taking a medically justified measure to avoid adding a preventable medical disaster to an already terrible natural one, transposing it from the Tibetan plateau to Burma, and then identifying it as a photo of a Buddhist monk murdering Muslims is… unhelpful to say the least.

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