Center for Strategic Communication

Balancing acts & mirror images: 1

by | Aug 1, 2014 | Monitor

[ by Charles Cameron — first in a series of (at least) three posts, mostly about Gaza ]
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There are a whole lot of uses of balancing acts & mirror images around these days on Twitter and elsewhere, and without prejudice I’d like to repost some of them. Individual items of this kind may be designed to “take a side” — but with any luck, presenting a slew of them together will encourage a more thoughtful response.

First up, one that compares and contrasts the Gaza situation with that in Syria:

Why the double standard is a great question to ask, but I’m not sure any one answer will be the right one. The juxtaposition of the two death tolls, however, clearly provokes thought. And besides, as the Reverend Dean of St Pauls, John Donne saith:

any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

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Here’s a “mirror image” with built in asymmetry that is clearly used to convey an Israeli point regarding Hamas:

This gains its psychological force as argument precisely from the symmetry between the two sides — and from the way in which that symmetry is broken.

And here’s a variant that I posted earlier, to much the same effect:

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Here’s a “twinning” of tweets that I put together myself, providing what may be a less obvious symmetry, and again one that takes us ourside of Gaza, though not out of the neighboirhood entirely. There’s this:

And then there’s this:

As I say — remembering as I say it, specifically, the injunction to “love thy neighbor” — it’s all in the same neighborhood.

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Really, the number of ironies, paradoxes, mirror-images and so forth cropping up in my Twitter feed these days is overwhelming.

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