Atlantic Using Old Unrepresentative Photo About Hebron
There are a number of problems with Ayelet Waldman’s piece, “The Shame of Shuhada Street,” that appeared in The Atlantic on June 12, 2014, but one of the most obvious and egregious is the magazine’s use of an old photo of Baruch Goldstein’s grave. (See photo above.)
Baruch Goldstein was a resident of Kiryat Arba who murdered 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994. While most Israelis regarded Goldstein’s mass murder as a shameful act, some of his supporters turned his grave into a shrine.
After a court fight, the IDF dismantled the shrine, which was comprised of a large stone circle that encompassed Goldstein’s grave. You can see the stone circle in the 1998 photo The Atlantic used to illustrate the article.
The use of this photo, however, is deceptive because as a more recent photo of Goldstein’s grave taken by B’Tselem (shown below) reveals that this circular platform has been removed, leaving only a small section of stone at the base of Goldstein’s grave.
Why did The Atlantic use a photo taken in 1998 for a story published in 2014? Why use a 16-year-old photo that gives the false impression that Goldstein’s grave is still a shrine and not simply a gravestone?
This is propaganda, pure and simple, as is much of Waldman’s article.
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