Did Newsweek Promote Fake Atrocity Video? Will ISM Produce Video for Inspection?

Is this young man a victim of an Israeli sniper?(Screenshot of ISM video)

The International Solidarity Movement, a radical anti-Israel organization that has condoned acts of terror against the Jewish state, is alleging that an Israeli sniper killed a young man in Gaza during the recent fighting between the IDF and Hamas. The ISM posted a video of the alleged sniper attack on its website on July 21, 2014.

Later that day, Newsweek posted an article about the video on its website and quoted ISM activist Joe Catron.

“We all just watched a man murdered in front of us,” said Joe Catron, an American ISM activist in Gaza who confirmed his account to Newsweek.

“He was trying to reach his family in Shuja’iya. He had not heard from them and was worried about them. They shot him and then continued to fire as he was on the ground,” Catron added.

Catron, who declared an unknown Israeli soldier guilty of murder, is not a disinterested observer, but a radical anti-Israel activist who has appeared a number of times on PressTV, which the ADL describes as “the Iranian government’s primary propaganda tool to promote a wide range of pernicious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in English to a worldwide audience.” This ADL report provides extensive background about the hateful antisemitic conspiracy theories that have been broadcast on this network.

According to the ADL report, Catron who appears regularly on PressTV, said the following on the network in 2012: “Well, it appears to me that the United States is, as obviously as we know, co-opted by the Israeli lobby, so is the United Nations and Israel is simply using the United States to buy what it wants…”

Catron’s radical anti-Israelism can be seen in a Tweet posted on July 21, 2014:

Newsweek’s reliance on Catron as a source, and its failure to disclose his radical hostility toward Israel and its supporters is patently irresponsible given the manner in which anti-Israel partisans have successfully introduced manipulated images and staged video into the Western media. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Richard Landes’ website, “The Second Draft.”

Blogger Thomas Wictor has raised some interesting questions about the ISM video in a post he wrote here. Two parts of the video deserve close scrutiny in light of Wictor’s challenge.

The jump between the images between 2:23 and 2:24 indicates that some editing has taken place. Wictor writes that “Suddenty [the victim] goes from being beside the cameraman to lying in the only cleared-out space in the rubble.” Wictor has a point.

And viewers who look at the the section between 2:27 and 2:30 lends credence to Wictor’s assessment that the alleged victim is applying fake blood to his hand. Is it a cell-phone the victim is holding (and if yes, why?) or is it a tube of fake blood as Wictor asserts?

Catron and the International Solidarity Movement have been challenged (on Twitter) to post the original, unedited footage of the event on the Internet. Here is Catron’s response:

Accompanying Catron’s ad hominem is an offer to provide the unedited video to news outlets. Will Catron and the ISM follow through? Will they make the entire video available (if they get it), for closer inspection by media outlets?

Will Newsweek follow up on the offer? Will other news outlets?