When I saw this image on a few anti-Israel twitter and facebook accounts today, with the message, “Happy Easter from Occupied Palestine,” well, I just laughed out loud.
Once I finished cleaning the coffee from my screen and keyboard, I decided to take a page from Aussie Dave’s playbook and do a reverse image search. Sure enough, the image dates back to at least 2007, and the earliest place I found it posted was on two humor sites. One was in the Slovak language called “All the funny pictures of the universe” (definite NSFW warning on that one) and one was in Chinese with the url joke.qq.com.
Are these Israeli soldiers and an Israeli landscape? Possibly. But the picture is clearly old and probably set up intentionally for a photo-op. Who dresses their kid up like a bunny, sends him out to play around soldiers, and then stands around taking pictures?
There’s an obvious similarity to the many photos of Palestinian Santa, which are designed to tug at naive Western heartstrings. The only thing this does is prove the point that guest poster Mark Pellegrino made yesterday, that for a certain set, images that set off one’s emotions appear to be more important than actual facts.
