This happens to be one of those iconic pictures captured in a fixed moment in time, that’s used thereafter to help formulate and direct public opinion on a specific issue. The problem with this iconic picture in question, is that it’s iconic to different sides for entirely different reasons.
For the photographer who took the picture and the media that falsely labeled and promoted it, the picture is ”iconic” because it supposedly symbolizes the Arab-Israeli conflict. For those of us, thanks to Honest Reporting, who care to know the actual facts surrounding the photo, it’s iconic for the reason that it symbolizes everything that is wrong in the media’s biased and non-factual reporting on the Arabs’ war against Israel.
Here is Honest Reporting’s story on the reunion between Tuvia Grossman and the IDF soldier that saved him. KGS
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Dramatic Reunion Ten Years After The Photo That Started It All
On September 30, 2000, The New York Times, Associated Press and other major media outlets published a photo of a young man — bloodied and battered — crouching beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman. The caption identified him as a Palestinian victim of the recent riots — with the clear implication that the Israeli soldier was the one who beat him.
The victim’s true identity was revealed when Dr. Aaron Grossman of Chicago sent the following letter to the Times:
Regarding your picture on page A5 of the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian on the Temple Mount — that Palestinian is actually my son, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago. He, and two of his friends, were pulled from their taxicab while traveling in Jerusalem, by a mob of Palestinian Arabs, and were severely beaten and stabbed.
That picture could not have been taken on the Temple Mount because there are no gas stations on the Temple Mount and certainly none with Hebrew lettering, like the one clearly seen behind the Israeli soldier attempting to protect my son from the mob.
In response, the New York Times published a half-hearted correction which identified Tuvia Grossman as “an American student in Israel” — not as a Jew who was beaten by Arabs. The “correction” also noted that “Mr. Grossman was wounded” in “Jerusalem’s Old City” — although the beating actually occurred in the Arab neighborhood of Wadi al Joz, not in the Old City.
In response to public outrage at the original error and the inadequate correction, The New York Times reprinted Tuvia Grossman’s picture — this time with the proper caption — along with a full article detailing his near-lynching at the hands of Palestinians rioters.
The photo of a bloodied Tuvia Grossman became a symbol in the struggle to ensure that Israel receives the fair media coverage that every nation deserves.
In April 2002, a District Court in Paris ordered the French daily newspaper “Liberation” and the Associated Press to pay damages to Grossman to the amount of 4,500 Euro.
The Court condemned the Associated Press for “mispresenting [Grossman] as a member of the Palestinian community,” while the court censured “Liberation” for “publishing the litigious picture with a comment edited the same faulty way, giving the picture a meaning and a scope it could not have.”
A picture is worth a thousand words even when it is used to push forward a lie. The immediate graphic horror is seldom corrected, and most folks never question the source or intention of the news item.