David Frum, Gaza Truther

David Frum presents himself to the world as a level-headed
moderate, a man repelled by crazy fringe figures and conspiracy
theories. The center-right pundit and former Bush speechwriter also
recently spent a day declaring that three major media outlets were
faking images from the Gaza war, borrowing this analysis from a
blogger who thinks he once took
a snapshot of a ghost-cat as it was dematerializing.

Here’s the backstory. On July 24, Reuters, the AP, and The
New York Times all published photos of two brothers in
blood-soaked clothes at a Gaza hospital. The men’s home had been
destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, and the blood belonged to their
father, who had been heavily injured in the attack. Frum then fired
off a series of tweets pronouncing the photos fakes and speculating
about why Hamas’ propagandists had created them. The sole source
for his accusations was a blog
post by a fellow named Thomas Wictor.

I won’t waste your time describing Wictor’s argument, because at
this point even Frum doesn’t accept it. The photojournalism
site BagNews
thoroughly debunked the charges, and LobeLong scored
an interview with
Wictor that made it pretty clear that this was not a well-grounded
man. (In addition to confirming that his ghost-cat post was not a
joke, Wictor told LobeLong that you can safely conclude a
Palestinian is a Hamas operative if he has a beard with no
mustache.) Yesterday Frum finally
retracted his accusations in a post at The
Atlantic.

Frum’s retraction was headlined “An Apology,” but it’s one of
those yes-but apologies where the author spends most of his time
making excuses for his error. Frum explains his “skepticism” about
the images—that’s what he calls it, his “skepticism”—in great
detail, but he never acknowledges that his tweets were not simply
skeptical: They swallowed Wictor’s analysis uncritically, declaring
forthrightly that the pictures were fake. Readers might also notice
that while Frum apologizes to one of the photographers he accused
of deception, he doesn’t spare a single word for the people in the
photo, though it is if anything even more offensive to accuse them
of faking their grief.

Because I spend a lot of time writing about
political paranoia, I can’t help remembering the many times
Frum has written or said things like
this:

I realize there’s something absurd in trying to debunk
conspiracy theories. People don’t reason their way into them, and
they are not reasoned out of them.

Now he has spent a day promoting a
conspiracy theory of his own. And while he was eventually reasoned
out of it—apparently you can do that after all—his retraction may
still give you the impression he thinks the flood of bloody images
from Gaza is some sort of Matrix that would vanish if we all popped
the red pill.

Frum is also the guy who gave George W. Bush the phrase “axis of
evil,” in which those famous rivals, Saddam’s Iraq and the mullahs’
Iran, were supposedly secretly
aligned. (That’s what an “axis” is, you know. An alliance.) So
the man is no stranger to dubious conspiracy tales. But he
consistently describes
them as though they’re something those other people
do, not a phenomenon you can see among establishment figures like
Frum as well as fringy folks like Alex Jones. Let this episode be a
reminder that paranoia can flourish at the top as well as the
bottom of the social pecking order.