Slashdot Mirror
Reuters Admits, Pulls Doctored Photos
fragmentate points to a post on PopPhoto which says "Reuters pulled a photograph of burning buildings in Beirut yesterday after a post on the Little Green Footballs blog outed it as digitally manipulated. The photo, filed on Saturday by freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, ran with the caption "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs."
Fragmentate adds "Another image from the same photographer was found to have been doctored.
Whether you're a CNN fan, or a FoxNEWS fan, you have to wonder how much of what we see is fake, or exaggerated."
Virtually EVERY news report from ANY source is either exaggerated (to reflect the reporters bias) or softened (to likewise reflect the reporters bias). Add to this equation the pressure for ratings and simple stories can quickly and easily become "sensational".
True 'unbiased' reporting is a myth.
If you want an idea of whats going on, read/view as much as you can -- from as many sources as you can. From Fox to CNN, from the far left Pacifica to convervative talk radio. From The Standard to the NY Times. From LGF to DailyKos. My limited experience has suggested to me that the 'real story' is usually somewhere in the middle.
That said, I'd like to address this statement from TFA:(sneeze)BULLSHIT(/sneeze)
Bad lighting conditions? Remove dust? Come on. Last I checked CRT and LCDs glow... unless he was working from memory alone without the aid of a monitor, he's a flipping liar.
Beruit is not being bombed!
Sure, this photographer is at fault, and you can make assumptions about his political motives for photoshopping this image. But what's worse is how did Reuters let such a piece of crap into the system? The guys on SomethingAwful or Worth 1000 all do a much better job, and that's just for the glory of the contest. They're not trying to pass their stuff off as "news." Even the guys at Fark aren't this bad (not even Heamer :-) No, this photoshop was of "The Daily Show" quality -- comically bad.
The only conclusion I can come up with is that Reuters isn't actually looking at the images that come in the door. Even if someone at Reuters had the same political agenda as the photographer, he should have had the good sense to deny that picture because the photoshopping was so obvious. Actually, neither conclusion is good news for Reuters at all.
John
If it's posted on Slashdot, then it must be true. :P
You use reporters with a political agenda, shared by the editors, it should come as no surprise that this is what you get. The international press does not like Israel. They especially seem offended that the country hasn't just given up and died yet.
This is no way confined to Reuters. Here is an excerpt from yesterdays reliable sources between howard kurtz and Thomas ricks of the washington post.
Reliable sources
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon. KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here? RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me. KURTZ: That's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here. RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.
This fellow Ricks is willing to spout crap like the above on national television. The Khmer Rougue could make a convincing case for the moral high ground against Hezbollah. Israel a country that goes to the trouble of trying to get civilians away from targets before they are hit does not.
As peple have been pouring through recent Reuters photographs, a number of other discrepencies have arisen: Here's one http://drinkingfromhome.blogspot.com/2006/08/extre me-makeover-beirut-edition.html from Drinking From Home.
2 separate photographers sent in captioned photographs of a woman who's house "had just been destroyed". The only problem is, it the same woman and same house but the claimed airstrikes were 2 weeks apart.
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
These days pros shoot digital. I am a pro, I shoot digital. Somehow people have this impression that only what comes "out of the camera" is "real," but a digital photo is just an A-D conversion with a given set of parameters. I can significantly change the look of a scene just by changing the settings of the camera.
More to the point, I often shoot RAW, which REQUIRES "development" in order to be shown online or printed, since as a file it's just an uncalibrated sensor dump, meaningless data, not an image at all. But the look of a RAW image can change DRASTICALLY when converted to JPG based on the choices I make when selecting things like white balance, exposure, sharpness, contrast, etc. (and these have to be manually selected--i.e. the choices must be made by me in order to get an image file out the other end, there is no "real" initial image).
The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit). Photoshop/GIMP/Silkypix/any other image processor is no different, and represents just an extension of the photography/development process.
If a JPEG image comes out of the camera with very low contrast, why is that the "real" scene and not an incorrect camera setting (contrast turned too low)? And if I then take a low contrast image in GIMP and adjust the contrast for better clarity, why is that a "fake" scene and not the "real" scene that I saw?
The logical extreme of such arguments is that the only "real" images in the digital age are taken with black-box cameras with all settings on "auto" and nothing adjusted afterward. Only people forget that digital cameras are just glorified A-D converters and that all of the "auto" settings are calibrated and coded by programmers who are also making decisions about how images will look (high contrast vs. low contrast, expose for shadows vs. expose for highlights, compensate for differences between human lens and camera lens or don't, etc.)
Every step of the photo process, from selecting the camera + lens in the first place all the way to selecting the compression level of the file after all else is said and done, is "editing." All photography is propaganda by the photographer and anyone that doesn't realize this is both naive and missing a great deal of the appreciable "art" involved in the process.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
In addition to the photos, there are many fake news stories out there. Like the one the photo was supposed to accompany said the photo was of a jet firing three missiles was actually the jet firing one flare. The report that a particular Israeli strike in Lebanon killed 40 civilians. There was only one casualty in that strike.
The fact that Reuters didn't even look at the photos before publishing is just laughable. Anyone with an ounce of experience in photography could tell they were fake. Either Reuters is so inept you can't trust them to know the truth from lies or they don't care to tell the difference. Heck, a death threat to "Zionist pigs" was traced to a Reuters IP. Sure, I'll believe anything they say.
Either way, as a previous poster said, read from a wide variety of news sources and figure it out for yourself.
But why is the rum gone?
Are you telling me that a this Reuters professional photographer has "Photoshop" skills so poor as to try and pawn off this VERY poor photo edit as the real thing? My God, he took the same puff of smoke and simply stamped it an extra 25 times on the photo. Absolutely unbelievable that anyone is that stupid, much less a professional.
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts", Earl Weaver - Legendary Coach of the Baltimore Orioles
LGF's extreme anti-Muslim stance is often disturbing, but this is the second time that they've made a major contribution by outing negligent reporting by the mainstream media--they were also the first to identify the fraudulent "Bush memos" as crude forgeries.
These photos are the latest chapter in a long-running problem of the press... and I think it's time for the American press to finally come out and say what it is - biased. ALL press is biased, period. But only here in the U.S. do we all happily assume that, somehow, our press holds itself to its lofty goals.
Almost all of the European press is up front about its bias - left, right, or otherwise. It's liberating, it's informing, it's better for consumers. If I want to read the French press and see what's going on in the right, I read Liberation, the far-left (communist), L'Humanite, the right, Le Figaro, a center-left, Le Monde. By reading articles from each newspaper on a subject, you can hear what all sides are saying quickly and get much more information.
But here in the U.S., such a bias is reviled. Fox News, for example, is looked down on for its conservative bias. I look down on them as well - not because they have a bias, at least they're more open about it - but because they try to conform to the American press ideal of supposedly unbiased reporting by claiming they're "fair and balanced". Just come out and say it!
I don't care if the NY Times is left-leaning, either. That's fine. But they should at least ADMIT it.
Americans, journalists in particular, need to embrace their biases. Let us know where you're coming from so we CAN get the message from both sides, not some filtered down, biased report passing itself off as "both" sides of the story.
I'm a Playboy fan, because nothing in that magazine is fake or exaggerated.
The bad photoshop work isn't really the story here. It's just what got him fired from Reuters. In one example and yet another, this photographer is acting more as a Hezbollah propaganda operative than a news photographer. He was responsible for one of the most used photos from Qana with the dead child being held up, and as recently as yesterday had a picture on Page 1 of the NYT of an injured Lebonese civilian. He's basically the Peter Parker of Lebanon. It's wouldn't be hard to get the best photos if you were working with the terrorists who control the region!
It was done so badly that I could tell it was clone tooled by looking at the thumbnail of the picture.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I have a friend who's a sound engineer and he says he always hears library sounds on news reports. e.g. A report from Iraq may have some standard AK47 shots dubbed on to make it sound more interesting.
You use reporters with a political agenda, shared by the editors, it should come as no surprise that this is what you get. The international press does not like Israel. They especially seem offended that the country hasn't just given up and died yet.
Oh, really? I mean, does someone from USA or Israel listen to the international opinion? I mean, the War on Oil^H^H^H^HTerror and this yet another international military conflict american style?
This is no way confined to Reuters. Here is an excerpt from yesterdays reliable sources between howard kurtz and Thomas ricks of the washington post.
Reliable sources [cnn.com]
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon. KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here? RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me. KURTZ: That's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here. RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.
*cough* Luisitania *cough* PearlHarbour *cough* WTC *cough*cough*, man, I have a very baad flu.
This fellow Ricks is willing to spout crap like the above on national television. The Khmer Rougue could make a convincing case for the moral high ground against Hezbollah. Israel a country that goes to the trouble of trying to get civilians away from targets before they are hit does not.
Maybe because without the approval of USA this kind of sh*t would not happen, and the rest of the americans should get involved into it.
Are you going to be happy if Cuba launches missiles at USA because they *know* there are suspected anti-communist elements in USA? Well, if not why are you in support of such butchery of innocent civilians? You know, if the Israel army is so great-and-humane, maybe they should go for every house, and not try to destroy the whole country *including* the infrastructure. Yes, the Home-Of-The-Even-Braver indeed!!! The poor israeli are going to get in so much trouble for this war... like, you know, the thousands americans veterans of the Vietnam war. People NEVER learn anything.
Would you be happy if Cuba launches missiles at the USA because confirmed anti-communist elements in the USA kidnap three Cuban soldiers, kill 7 other Cuban soldiers and escape into the American borders not to even be glimpsed at by the American government?
Now imagine I tell you these anti-communist elements have attacked Cuba for a few decades now, and have kidnapped and killed other Cuban soldiers and civilians - all of this after Cuba retreated from the conquered American soil to prevent such attrocities. What do you think now?
Before you start implying that someone is paranoid, you may want to do a little fact checking. Going over the grandparent post line by line:
- Would it surprise you to learn that these doctored photos were placed by someone on the far Right trying to discredit the centrist media?
- Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.
- The goons on the Right in this country are playing a very deep game.
- They're sophisticated enough to data mine,
- and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero.
- It's just fascinating that the paste-eaters at LGF are always the ones who find these doctored photos,
- but never say a word about the ones on GOP web sites that show too much smoke on the destroyed World Trade Center.
- With a news media that's run by press agents,
- and a government run by lobbyists,
- you should just be prepared to only believe your own experience, and the media that you absolutely trust.
- Other than that, expect it to be lies.
- Then, get ready for the struggle to save our freedom that is inevitable.
-- MarkusQNote that he's not saying that it's true, just suggesting that it might be. And, given that this is a well known technique in spin control / psyops, it isn't an unreasonable questions.
Well, he's certainly not alone in this theory, and it is consistent with what Rove is known to have done to Alan Dixon, John McCain, and many others.
Goons is subjective, and pejorative, but the rest of this point is darned hard to argue with. When a party rises from the mat to take control of all three branches of the federal Government, is a coordinated effort lasting decades, you'd be hard pressed to call it luck.
Widely known
His name was Max Clealand, and they did just what he said.
"Always" is an exaduration, and "paste-eaters" is (probably) unjustified, but other than that it is an interesting point. They certainly have found a number of them, and always leaning to the right.
This did happen, and so far as I know none of them raised a stink, so he's spot on.
Also well known.
Well, they write the laws, and
If you want to, go ahead and argue that you should believe sources you don't trust.
Thing that aren't true, are...lies. Again, pretty hard to argue with.
Everyone from Ben "A Republic, if you can keep it" Franklin has agreed with this.
OK, I'll bite.
I don't believe it is unreasonable, nor prejudiced, to think that a man, who obviously and intentionally doctored a photo, did so to fan the anti-Isreali flame that seems to permeate the world right now.
The fact, that the man has an "arab-sounding name", only intensifies that theory.
However, it is just a theory as is your excusing his fraud by stating he was simply trying to "make a buck." Unless you have personal knowledge of his reasons, your theory is no more valid than any others. Of course, I'm not calling you a racist. Heaven forbid someone come to the logical assumption that he may have biased intentions based on the fact that he is either from that region or a muslim (based on his "arab-sounding name").
I despise the use of racism as a method of shutting down opinions that are contradictory to the politically-correct crowd.
I think you're being more than a little paranoid with what you think you 'see between the lines'. Not everybody has some kind of insidius agenda, whether they be freelance photographers or /. posters.
Listen to the news and take note: When the fighters are contrary to the wishes of US foreign policy, they are insurgeants or even terrorists. When they are for the wishes of US foreign policy, they are soldiers or even patriots. (This brought to light during the Reagan presidency regarding the actions in Nicaragua, it's the same these days.) News tends to colour Hezbollah and Hamas as organisations with dirty, bloody even, hands. The problem is, both sides are about as bad, rather like the tit-for-tat vengeance killing in Iraq between sunnis and shites. It's were everything becomes shades of gray and the news, often in line with Whitehouse wishes (because the Whitehouse feeds much of the media), is coloured in.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
First, let's get this out of the way: taking a picture always entails a reduction. Any picture is a two dimensional projection of one brief moment in four-dimensional space-time. So there is, necessarily, no objective reproduction of the observed reality. Whis is fine, as long as the image does not convey a grossly inaccurate view of reality, whether on purpose or not. That said, there's plenty of room for creating misleading depictions without resorting to post-processing (nowadays done mostly digitally, but the fine art of analog retouching has been practiced for more than a century by glamor photographers).
Now suppose there's one burning building in a city. There are many different ways to depict the situation. An aerial shot will show an isolated fire, without showing any details of the damage to the burning building. A photo taken at street level will show one or two sides of the building, probably focusing on the more heavily damaged sides. People may or may not be included in the picture. If they are, does it show terrified residents running away from the building? (Shock and awe.) Onlookers standing around? (Entertainment.) Firefighters doing their job? (Situation under control.) Did the photographer go directly for the jugular (weeping mother holding her infant)? Depending on what is shown, the composition, the exact moment, etc. one can convey vastly different messages, not all of which accurately reflect the situation.
If you look at award-winning photojournalism, it's the drama-queens that win: the typical scenes are usually boring, and the unusual photos take on an iconic status. The Vietnamese girl running crying down the street, the raising of the flag over the Berlin Reichstag or on Iwojima all range from unusual to unique. They are powerful symbols, but not necessarily an accurate depiction of what goes on most of the time during a war, crisis, natural disaster, etc. (namely, not a whole lot).
I'm assuming that (since you only objected to one point), that you agree with the rest and will focus on the one you singled out:
It certainly is possible to fact check a bald assertion. Of all the things you might want to fact check, a bald assertion is perhaps the easiest. If I say something like "The bulk of Portugal lies to the west of Spain" you will find it much easier to fact check than if I say something like "How like a flower my true love blooms."
Of course, this doesn't always mean that we have the resources to do it. Claims like "The far side of Jupiter is about -170 degrees Celsius" or "Arnold Schwarzenegger wears pink thong underwear" can be hard (expensive, risky, time consuming) to verify. So instead you can do the next best thing, and sanity check the assertion, from multiple directions.
Yes. Everyone agrees that the documents exist, and no one has proven them to be authentic.
Yes.
No, not really. The other proposed explanations (e.g. Terry McCallef(sp) did it) are even weaker.
No, not at all. In fact, the two prime reasons for suspecting Rove are 1) that it's very similar to things he's been known to do in the past (e.g. spreading negative information against his own candidate, such as he did for Harold See, forging documents as he did against Alan Dixon), and 2) it accomplished exactly what he would have wanted
Not really. Nothing in the memos was contested, and all of it had been previously reported (e.g. by the BBC). Bush never even attempted to deny any of it. The people who would know even stated that the information in the memos was essentially correct. So it wouldn't have helped Kerry's team much at all to have the documents, even if they had been legitimate.
You can go on and on like this, but I don't see how you can make it a "tin foil hat" theory, even if it can't be proved. And bear in mind here that the burden of proof at this point is on you; the original poster asked a (possibly rhetorical) question and you attacked without (so far as I can see) much ground to stand on.
--MarkusQ
I wanted to put in my two cents here and say that I agree.
Part of the problem seems to be that we've taken to using the word "terrorist" so broadly, and with such a stigma attached to it, that we've forgotten what it actually means. A terrorist is a person who intentionally attacks a civilian population, usually with the immediate goal of causing mass casualties, with the ultimate goal of accomplishing a political end by causing terror and fear in said civilian population.
To say "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is a lie; at the very least, it assumes that one man is either deluded, or misunderstanding the nature of terrorism. (At the very least it is simplistic: a person could be both a freedom fighter and a terrorist, or neither, or either one singly.)
To be a "terrorist" doesn't imply any particular political ideology. You could be a "Zionist" terrorist as easily as you could be an "Islamo-facist" one. Being a terrorist also doesn't require that someone be disconnected from a government, either; I think you could make a fairly convincing argument that a lot of warfare and accepted strategy in World War Two falls squarely into the realm of terrorism: bombing a city for its "morale effect" is simply terrorism by another name. (It's worth pointing out that most countries have rejected these tactics, and at the same time the word 'terrorist' has become more stigmatized as it becomes a less tolerated practice.)
Just because a word is used politically doesn't immediately strip it of all factual meaning; if that were the case, we wouldn't have any language left.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This particular photographer has reputedly commited fraud before. I'll accept that *his* motive was financial gain. What was Reuter's motive for accepting work from a know producer of fraudulent news?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The general public in Lebanon is to blame.
Lots of them actually support taking shots at Israel. The people who don't support that have still allowed it to occur.
I know, it's easy for me to say that the people in Lebanon should have put Hezbolla in jail or executed the whole lot of them. There isn't a one politician over there who dares to take a strong stand against the bastards.
But yet... a nation is responsible for keeping such things in check. Each and every person has a duty to keep the gangs under control. When this is not done, somebody else will come in and do the job.
If you let the criminals operate out of your house, don't complain when you get raided.
Not about the image that the original post is about, but about what happens after something like this gets out. Read this blog post:
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014929.php
A fine example of a blogger making a fool of themself, doing the exact same thing they are accusing Reuters of doing. Read my response to it:
----
The only photograph that strikes me as somewhat odd is the bottom image http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj4567.jpg.
The other 4 images are clearly photographs of the same scene. Let me give you my view on the positioning of the photographers in each.
#1 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj1234.jpg
This picture was taken with a regular angle lens, say somthing like 35mm, towards a building, across the bridge that is out. The photographer was standing close to the right side of the road (when viewed in this direction). The car in the next picture is out of the frame, to the left of the photographer. The photographer is too far from the actual damage to get a good shot of it. The actual damage is close to the right shoulder of the man in the center of the image, off to the left.
#2 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj1245.jpg
This picture has been taken from the opposite side of the road from #1, i.e. the left, shooting in the same direction. The photographer will have used a telelens, say 200mm. This pulls in the distant background and seems to place the pilons in the center of the road closer together. Note the tree white and red pilons, with the overturned fourth. Now look at #1 again, you will notice the same three pilons with the overturned one pointing towards the photographer. Also not that the two palms and the car on the right side of the road are visible in #1 as well, off in the distance.
Again, this picture has been shot across the destroyed bridge, which is now partly obscured by the car and the man. But you can make out the concrete mesh fragments sticking off the right shoulder of the man, to the right.
#3 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj2345.jpg
In #3, the photopgrapher has arrived at the collapsed bridge. From this angle, the photographer, shooting with something like the 35mm again, can shoot into the gap, clearly showing the damage. The photographer is now well past the car in #2, but the other car is still visible across the gap. The car in #3 is actually visible in all of the images, as is the building in the background, though very poorly in #1.
#4 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj3456.jpg
In #4, the photographer has moved back beyond the overturned car. Or, about as likely, #4 was actually taken before #1. The photographer is now so far back and to the left, that the small watchtower is also in the frame.
The allegations in the piece are sensationalist and don't stand up to scrutiny. The author (and powerlineblog) are doing exactly what they are accusing Reuters of doing: posting material without a critical and sceptical review. If the bottom photo (#5, http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj4567.jpg) was published as a photo of the same incident, that's not right But some of the comments on the other 4 are simply wrong.
I've included a schematic drawing of the scene as I think it was, for your reference. Note that I was there no more than the author was and that errors in my reasoning or schematics should in no way impact what Reuters and Hajj have to say for themselves.
----
The schematic I'm talking about: http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k88/Grismar75/i
ENOUGH of this "both sides are about as bad" B-S. Let's see if I can make this clear....
Those who intentionally TARGET children and PUBLICLY celebrate the deaths of children == Terrorist
Those who intentionally try to NOT TARGET children and publicly MOURN and REGRET the deaths of even their enemy's children == Probably NOT terrorists.
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
I have an even simpler definition for you:
Initiating conflicts, intentionally targeting civilians, intentionally putting civilians in harms way = terrorism.
Responding to aggression, making best efforts to not kill civilians even though foe dresses as and hides among civilians = not terrorism.
The news tends to cover Hezbollah with dirty and bloody hands because, well, they do. They intentionally locate their weapons in civilian locations such as apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals. They launch anti-personnel rockets towards population centers. When Israel responds, with inevitable civilian casualties, they are decried as evil baby killers. The media perpetuates this no-win situation by gobbling up every photo-op, whether real or doctored, because it forwards their agenda and/or ratings. How you could claim that the media is in the White house's pocket, especially in light of stories such as this one, is beyond me.
I guess I see a serious moral difference between a side that drops leaflets warning civilians of incoming attacks and encouraging them to move/leave, so that military targets and weapons caches can be destroyed with a minimum of civilian casualties, and a side that straps bombs to 15 year olds and sends them into a Sbarro's to blow up 40 people who are trying to enjoy lunch.
Perhaps you don't see any difference, and that's your prerogative, but that kind of thinking ("we're no better because we do rotten stuff too") is exactly what is going to lead to the downfall of Western civilization. What scares me even more is that a lot of people think we deserve it. What scares me even more than THAT is that the people who think we deserve it are almost without exception educated an enlightened liberal thinkers who cherish the progress made in the name of liberty - desegregation, women's sufferage, the gradual triumphs of the gay rights movement, etc. These things would fly right out the window across the globe in the absence of countries like the U.K. and U.S.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib