Sins Of Omission

A sniper loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr fires towards U.S. positions in the cemetery in Najaf, Iraq while being admired by Joao Silva for the treasonous New York Times.

Good Ole' Joao Silva is not a United States citizen. He's South African, and he's not an employee of the New York Times either, he's an independent, who sells his pictures to the highest bidder.

While all this means he isn’t a traitor, it certainly means he is no friend of any American and it certainly does not absolve the New York Times.

Times assistant managing editor for photography Michele McNally gushes: "Right there with the Mahdi army. Incredible courage."

Incredible courage?!?!? I think actual “incredible courage” would have entailed, Joao Silva getting word to US troops, or how about attacking the sniper and beating him unconscious with a heavy telephoto lens. Perhaps even turning over the photos and locations that they were taken to US troops.

If you were a photographer assigned to that region to cover the insurgency, would you take that picture? Would you believe that Americans need to see the reality of the forces we are fighting?
That we want to read about them and what they are doing and want to see them doing it?

That’s what an American Glenn Greenwald believes.

Would you allow this to happen? Personally profit from it?

Growing up Catholic, I was taught about two major types of sins:
Sins of Comission and Sins of Omission. Sins of Comission are sins of something you did. Sins of Omission were sins of something you failed to do.

It's even part of the Act of Contrition: ". . . I have sinned through my own fault. In my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. And I ask Blessed Mary, Ever Virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, our God. . . "

I'm not trying to preach to you, but I do believe that not doing what should be done is every bit as terrible as doing something that shoudn't be done.

So, when you stand in a room and take pictures of a terrorist kill a soldier with a sniper rifle and do nothing to stop it when you have the ability, then you have consented to that murder. You have allowed it and by allowing it when you could have prevented it, you condone it.

These journalists may protest all they want that it's their duty to get the story out to the people, and they can't let anything get in the way of that.

I say that the photographer who took the picture is no better than the terrorist himself.

Whether this photo is real or staged the caption reads "...fires towards US positions". If it is the former then Silva is complicit in the killing of Americans, if it is the latter he is serving willfully as a propogandist for the terrorists.

He should be promptly detained as an accomplice to terrorism. Imagine all of the useful intel that could be gleaned from his archives, not to mention his knowledge about the terrorists and the contacts to them that he must have in order to be able to operate like that among them.

The scum at the New York Times are even worse for publicizing this photo and attempting to profit from it. And they wonder why their stock is plummeting...