Last Sunday. a week after the raid on OBL’s compound, The Jerusalem Post was the first to report that a Hasidic newspaper based in Brooklyn, Der Zeitung, had excised Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Audrey Tomason, Director for Counterterrorism for the National Security Council, from the iconic Sit Room photo, seen here, taken a week earlier during the course of the raid.
The supreme irony was that when this original photo was first released and making the rounds, much of the commentary mentioned that the photographer seemed to have made HRC the focal point intentionally. You do not need to know much about composition to predict that removal of the focal point makes for pitiful photography. I suppose you do need to know something about Hasidim to know why the women were erased from the photo and thus from the historic moment.
The newspaper’s policy is not to print pictures of women because … well they can be tempting, sexually suggestive. There are a few things wrong with this thinking. First, and foremost it assumes a primarily male readership. Secondly, it alters history whenever any woman’s photo is removed from a news story. Thirdly, it posits that women, no matter how professionally they present themselves are sirens whose essential raison d’être is to seduce men.
Now readers of this blog have seen Mme. Secretary exercising her “smart power” in some flirty ways over her more than two years in this post, She is very beautiful and can melt all but the hardest of hearts (Avigdor Lieberman has yet to tumble, but Hugo Chavez may be softening). She knows how to charm men and does not hesitate to use that ability in service to her country. Sergei Lavrov and the New START Treaty attest to her capacity to win over the previously stubborn. The Sit Room on May 1, 2011 was not, however an occasion on which that particular talent of hers would have been likely to have been on display.
Always carefully attired, she was in a sensible tweed jacket and all of the secretarial assets were well covered. Her eyes were on a screen of some kind, not gazing into some man’s eyes … not even gazing into the camera lens. If something about her in that photo gave rise to sexual impulses, there was no effort on her part to generate that.
So if merely the presence of a woman, no matter how qualified and legitimately involved in an incident. merits her erasure from a moment in history because she is potentially just too sexy and seductive, we say turnaround is fair play and applaud FreeWilliamsburg for providing us sex-driven females with a version of the historic photo free of the tempting presence and distraction of all of that testosterone in the room.
In the week that has ensued, the paper has said it issued apologies to the White House and the State Department. As far as we know, they have not printed a correction (i.e. the original photo). Neither did we hear a peep from the White House which issued the original with the following provision, according to The Jerusalem Post:
“This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, e-mails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.”
So, just guessing, the tampering is OK, and long as no one draws a mustache on the POTUS. That would cross the line of propriety.
Still4Hill 