Context is All

Great photo essay that shows how, by tightly cropping a photo and removing the explanatory context around the central image, the San Francisco Chronicle was able to create an impression that, while false, is still not quite unethical.

What looks like an iconic image of a strong, poltically active woman is revealed instead to be one of several teenagers being stage-managed by an adult communist organiser for an anti-Israeli front group.

SATURDAY NIGHT UPDATE: Oh my God, but it keeps getting better and better. The SF Chronicle article linked in the story above identifies the young girl as a member of Youth Together. Who are they?

The Youth Together Project was created in October 1996 in response to rising racial conflicts in California's Bay Area schools. The project is a consortium of multiracial agencies: ARC Associates, East Bay Asian Youth Center, International Institute, West Oakland Health Council and Xicana Moratorium Coalition. These groups believe that in order to achieve long-term resolutions to racial conflicts in the schools, the students must be involved in creating the solutions. Funded initially by the U.S. Department of Education's hate crimes prevention grant, Youth Together is currently funded by the department and additional private foundation grants, including the Evelyn and Walter Haas Foundation and the Y and H Soda Foundation.

Program Operations

Youth Together develops multiracial student teams to lead school-based efforts to prevent and reduce racial conflicts and violence in five targeted high schools in Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond. Each of the five Youth Together consortium members is responsible for one school. A group of approximately ten diverse students at each school undergoes a series of biweekly trainings that are run by the consortium group. In addition, each month there is a project-wide meeting for the young people from all five schools. Through a racial violence prevention curriculum, imparted in these trainings and through team discussions, students develop an understanding of the dynamics of race, equity and violence in their schools. These students then mentor their peers and younger students to pass on the understanding and skills that they have learned. Participants also work with school administrators and staff to educate them about students' perspectives on race and equity issues. Finally, the students develop school campaigns to address the underlying roots of racial violence, and work with members of the school community to implement these changes. Through the design and implementation of the Youth Together Project, students learn that their perspectives are valid and valued. They also learn to find positive ways to resolve conflicts and to build alliances across color lines. Youth Together also operates a summer program for eighth graders to increase their understanding of race and peacemaking.

Outcomes and Significant Accomplishments

As a result of the Youth Together Project, 350 young people have increased their awareness and understanding of their own and other groups' cultural and racial histories and backgrounds. The project has empowered young people to believe that they have the ability to change themselves, their friends and their schools into positive forces working for justice and peace. Youth Together has also enabled school communities to work together to change the policies and practices that give rise to racial conflicts and divisions. Youth Together is currently developing a curriculum guide which will be available for dissemination and replication in Fall 1999.

That's from this page, from NARA, the . Follow the link up the URL chain and you learn that this program was an initiative from... wait for it... the Clinton presidency!

Even better was the purpose -- to stop racial hatred in America's schools. Which explains why a communist sympathiser is leading a group of American teens in adopting Palestinian terrorist dress, in front of Palestinian flags which indicate sympathy with the Palestinian terrorist actions, and by extension sympathy with the murder of Israelis and Jews.

If I had more time, I'd love to Google the names and organisations listed by Youth Together as their founders. Guarantee you that they are all radical, Leftist (and Marxist) narrow-agenda "activist" groups, bilking taxpayers for the money they need to survive because they can't possibly raise it themselves.

Remember, this is your tax money at work here, funding anti-war nonsense that has no rational connection to teaching East Bay youth how to live with each other.

All of which flew right over the heads of the SF Chronicle photographer, writer, editor, etc as they were prepping this for print. Or maybe they knew and hoped you wouldn't....

Hey, Chris Peck, Editor in Chief of the Commercial Appeal, tell me again why I should trust your industry's vetting and fact-checking process; the assurances of balance, neutrality and objectivity; the ponderous solemnity you drape yourself in? Cause I sure see a whole lot of reasons not to trust.