The
Times photo, by Sergey Ponomarev, an AP veteran and regular
Times contributor, shows one blood-soaked man comforting another in the hallways of a hospital near Rafah, a town in the southern Gaza Strip. In a dozen or so
tweets, the former George W. Bush speechwriter declared the photos fakes — not allegedly fakes, but fakes, full-stop — and berated the
Times’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan. Frum’s source? An obscure blog run by a man named Thomas Wictor
I spoke with Wictor by phone today. His is a tragic story. A self-described “failed music journalist” and “failed novelist” — “As of right now, I’m a failed everything,” he tells me — Wictor says that two literary agents defrauded him of his life-savings and managed to kill his latest book project. His
website bio says: “To do so they took advantage of his post-traumatic stress disorder with secondary psychotic features, as well as the ‘brain fog’ caused by Meniere’s disease. Both of these conditions create memory lapses and dissociation, which were exacerbated by the suicides of Wictor’s parents in February and October of 2013.”
In light of this history — and some other details, more on which in a bit — I asked Wictor if he thought he made for a reliable source. “I don’t care,” he told me. “My writing career was completely destroyed by these con artists and I don’t care.”
I won’t bother too much with
Wictor’s theories about why the photos are faked. For that, you can
visit Bag News, a blog about photojournalism and other forms of visual documentary run by professional journalists and journalism experts, where Michael Shaw has done a deep dive on Wictor’s post. But it’s worth noting that the
Times’s international photo editor David Furst was unequivocal that the paper stood by Ponomarev’s shots. “We have investigated the allegations being made against photographer Sergey Ponomarev,” Furst told me, “and have definitively concluded that they have no foundation and are absolutely without merit.”
That’s not a surprise to Wictor. “Of course. That’s fine,” he says. “Oh yeah, it’s possible that I’m completely wrong about everything. This is just opinion.” I pointed out to Wictor that he displayed a propensity for jumping from conjecture to full-blown assertions. “I’m a very assertive person,” he replied. “I believe that these are obvious fakes, but I could be wrong.”
In a separate
post, Wictor had written that an alleged shooting victim in Gaza “has a beard with no mustache, which means he’s a Hamas operative.” I suggested that such a facial-hair profile wasn’t as airtight as he seemed to think. He responded: “A beard with no mustache has a very different meaning in Gaza than it would in Pennsylvania” — a reference to the Amish, who wear their beards this way — “or in Israel.”
If Frum had done a little more digging, he would have found other posts on Wictor’s blog that call into question his credibility. Frum might have discovered some of Wictor’s recent
free-associative rhapsodies or
winding disquisitions on minstrel shows. Frum might’ve even found Wictor’s post where he
thinks he has taken a photo of a “dematerializing” cat — apparently the second coming of a ghost cat Wictor knew earlier in life.
When prodded on whether the dematerializing cat thing was serious or ironic, Wictor laughed. “No, it is serious. You can present me as completely off my rocker,” he says. “The fact is I took a picture of a cat that looked like my beloved dead cat, and when the shutter snapped the cat was gone. I tend to believe that when we’re under a lot of stress and pain, we can hallucinate. Sure, why not? But I also believe that we might get signs to help us carry on.”
Wictor spoke about “Pallywood,” the term pro-Israel activists use to describe allegedly fake videos of Palestinian suffering. “People don’t tell the truth,” he tells me. “This is a propaganda war.” He doesn’t trust major media outlets: “I understand that AP and Reuters are giants, but I have myself seen so much bias in them that I don’t respect them at all.”
Wictor backed up his gentle demeanor on the phone — he encouraged me to ask him about anything, always polite and frank — with a note about how he viewed the current Gaza war: “I don’t take any joy in this war. I’m not waving, cheering, going, ‘Go! Kill Palestinians!’,” he explains, adding with a touch of humor, “If I could press a magic button I would dematerialize all the Hamas guys.”
Reading over Wictor’s blog, it’s clear that he’s not entirely well, and that his analysis is wanting. Which all raises the question of what exactly Frum was thinking questioning a bevy of professional journalists based on Thomas Wictor’s writings.
