[<<The Pakistani security officials guarding the way to the site cited “security concerns” for denying access. They stuck to the Pakistani government’s position ever since the Indian attack on Feb. 26 that no damage was caused to any buildings and there was no loss of life. In Islamabad, the military’s press wing has twice called off visits to the site for weather and organisational reasons and an official said no visit would be possible for a few days more due to security issues. The Reuters team could view the madrasa from 100 metres away and only from below. The building that reporters could see was surrounded by undamaged pine trees, and did not show any signs of damage or activity but given the view, the assessment is very limited. High-resolution satellite images reviewed by Reuters on Wednesday showed the madrasa appears to be standing, virtually unchanged from an April 2018 satellite photo of the facility.>>
(Excerpted from sl. no. II. below.)] I/II. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opinion/india-pakistan-news.html?fbclid=IwAR1kY_0FRLTpeASebJl-ZmX4lYJmdvWY0nX-vYLrdTT0U8nevq7Ga_YkKik Opinion The India-Pakistan Conflict Was a Parade of Lies The internet contributed to the culture of mendacity in a fight between nuclear neighbors. Farhad Manjoo By Farhad Manjoo Opinion Columnist March 6, 2019 Image Televisions last month broadcasting details of the conflict between Pakistan and India.CreditCreditRehan Khan/EPA, via Shutterstock The internet truly is super-duper fake, and thanks to the malleability of digital media and the jet fuel of network virality, a digital lie can spread more quickly, and cause more damage, than an analog one. We all know that. Still, the blame-the-internet formulation has grown useless lately, because “the internet” has become inseparable from everything else. Social networks are now so deeply embedded into global culture that it feels irresponsible to think of them as some exogenous force. Instead, when it comes to misinformation, the internet is a mere cog in the larger machinery of deceit. There are other important gears in that machine: politicians and celebrities; parts of the news media (especially television, where most people still get their news); and motivated actors of all sorts, from governments to scammers to multinational brands. As these players adapt to a digital politics, they infect and become infected by novel possibilities for misinformation. It is in the confluence of all these forces that you come upon the true nightmare: a society in which small and big lies pervade every discussion, across every medium; where deceit is assumed, trust is naïve, and a consensus view of reality begins to feel frighteningly anachronistic. [Farhad Manjoo answered your questions about this column on Twitter.] You don’t need to travel far to find such a nightmare. But distance can help clarify the picture: It’s easier to appreciate the simmering pot when you’re looking at it from the outside, rather than boiling in it. And so I spent much of the last week watching a pot boil over on the other side of the world. In retaliation for a terrorist attack against Indian troops last month, India conducted airstrikes against Pakistan. After I learned about them, I tried to follow the currents of misinformation in the unfolding conflict between two nuclear-armed nations on the brink of hot war. What I found was alarming; it should terrify the world, not just Indians and Pakistanis. Whether you got your news from outlets based in India or Pakistan during the conflict, you would have struggled to find your way through a miasma of lies. The lies flitted across all media: there was lying on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp; there was lying on TV; there were lies from politicians; there were lies from citizens. Besides outright lies, just about everyone, including many journalists, played fast and loose with facts. Many discussions were tinged with rumor and supposition. Pictures were doctored, doctored pictures were shared and aired, and real pictures were dismissed as doctored. Many of the lies were directed and weren’t innocent slip-ups in the fog of war but efforts to discredit the enemy, to boost nationalistic pride, to shame anyone who failed to toe a jingoistic line. The lies fit a pattern, clamoring for war, and on both sides they suggested a society that had slipped the bonds of rationality and fallen completely to the post-fact order. The lies began immediately after Indian forces attacked what they described as a terrorist training camp in a Pakistani town called Balakot. The Indian government offered no visual proof of the effectiveness of its strikes, and there is still debate among Indian politicians about what was hit. Pakistan’s military quickly put out pictures from Balakot showing not much damage. Indian media, however, appeared eager to fill in a government-friendly narrative. As the Indian fact-checking site Alt News documented, several outlets, including some of the country’s largest TV news networks, aired what they described as exclusive footage of Indian fighter jets attacking Balakot. Here’s India Today’s breathless coverage of the clip: Except it wasn’t. The fighter-jet footage was actually first posted online in 2017, Alt News found. It appeared to have been resurrected on social networks last week and then lifted by Indian TV networks as proof of the attack. Not that Pakistani media were above fakery. After Pakistan’s Air Force shot down an Indian jet and captured a pilot who was later released, Pakistani media began airing images of downed aircraft. Except, as fact checkers documented, the pictures were old, showing wreckage from a previous crash. You would think fact-checking this stuff would limit its spread. Instead, what happened was that each side weaponized fact-checking, taunting the other for wallowing in lies without acknowledging its own part in all the fakery. Here are Indian anchors — from a network that pushed its own fake images — sliming Pakistani media with the hashtag #PakFakeClaim: What I’ve shared here is just a taste. If you dive into the tireless fact-checking sites policing the region, you’ll find scores more lies from last week, some that flow across both sides of the conflict and many so intricate they defy easy explanation. And you will be filled with a sense of despair. The Indian government recently introduced a set of draconian digital restrictions meant, it says, to reduce misinformation. But when mendacity crosses all media and all social institutions, when it becomes embedded in the culture, focusing on digital platforms misses the point. In India, Pakistan and everywhere else, addressing digital mendacity will require a complete social overhaul. “The battle is going to be long and difficult,” Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist who runs the Indian fact-checking site Boom, told me. The information war is a forever war. We’re just getting started. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: lett...@nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The Times in 2018. Before that, he wrote the State of the Art column. He is the author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.” @fmanjoo • Facebook II. https://in.reuters.com/article/india-kashmir-pakistan-madrasa/no-access-to-pakistan-religious-school-that-india-says-it-bombed-idINKCN1QO26W MARCH 7, 2019 / 11:00 PM / UPDATED A DAY AGO No access to Pakistan religious school that India says it bombed Saad Sayeed 3 MIN READ JABA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani security officials on Thursday prevented a Reuters team from climbing a hill in northeastern Pakistan to the site of a madrasa and a group of surrounding buildings that was targeted by Indian warplanes last week. A general view of a building, which according to residents was a madrasa (religious school) is seen near the site where Indian military aircrafts struck on February 26, according to Pakistani officials, in Jaba village, near Balakot, Pakistan, March 7, 2019. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro It is the third time in the past nine days that Reuters reporters have visited the area – and each time the path up to what villagers say was a religious school run at one time by militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and what the Indian government says was a “terrorist” training camp - was blocked. India’s Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale said on the day of the strike that it had killed “a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists, trainers, senior commanders, and groups of jihadis” at the alleged training camp. The Pakistani security officials guarding the way to the site cited “security concerns” for denying access. They stuck to the Pakistani government’s position ever since the Indian attack on Feb. 26 that no damage was caused to any buildings and there was no loss of life. In Islamabad, the military’s press wing has twice called off visits to the site for weather and organisational reasons and an official said no visit would be possible for a few days more due to security issues. The Reuters team could view the madrasa from 100 metres away and only from below. The building that reporters could see was surrounded by undamaged pine trees, and did not show any signs of damage or activity but given the view, the assessment is very limited. High-resolution satellite images reviewed by Reuters on Wednesday showed the madrasa appears to be standing, virtually unchanged from an April 2018 satellite photo of the facility. “That used to be the madrasa but it is no longer active,” said one villager, pointing at the white building on top of one of the many hills surrounding Jaba. The site matched the coordinates of the satellite images. Villagers told Reuters the school was no longer operational. “It was shut down in June last year,” said one, who asked not to be identified. On previous visits, a number of residents have said the madrasa was run by Jaish-e-Mohammed. A sign with the group’s name had previously stood near the site but was later removed. Another man, Mohammad Naseem, said there were madrasas in the area, opened during the rule of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose Islamisation policies during his 1977-1988 rule are largely seen as bringing radicalisation to Pakistan, but “there is no madrasa or anything like that here anymore”. “They say they killed 300 people but they didn’t even get 300 trees,” one soldier posted at the site of the Indian attack said. “Thank God they didn’t destroy the four or five homes that are here.” Reporting and writing by Saad Sayeed; Editing by Frances Kerry, Robert Birsel -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to greenyouth+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to greenyouth@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. 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