On August 22, 2012, I picked up a story making the rounds on Facebook having to do with reporting the emergence of crucifixion in Egypt, and I looked into it (“Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated”).

A downloaded copy of the photograph accompanying the claim yielded no IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) data, and continued web searching led me to what I considered a reliable debunking.

However, with credit extended to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), not only the picture but a video clip of the same appeared in relation to a spy caught having betrayed an Islamist group in Yemen.

I saw it first here on the Blazing Cat Fur blog, n.d.

And found a listing for something at least like it here:

#3552 – Man Crucified by Al-Qaeda in Yemen – Viewer Discretion Advised
The Internet – August 27, 2012 – 01:14

A subscription is required to view it — same or different, but same category — on the MEMRI site, and I’m looking into that.

The flip with dates (August 22, first round; August 27, posted by MEMRI; by August 30, well along in the anti-Jihad industry) I take as indicative of how information continues to crawl off the street and up to the web from the world’s most remote locales.

In the meantime, the Blogosphere seems to have picked it up and gotten its facts straight — “Sheik Yer Mami” (Winds of Jihad) notes a Jihad source on YouTube as a  primary location (see “Crucifixion in Yemen,” August 30, 2012 for the video plus that detail).

I suspect most believe the “War on Terror” involves neutralizing a number of violent moral entrepreneurs and their networks, but to my mind that’s a small part of a much, much larger story having to do with the development, installation, and continuing support of certain critical and laudable values and virtues worldwide, starting with the definition of “good conscience” (it’s not mapped the same for  everywhere, one reason I’ve launched this blog)) and then the possession by persons and groups of credibility and integrity within themselves and in relation to other persons across a world rapidly integrating its communicating and information resources and content.

War may be called deception; taqiyya may be advised: evil, however, begins with such easily digested lies and the lies to come from having swallowed both.

In war, deception may be a tactic, but wars are about other things — e.g., the possession of resources; the displacement, modification, or termination of cultures and their customs and languages — and “taqiyya”, ever loosely accessed (one well may lie to save life — for the western mind, there’s not much need to put a label on that), seems only to serve to make liars out of people who would otherwise be forthright.

When an overzealous, special interest press chooses to copy a photograph appearing in one context or application in an event alleged to have taken place elsewhere, it corrupts, dishonors, and sabotages itself.

Yesterday in Eritrea; yesterday in Somalia; yesterday in Waziristan; yesterday in Gaza: aggressive spoilers, parties to war, parties to cultural imperialism or annihilation (both) in the name of one cause or another, could, would, and did, with impunity, fabricate stories a very few or none could check.  Their common intention (never mind ends): power through the manipulation of perception in line with  mercenary agendas.

For the more remote regions of our planet, that thing called “yesterday” is closing, swept away by camera phones, tablets with recorders, and the World Wide Web.

It may go shaking its fists.

It may go slowly.

However difficult it may be to see it; however short our lives in comparison to such processes — and this across a frontier unique in recorded history, i.e., a frontier about mind globally — the past that has been past for some time will recede.

“I C U”.

Remember that?

Do.