Netanyahu's devil horns: The right-wing's lamest media gotcha of the (young) week?

It comes courtesy of far-right Pajamas Media and it's a beaut.

It's built around a breathless write-up about how the Huffington Post used a (mundane) AP/AFP photo of Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and, according to a conspiratorial blogger, how the photo was “carefully” and “cleverly” cropped to make it look like Netanyahu was Satan with horns popping out of his head.

Why would left-leaning HuffPo do such a thing? Simple. It's part of a “relentless campaign” to slant the news and “demonize” Israel. Or something.

What happened was that Netanyahu was photographed by the AP/AFP in front of two microphones and behind him was a emblem on a wall that, based on the angle of the photo, appeared to float above his head. But the resulting image was utterly innocuous. Except, apparently, for a devil-seeing blogger at Pajamas Media.

The laughs only multiplied though, when the intrepid blogger tracked down the original AP/AFP news photo of Netanyahu. Surprise! It proved unequivocally that nobody at HuffPo had done any sinister cropping to make it look like the Israeli prime minister had horns.

All that happened was that the photo was slightly altered from its original, vertical rectangle shape to a more horizontal rectangle shape, no doubt for space consideration. (And also to minimize the sight of the obtrusive microphones in the photo.)

In both versions of the photo Netanyahu was standing in front of the emblem, which meant overly imaginative, conspiratorial bloggers at Pajamas Media (and elsewhere) were still going to see the magical devil's horns and, no doubt, run off on a liberal media biased crusade.