OK, come on now. I mean, really.

One picture cropped to remove a knife might be explained as incompetence or a simple mistake.

But now we have two pictures from the “peace activists” that were cropped by someone at Reuters to remove knives in the hands of the activists, as they attempted to take soldiers hostage.

Reuters has published this picture from the activists.

The picture is a cropped version of this photo from the IHH website (IHH is the Islamist group whose members rioted aboard the Mavi Marmara).

What did the Reuters photo editor crop out? A big knife and a big pool of blood.

UPDATE at 6/6/10 4:20:27 pm:

And it gets worse. I took the photo into Photoshop and increased the exposure to lighten the dark areas, and discovered that they didn’t just crop out the knife and blood — they also cropped out another badly injured Israeli soldier lying on the floor.