Augean Stables

So the BBC finally has an article on the Al Durah controversy. Alas, and predictably, it’s a lamentable example of the kind of uninformed journalism that really serves as a kind of rubble to fill in the places where one needs a facade of “coverage.” I can hear the editor saying, “Do an article on this, and get it to me by 5PM.” The reader can’t even know that there’s evidence available for him to “read and see more.”

Dispute rages over al-Durrah footage
By Martin Patience
BBC News, Jerusalem

They were images broadcast all over the world. The TV footage of a young Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Durrah, and his father cowering in front of a wall as Israeli forces and Palestinians exchanged gunfire at a crossroads in Gaza.

The footage is once again under the spotlight

The 12-year-old Muhammad was killed during the incident in September 2000.

Woops. How little we learn. At least, for the sake of accuracy, I think Mr. Patience would want to say “allegedly.” It comes so trippingly off the tongue when it’s a claim coming from the Israeli side.

For Palestinians and many people around the world, the death - coming in the early weeks of the second Palestinian uprising - became a symbol of the brutality of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Initially, Israeli army officials said that the bullets “apparently” came from Israeli positions.
A subsequent military investigation concluded that it was “quite plausible that the boy was hit by Palestinian bullets in the course of an exchange of fire”.

But seven years on, the footage of the death of Muhammad al-Durrah is once again under the spotlight and the subject of a French court case.

Philippe Karsenty, a French financial analyst who has studied the killing, accuses the channel which first aired the footage, France 2, its correspondent Charles Enderlin and the Palestinian cameraman who filmed the incident of being complicit in staging the killing.

Woops again. Karsenty did not accuse Enderlin of being complicit (except in the cover-up), but of being the dupe of the Palestinian cameraman, who was complicit (if not the main figure involved) in staging the scene.

This is a campaign designed to harass foreign correspondents and call into question all the footage shot in the occupied Palestinian territories
Charles Enderlin
France 2 correspondent

Mr Karsenty, who also runs a media watchdog group, was sued by the channel and correspondent. In 2006 a French court found that he had defamed them.

But now Mr Karsenty is appealing against the decision, and the court hearing the case has requested that France 2 release the unedited footage of the death.

Enderlin says that the whole case is a “smear campaign”.

“The footage is authentic,” he told the BBC News website. “This is a campaign designed to harass foreign correspondents and call into question all the footage shot in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

Ah Charles, how venal of you to accuse your critics of such base motives. Granted that anyone who sees your cameraman’s work – as will those in the courtroom on Wednesday – and those of the Reuters cameraman from the same day, has good reason to question any footage shot in the Palestinian territories. But that’s not what this campaign is about. It’s about you, your stunning incompetence as a real journalist (no one’s questioning your competence as a producer of material that goes on the news – very professional – just your competence as a journalist committed to the principles of presenting real news and ability to sort out the fakes. As for the pressure we wish to put on foreign correspondents, if asking them to check and make sure they’re not being duped like you is “harassment,” then so be it. We, the public, deserve at least that minimum of competence.

‘Conspiracy’

Enderlin confirmed that France 2 would show the 18 minutes of unedited footage filmed that day to the French court.

The case comes as there are more allegations in Israel that the event was not as it first appeared.

Events could not have occurred as they were described… This blood libel inflamed the Arab world and led to many victims in Israel and across the world
Danny Seaman
Director, Israeli government press office

The director of the Israeli government’s press office, Danny Seaman, last month described the events as being “staged”.

“Events could not have occurred as they were described by the network’s reporter, Charles Enderlin, since they contradict the law of physics,” he wrote in a letter.

“This blood libel,” Mr Seaman added, “inflamed the Arab world and led to many victims in Israel and across the world.”

However, another Israeli government spokesman, Miri Eisen, has said this is Mr Seaman’s “professional” view and that the government has no position on the question of the staging of the incident.

Miri Eisen (and apparently Calev ben David, below) is of the school that says, “Don’t bring up the case, people will just see the images again and be reminded of the incident. The assumption here is that the public is not intelligent enough to reconsider, and that any mention of the case will only redound to Israel’s disadvantage. This is exactly the bind that Israeli public diplomacy has increasingly found itself locked into: they get libeled, and they cannot refute it without digging itself in deeper. There are those of us who think that the Israelis have to take the bull by the horns, that only when they start to fight back will the situation begin to change. Otherwise they are, as Rafi Israeli pointed out in his book on an early “blood” libel (1983 Jenin poisoning of school girls), caught between libel (when the Palestinians make their accusations) and silence (when they turn out to be false).

The French court case has made few ripples among Palestinians. For most, the Muhammad al-Durrah case is closed.

“The majority of Palestinians would not believe the court if they said the killing was fake,” says Dr Eyad Sarraj, the head of the Gaza Community Health Programme. “They would see it as some sort of conspiracy.”

“All Palestinians see the Israelis as guilty in this. Even if Muhammad al-Durrah was killed by a Palestinian bullet, if it hadn’t been for the Israeli occupation in Gaza he would be still alive today.”

What an extraordinary statement on so many counts.

1) If the Palestinians had killed al Durah because they shot at Israelis regardless of whether an innocent boy and father were in the way, it would still be Israel’s fault? In other words, no matter what the Palestinians do, it’s Israel’s fault. We Palestinians have no accountability as long as the Israelis are “occupying” us (including, presumably, Gaza today). If the bomb that killed the family at Gaza Beach was a Palestinian land mine, then it’s still Israel’s fault for forcing us to mine the beach to keep them from coming ashore (and forcing us not to tell our own people not to go to the beach, lest the Israelis realize that it was mined.

2) But even if we accept so ludicrous a notion of accountability, if Arafat had said yes to Camp David, then one of the first things that would have happened would have been the evacuation of Gaza. So apparently the logic runs, we Palestinians can refuse any deal we want, and Israel is not only responsible for the failure, but anything we do to resist, including kill our own children, is their fault. No wonder Palestinians include suicide bombers in their statistics of Palestinians killed by Israelis.

3) The most amazing part of this statement is the concession that the Palestinians may have killed the boy. Who would have imagined such a concession? Indeed the whole point of the initial accusation was that it had to be the Israelis on purpose. That’s why PA TV doctored the footage. Where is that vaunted BBC “killer instinct”? Why didn’t Patience shoot back, “What? You concede that it may have been Palestinian bullets that killed the boy? Then what’s with all the manipulation of the footage? Who’s involved in a conspiracy?” Of course, to do that he’d have to know more than he probably does, and he’d have to be courageous enough to challenge a Palestinian.

Autopsy

Some commentators in Israel also question the wisdom of dredging up the Muhammad al-Durrah case.
“I think in one sense it’s damaging because it keeps raising the issue,” says Calev Ben David, a media columnist for the Jerusalem Post daily newspaper.

“But I do think that we need to be more proactive and challenge Palestinian manipulation of the media.”
The truth of what exactly happened back on 30 September 2000 may always remain disputed.

But the father of Muhammad, Jamal al-Durrah, has said he is willing to have his son’s body disinterred for an autopsy as part of an “independent” inquiry.

Mr Durrah has little doubt about what happened that day - he blames Israel for his son’s death.
“I’m not afraid because I’m confident of what I witnessed and what the world saw,” he recently told the Associated Press news agency.

What’s an autopsy going to show? How about Jamal come answer questions about his own eight bullet wounds (no bullets recovered), and why they were precisely where he received scars from an earlier incident in which Israeli doctors operated on him?

No wonder the public knows so little of what’s going on. They are informed by amateurs who don’t know what they’re talking about.

In a very clever spoof, the author of the blog Better Part of Valor, has speculated as follows on how the MSM would treat this story (if they dealt with it):

Tomorrow the rushes of the footage will be shown in a French court. They have already been viewed by senior journalists, and Landes himself, and all are agreed they depict no more than play-acting by a bunch of Palestinian kids.

But what will the media make of it? I’m a pessimist in this regard. I doubt the MSM will touch it. And if they do, it will be along these lines:

(Note: this is an imagined pre-construction.)

Anger, sadness greets ’smear’ of Palestinian boy martyr

GAZA CITY, 15 Nov., 2007. Palestinians reacted yesterday with a mixture of sadness and anger at allegations in a French court that the death of 12-year old Mohammed al-Durah, killed by IDF gunfire at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip in 2000, had been ‘faked’.

The allegations, which have not been supported by the Israeli or French governments, arose from a little-known libel case in France, which involved a so-called ‘independent’ analysis of the seven-year old killing by pro-Israeli activists in France and the US. Some of them have been described by world-renowned US journalist James Hallows as fanatics.

The dead boy’s father, Jamal, reacted bitterly to news of the allegations. ‘My son was a martyr slaughtered at their hands’, he said angrily, ‘and now they smear and slander him in his death and dishonour his memory, and the memory of all the Palestinians children they have destroyed’.

Veteran Ha’aretz journalist Gideon Levy - regarded as one of the finest and most fiercely independent of Israeli journalists - agreed, though more cautiously. ‘Undoubtedly the allegations are designed to deflect attention from the IDF’s appalling human rights record in the Occupied Territories,’ Mr Levy said, ‘especially its proven history of killing innocent children.’

Mr Levy also questioned the timing of the allegations, just days before the crucial summit in Annapolis, where the hopes of moderate Israelis and Palestinians for a negotiated peaceful settlement will rely heavily on the goodwill of both sides. Mr Levy considered that the sudden appearance of these allegations might derail the peace conference by destroying the atmosphere of trust. ‘Is this what Olmert wants?’, Mr Levy speculated. He declined to answer his own question when asked, but he is on record as profoundly distrustful of the Israeli Prime Minister’s motivations, character and truthfulness.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the site of the boy’s death, Hamas spokespeople were playing down the possibility of violence in response to the charges. In Gaza, Mohammed al-Durah remains an icon of the Intifada, and an adored role model for thousands of Gazan children. Allegations that his death was ‘faked’ could be expected to be controversial, to say the least.

However, Government spokesman Hamid Ismail said the mood in the Strip was sad rather than angry. ‘We understand,’, he said, ‘why Israel has to do this, why they will stop at nothing to tear down the shrine of this martyr. Even in death and silence he condemns them’.

However, he added, ‘There remains the chance that some will be so outraged that it will be difficult to prevent them shouting out loud in the streets, and possibly firing weapons into the air.’ But he was confident restraint would prevail.

The charges in the French court were sparked by claims that examination of the footage of the shooting broadcast by France2 showed some scenes might have been staged. No one, including the veteran journalist and cameraman who broadcast the story, has admitted any wrong-doing and no-one has ever been charged with any breach of professional ethics. These claims have not been taken seriously by any court or tribunal in seven years. As for the case before the French court, it is actually an appeal by one of the pro-Israel activists, Philippe Karsenty, against his conviction in a lower court on a charge of libelling France2 and its Jerusalem editor, Charles Enderlin, who is both Jewish and a loyal Israeli citizen.

There are about seventeen conscious and identifiable spins in that ‘article’. If it were a real one, and I were writing it, I would be careful to say nothing that was factually inaccurate. Spin’s easy. Everything can be spun. That’s why journalists do it.

The sad thing is that his is a far better article than the BBC’s (with the exception of misquoting James “Hallows”).

I guess the only thing one can say for the BBC is, at least they covered it. Will Patience be in the courtroom to see the rushes?