Augean Stables

Maurice Ostroff has been discussing Larry Derfner’s op-ed piece (which I’ve fisked here) with him. Here are LD’s current objections to the “staging” hypothesis which Maurice posted at a list-serv, with my and Nidra Poller’s responses. Judging from his observations and arguments, I’d say the epithet “intellectual” still escapes him. (Hat tip: Solomonia)

Dear Maurice:

While there is good reason to think Palestinians, not the IDF, killed al-Dura, and good reason to suspect that Enderlin and Abu Rahme stonewalled in the face of evidence that their story was mistaken - although not to conclude as such without hearing their side first - there are very strong reasons NOT to believe the shooting was staged.

By all means, Larry, talk with them. But be ready to confront them when they lie to you. I presume that Enderlin won’t try the map trick with you.

Map Enderlin drew for me of Netzarim Junction the first time I saw him. He puts the Israeli position across the street (i.e., the place where the bullets are coming from). Apparently he drew similar maps for others he thought were ill-informed enough to believe whatever he said.

But he might try the “Tanzim behind the barrel” with you. And be sure to ask him about the “cutting the unbearable death throes.”

A few points:

1. How can anybody call the shooting “staged” when real bullets were being fired - both from Palestinian gunmen AND FROM THE ISRAELI OUTPOST. (See Fallows article saying that from the videos, you can see puffs of smoke coming at various times from gun slits in IDF outpost, and that the examination of the concrete barrel found a number of bullet holes on the side of the barrel facing the IDF outpost. Also, of course, you see bullets hitting the wall in the clip originally broadcast on France 2, even though it’s likely they came from Palestinians.)

Personally, if I were staging a scene of a father and son being fired at, I would hire a marksman to shoot over their heads, otherwise it would be completely unconvincing. Why on earth is the presence of real gunfire proof of no staging? Does LD think the Palestinians have the same “insurance-policy restrictions” that Hollywood has?

As for fire from the Israeli position, we know they fired (France2 has isolated one shot from their position which I treat in my discussion of their use of the evidence). But there is no evidence that they fired during the sequence that Talal filmed of the father and son behind the barrel. All three bullets we can identify come from the Palestinian side. And if they were not deliberately fired in order to help with the staging, how is it that Palestinians are firing individual bullets at the al Durahs when there’s not an Israeli anywhere near them? If you’re going to think like a detective, LD, you have to explain the anomalies, not list them as evidence of confusion.

Finally, there are two bullet holes in the part of the barrel facing the Israelis. This hardly accords with targeting the couple behind the barrel with “bullets like rain” for 40 minutes, and nothing indicates the holes were made either by Israeli fire or during the events in question. None of this evidence is counter-probative in any sense, and much of the argumentation it makes no sense at all.

By hiding behind the barrel, the al-Duras were shielding themselves from the direction of IDF fire. Given this - that the al-Duras are hiding from the Israeli side, that the IDF (along with Palestinians) are firing bullets in their direction, that blood spurted from Mohammed al-Dura when he was shot (you see this on the video. Shahaf claims the boy had a “red cloth” in his pocket - but then Shahaf also has dramatic revelations about the Rabin assassination) - how can this be staged?

LD’s logic continues to baffle me. I’m not sure what he thinks is involved in a hoax, but as a director of the scene, it certainly makes sense to me to have the father and son sheltering themselves from bullets coming from the direction of IDF fire. So their “taking shelter behind a barrel” seems to me to be perfectly consonant with either a real or staged situation and has no relevance to the discussion.

As for “spurting blood” I don’t know where he got that one; I see it nowhere on the video. And Shahaf’s theory of the red rag, which I thought was far-fetched when he first ran it by me, gained considerable credibility in my eyes when I saw the high definition Francee2 tapes in the court. As for Shahaf’s past arguments about the Rabin assassination, that’s ad hominem (at which Enderlin excels). Deal with the evidence, LD.

Scene 3

And of course, if you want to insist that’s real blood (the doctor’s report included the wound to his right thigh as one of the boy’s three injuries), you have to explain why, in subsequent scenes, the thigh has no trace of red on it.

Take 5
Quick cleaning job between takes? Self-cleaning jeans?

2. In the 55-second clip, you see the father, Jamal al-Dura, waving in the general direction of Palestinian gunmen - NOT in the direction of the IDF outpost - and hollering in Arabic for them to stop shooting. Seeing this is what led Shahaf to first suspect something fishy. But while Jamal’s gestures and Arabic shouts are evidence that he was afraid of being shot not only by the IDF but by Palestinians as well, it is also evidence that he and Abu Rahme did not stage the shooting. If the idea supposedly was to make it look like the fatal shots came from the IDF, why would Jamal be pleading in Arabic in the direction of the Palestinians shooting? Wouldn’t that give the “hoax” away?

This is perhaps the most amazing passage in LD’s thought process. Let’s take it part by part.

a) Jamal is not waving at the Palestinians but at the Israelis. And while he’s doing it, people around Talal are yelling in Arabic “the boy is dead! the boy is dead!” (I wish he were, it would make our case even stronger.) As for hollering in Arabic (which I’m not sure he is), since Jamal speaks fluent Hebrew and if he were yelling at the Israelis to stop he’d do it in Hebrew, that would tell us something about the audience he has in mind as he speaks.

b) If, as LD seems to think, Jamal’s gestures and words are addressed to the Palestinians, it just means that he did not expect this, and tells us nothing about what Talal did or didn’t know about how things would “go down.” If Talal recruited Jamal for this scene, he may not have told him about this aspect of the staging, and indeed both Jamal and his son seem genuinely alarmed by what’s happening. LD seems determined to project onto Talal the mind and ethics of a western journalist who, while he might “stage something,” would never put people’s lives in danger. Talal, on the contrary, strikes me as someone who informs people on a “need to know” basis.

c) Finally we come to the most absurd piece of logic, one that is, alas, all too common. It can’t be fake because as it stands it’s so obviously a fake, they wouldn’t have done it that way. If Jamal had acted this way — yelling in Arabic at the Palestinians — he would have given away the fake, so that proves it isn’t… because if it was, he wouldn’t have given it away. (One could make the same argument about the boy looking up in take six.)

This is, incidentally, precisely what Enderlin said to me the first time I spoke with him:

Talal never would have even conceived of such an idea because he would have known he’d have to get it past me, and he knows he could not have done that.

QED. In other words, it can’t be a fake because as a fake, it’s too transparent. Unless, of course, it’s being examined by people whose logical processes are as pitiful as LD and CE. (Like George Bernard Shaw, these useful idiots are especially foolish because they’re so arrogant.) Shades of the purloined letter.

3. Every prominent, disinterested journalist who investigated the affair - Fallows, Schapira, Laconte [sic] and Jeambar - raised very strong doubts about the credibility of France 2’s version of what happened - but at the same time they either remained unconvinced that the shooting had been staged, or were positively convinced that it hadn’t been. (I was told that Rozenzweig, formerly of Le Monde, was working for MENA at the time he got involved in the case, which would take him out of the disinterested category.) Laconte [sic] and Jeambar saw the rushes, and here is what they said about them - and about MENA’s misrepresentation of their views. I got this from Augean Stables - it’s a translation of the court decision of Oct. 19, 2006:

Note that the following is not Jeambar and Leconte’s words but the decision of the court in which the judges used large sections of the argument from France2’s brief. For those who wish to read what Jeambar and Leconte said in their interview, they can read the original French, or English translation with my comments.

Furthermore, it is shown that this theory is inconsistent with that expressed in exhibit no. 4, an interview granted to the RCJ by the two other journalists who, with Luc Rosenzweig, saw the France 2 rushes. Indeed, while Daniel Leconte and Denis Jeambar, after having seen the rushes, continue to criticize Charles Enderlin and believe, as does Luc Rosenzweig, that most of the film shows young Palestinians using the presence of cameras an a means of propaganda by simulating combat or pretending to be wounded, these two journalists vehemently deny that the images of Mohamed Al Dura’s death could have resulted from such acting. Denis Jeambar stated, “So yes, there were scenes that were acted out – except for one,” and later, “What we saw, does not at all lead us to say that [it could have been a set up], rather, it leads us to say the opposite.” And Daniel Leconte describes the MENA theory, as “a rather conspirasist theory,” alluding to Thierry Mayssan’s [sic] theory of the airplane “crash” into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, in Washington.

Leconte refers to 9-11 but neither to the Pentagon nor Thierry Meyssan’s conspiracy theory specifically.

These two journalists reiterated their positions more assertively in an opinion piece published in Le Figaro: “To those who, like MENA, tried to use us to support the theory that the child’s death was staged by the Palestinians, we say they are misleading us and their readers. Not only do we not share this point of view, but we attest that, given our present knowledge of the case, nothing supports that conclusion. In fact, the reverse is true.”

Rather than try and deconstruct what’s going on here, let me first note that in LD’s mind, anyone who might be tainted with Zionist commitments is not “disinterested,” but everyone else is — a form of ad hominem that permits him to avoid the evidence. In fact the MSM players in this affair had intense pressure on them, and this is particularly the case of Jeambar and Leconte. So let me quote from an email from Nidra Poller (in italics) who explains to LD what’s behind their statements:

It seems that Mr. Derfner is willing to look at the evidence. That’s a first step. His recent article was typical of those who castigate al Dura demystifiers — who have so much evidence they are almost buried under it — without bothering to study the facts of the case. As Richard Landes and I have often observed, ignorance seems to be the primary qualification for shooting us down!

To understand the statement from Jeambar and Leconte, you have to place it in the French context. And you have to know how they got involved in the al Dura affair. Richard will correct me if I’m wrong here: Luc Rosenzweig (former journalist and at one time editorial director of Le Monde) got interested in the al Dura affair, investigated it, and pitched an article to L’Express. Jeambar , who was editor-in-chief of L’Express, accepted the proposal, Luc wrote the article (we have a copy) in which he said the al Dura story was the biggest media hoax of recent times. The article was supposed to come out in September 2004, 4th anniversary of the al Dura “news report.”

Jeambar hesitated. Said he needed to confirm some of the evidence with his own eyes. He obtained what no one else had been able to manage: a chance to look at a piece of the “raw” footage. I believe that Leconte came along with the idea of doing a documentary film on the case.

What happened? Were they convinced by the fabulous material shown to them by France 2 officials? No way. They were shocked and stunned to see that the state-owned TV channel was showing staged scenes as news. Were they convinced that in the 27 or 28 or 24 minutes they were shown, one little bit of footage just under one minute was authentic and all the rest was faked or — in the parts that were real — proved that the shababs were in no danger from the Israeli soldiers they gleefully harrassed? No. They were totally destabilized.

Why? Because it was worse than they had even imagined (I am imagining their reaction, extrapolating from their subsequent statements). So they backed off. It was too much for them.

I spoke with Leconte shortly after he’d seen the rushes. He told me that at the sight of the rushes and the obvious staging, Arlette Chabot, the director of news at France2, turned white as the walls.

The MENA jumped the gun, published an account of the screening (I suppose from information supplied by Luc Rosenzweig), and Jeambar and Leconte had to find a way to back pedal. We are told that Jeambar was under pressure from his editorial board and Leconte from the TV channel he works with (ARTE). The pressure wasn’t subtle, it was “shut up about this or you’re out.” In fact Jeambar left L’Express in 2006 shortly after writing an editorial saying Israel had a right to strike back forcefully in retaliation against the Hizbullah attack.

Leconte and Jeambar were caught between Enderlin, who tried to force them to accept his strange idea of journalistic ethics (the news report represented “the situation” in Gaza and the West Bank at that time) and Rosenzweig, whose article was in fact confirmed by what they had seen. They chose the famous middle ground: refuted Enderlin’s code by reasserting the role of journalism to report what has in fact occurred, and not a sort of symbolic representation of “the situation, and vociferously claimed that the staged scene thesis was invalid.

So what did happen at Netzarim Junction that day? The boy, they say, was killed in a crossfire.

You might want to read my article in Commentary where I discuss this at length.

Rejecting the only theory that is supported by overwhelming evidence — the scene was staged — two reputable journalists latch onto an explanation that belies the testimony of the major witness to the incident: the cameraman. He declared: 5 minutes of crossfire, then 45 minutes of fire only from the Israeli position. Later, at the appeals hearing, a court-accredited ballistics expert testified that if there had been a crossfire, Jamal and the boy were not in the line of fire! What are we to make of the statement of Jeambar and Leconte? They know better than the cameraman and the ballistics expert? Might they be thinking that the cameraman’s claim of 45 minutes of fire from the Israeli position would make the Israelis look bad. But shouldn’t be taken literally?

And that’s a reliable source?

Why grab at the statement of Jeambar and Leconte when they declared (RCJ interview) that they dropped the investigation because they saw it was too complicated to get at the truth. So they are more reliable than people who pursued the investigation? More reliable than Karsenty who produced medical records to prove that Jamal’s wounds were incurred in 1992, not 2000?

Every single detail, minor and major, of the al Dura hoax has been investigated and analyzed by honest, intelligent, resourceful minds. When will the sharp tongued kibbitzers make the effort to examine the evidence? That’s what the appellate court did. And anyone who thinks they confirmed the defamation conviction because they concluded that the accusations were untrue is simply illiterate.

Derfner’s article is an insult to the truth. I have nothing against outspoken journalists. I am outspoken myself. But he should impose a severe sentence on himself, and go into rehabilitation…that is, study what is already known about this controversy. Maybe next year he will be ready to write a better article.

Amen to that. But I somehow doubt it given what’s still to come.

4. Why would Abu Rahme et al. stage such a shooting in a fire zone when there are already countless videos of Palestinian children killed by the IDF and other depredations of the occupation? It’s not as if they could have known in advance the effect the al-Dura film would have.

It is my impression that Al Durah is the first “proven” case of Israelis deliberately killing unarmed kids, and that once it passed muster with the MSM, they believed virtually anything they were told subsequently. Certainly the “800 Muhammad al Durahs” that Gideon Levy cites come after al Durah. I’d like Mr. Derfner to substantiate this claim, specifically in the context of killing children — which is what this story is about, which is what makes it possible for people to have this make the Israelis the new Nazis, which is why it’s a blood libel.

As for knowing in advance how powerful it might be, I agree, they couldn’t have imagined, partly because they couldn’t have imagined they would so thoroughly get the Western media to buy into the tale. Palestinians repeatedly refer to al Durah as the case “the whole world saw.” While Pallywood has a long history, I don’t even think Talal expected it to work so well. But that’s hardly an argument for their not having planned it.

4. [sic] What bothers me most about the conspiracy theorizing is that it seeks to blind people to the fact that Israel really has been killing and injuring thousands and thousands of Palestinians since 1967. The notion of an al-Dura “hoax” and of “Pallywood” allows people to answer every Palestinian claim by saying it’s a fake, it’s staged, it’s made up.

Note the reference to 1967, i.e., the “occupation.” There’s precious few Palestinians killed by Israelis in the early decades of the “occupation.” Indeed, until the first intifada in 1987, according to a World Bank Study “The Occupied Territories were among the top ten fastest growing economies in the world.”

This comment does, however, get us to the core of LD’s resistance to the claims of staging… that it’s a slippery slope from this and Pallywood to denying any Palestinian claims of suffering. So in his mind, we’re stuck between all or nothing, we’re either totally skeptical or — and this seems to be his choice — totally credulous. This is where we get the hysteria, and this is how the Palestinian narrative has come to colonize the imagination of the Israeli left: if I accept that the Palestinians fake stuff, how can I use their claims to chastize the Israelis? With thinking like this, what possible grip on reality can we possibly hope to have?

Maurice, there may be a lot of legimate criticisms that can be made of France 2, Enderlin, Abu Rahme et al. - again, I would want to hear more of their side of it before reaching any conclusions - but it is reckless, irresponsible and damaging to be shouting hoax about the al-Dura shooting.

With thinking like this, it’s irresponsible to be writing newspaper columns.