"Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." "Opposition is True Friendship." -William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1796
The Augean Stables and The Second Draft
This blog takes its name from the Fifth Labor of Herakles, to clean the stables of Augeas, where thousands of cattle had left so much un-cleaned dung that the whole Peloponnesus smelled of it. At Second Draft, our discovery of both Pallywood and the Al-Durah Affair have led us to realize that — at least where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned — our MSM represent a veritable Augean Stables of accumulated misreporting. We dedicate this weblog to exploring the many aspects of our MSM’s problem, not only those concerned with the Middle East problem, but more broadly with the many ways in which our media’s errors and our media’s extraordinary resistance to admitting their errors, have contributed and continue to contribute to the serious problems that plague our globe in this young 21st century.
The startling footage of Neda, the 27-year old woman shot to death in the streets of Tehran recently has reminded some of the image of 12-year old Muhammad al Durah (HT Tom Gross):
The footage of a Palestinian man [sic] being shot dead [sic] next to his 12-year-old son, Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah, by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2000 has been etched in the minds of many Iranians, as state television has continually replayed the images to highlight the “Zionist regime’s brutality.”
Now, the Islamic regime itself has become the subject of similar allegations at home and abroad after gruesome footage of a dying young woman during the suppression of an opposition protest on Saturday was released on the internet.
The image of Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan, a 27-year-old philosophy student, bleeding to death on the asphalt road of a Tehran street after she was shot in the chest, has become the rallying cry of the country’s opposition, which is disputing the June 12 election of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
Only neither Jamal (the father) nor Muhammad al Durah (the son) were killed, not by Israelis soldiers, probably not by anyone, and certainly not “on TV.” These days when real footage, shot spontaneously, of victims of brutal repressive forces make it out of Iran, a country where the leaders make every effort to shut down the media, it may be useful to revisit the case of Muhammad al Durah.
With al Durah, we have a case of footage uncensored by authorities coming out of a conflict in which the allegedly repressive regime — the Israelis — provides the most welcoming atmosphere of freedom for journalists. These journalists repay the Israelis for their tolerance by running Pallywood footage staged by the Palestinians, specifically designed to provoke outrage. And in the case of Muhammad al Durah, the boy behind the barrel at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000, the footage was not only staged, but, thanks to the efforts of France2’s Middle East correspondent, Charles Enderlin, it made it around the world with the imprimatur of Western Mainstream media. In short order, it became an icon of hatred, provoking outrage, hatred and violence against both Jews and Israelis — the first blood(less) libel of the 21st century.
One of Enderlin’s favorite arguments is, “look, if there were any substance to these allegations, the Israelis would be all over me and Talal. The fact that they’ve done nothing is proof that we’re right, and Talal is “as white as snow.” He most recently repeated these arguments at his blog.
So let me suggest a counter-argument: If there were any substance to Charles Enderlin’s defense, he would have informed himself of the details of the evidence.
Instead, he continues to remain supremely ignorant of all the telling problems with both Talal’s account and his own.
His performance in his interview with Schapira for the new movie shows us precisely the kind of know-nothing folly that first inspired the term Pallywood, which came not from evidence of Palestinian fakes — I’d already seen many — but from Enderlin’s complacent response to having them pointed out: “Oh yeah, they do that all the time. It’s a cultural thing.”
Here are some views of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of a major MSM figure, one of the most influential journalists in Europe for the last two decades. Not one word that he utters has any substance in terms of serious argumentation. In any first-year graduate seminar in history the kind of cavalier contempt for hard evidence and argumentation that Enderlin displays here would earn him the disbelief of fellow students and a ticket to ride from the professors… Unless, of course, we were in an honor-shame culture where someone with protected status could get away with anything he wanted to say.
Both in the details, and in the argumentation, Enderlin gets an “F” in Second Draft of journalism.
Enderlin handles a question from Esther Schapira.
It’s a smear campaign by people who don’t like my work
Here is Charles in court the day of the showing of Talal’s rushes (the beginning of his downfall), pugnaciously leading with his chin. He is typically dismissive — “you can say he was killed by Martians…” and categorical “we didn’t fabricate these images” (if that we includes Talal, it’s problematic). But the most revealing “argument” is that people who oppose him do so because they “don’t want my reports, my books, and my commentaries.”
Note the revealing slip at the beginning: “This is a libel suit… uuuh, a libel against me.” He’s the one bringing the libel suit against Karsenty, but he’s trying to position himself as the victim. Indeed, we met one vociferous ex-Israeli French journalist in the court who was indignant at how Enderlin was being dragged through the judicial mud by this suit against him.
But the larger question is certainly worth considering. Enderlin, true to style, uses conspiracy-theory logic. Cui bono? To whom the good? If I lose this case, then my whole oeuvre will be in doubt. Ergo, those who attack me on this case actually want to discredit me entirely.
Actually, I had never heard of Enderlin before this, and my concern was both to challenge so powerful and hate-engendering an icon — a blood libel — and, as I became involved, to challenge the inexcusable complaisance of the MSM with Pallywood footage. As I’ve learned more about Enderlin, I think he’s right on one point: his behavior here should call into question the rest of his work which, as I’ve learned, is also tendentious and treats evidence loosely. But to go from that to “it’s a conspiracy to shut me up” not only shows the paranoid quality of Enderlin’s thinking, but also the nature of his appeal: “Don’t listen to them; they don’t like my politics.” Alas, this works all too often these days.
***
That’s how I do a story: “The child is dead” is a statement. What’s your problem with it?”
Here’s Charles asked about why he claimed that the child was dead and then three “takes” later, he’s still moving. This is, of course, a critical issue, since the scene in which the child moves was one that he cut from his broadcast.
I don’t know if Schapira asked him why he cut it, but I presume he’d have answered the same way he has for 9 years — “it was the death throes, and too unbearable for the public to view.” You be the judge on to whom this cut footage is unbearable — the viewer or Talal’s and Enderlin’s “narrative.”
In response, Enderlin let’s us know how he works: “This is the way I do a story…”
I’m very sorry, but the fact is the child died. Maybe not at the precise moment I showed. But this is the way I do a story. “The child is dead,” is a statement. What’s your problem with it?
How many Teamsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
12.
Why 12?
You got a problem with that?
Enderlin: “Maybe not at the precise moment…”
Like the Teamsters, this man thinks he won’t be challenged by anyone who counts. He doesn’t have to give a serious answer, because the people who count — his bosses at France2, his fellow journalists — support him fully.
In his on-going saga of hitting the bottom and digging, Charles Enderlin has dealt with a challenge on his blog from a major French news anchor, Jean-Claude Bourret on the issue of blood. The answer exemplifies not only the fundamentally flawed nature of Enderlin’s “argumentation,” but illustrates his sheer contempt for any demand that he engage in serious discussion. This answer matches quite closely the aggressive, know-nothing tone he takes with Esther Schapira when she asks him about the blood.
[NB: While I was working on this exchange, Charles Enderlin took it down from his site, saying
“Ayant eu un long dialogue avec JC Boutet [sic], j’ai mis hors ligne les éléments de cette discussion.” [Having had a long dialogue with JC Boutet [sic] I took the elements of this discussion offline.]
I won’t guess what motivated such a strange move, but maybe it has to do with how revealing it was of the poverty of his thought, as analyzed below.]
The issue in question concerns the following photograph, taken the following day, October 1, 2000.
Now there a multiple problems with this photo.
1) The blood is red, despite having been exposed to air and sun for hours. This detail suggests that the blood was added later. Several things corroborate such a suspicion.
2) The blood is where the father was sitting, but the place where the son bled for “twenty minutes” from a gaping stomach wound has not a trace of blood. Again this suggests that the blood was added later without thinking seriously about what it should look like.
3) There is no sign of blood behind the barrel either immediately after the father and son are gone, or the next morning when Talal comes back to film the place.
4) There is no blood on the wall, despite the claim that the father and son were hit by 15 bullets, none of which were recovered in the hospital because, claimed the doctors, they went through the bodies. Hence, one would expect the wall to be splattered with bullet holes and blood.
Esther Schapira asks Enderlin about this in her second movie:
Esther Schapira: It [the incident] happened the day before. The sun shone. Shouldn’t it be dark blood?
Endlerlin: Not when… I’m no specialist, but the next day there was blood there. It was dark, it was… I don’t know how the photo was taken.
Like many of his responses to Esther Schapira the second time around, he’s belligerently contemptuous of the evidence and the argument.
In writing we find the same style. Jean-Claude Bourret left the following question at Enderlin’s blog:
Bonjour Charles!
Je sais que cette “campagne” comme tu la nomme n’est pas agréable pour toi. mais j’ai assité à l’enquête de Philippe Karsenty et je la trouve très convaincante. J’étais également présent à une soirée, ou après la projection, un débat a opposé M. Karsenty à l’un de tes défenseurs. Ce dernier a été pathétique, ne faisant que renforcer la démonstration de M. Karsenty.Parmi les dizaines d’arguments, il y en a un, un seul, auquel je ne trouve pas de réponse : comment se fait il que les deux corps, transpercés par une douzaine de munitions de guerre, et restés 40 minutes contre le mur, comment se fait il qu’il n’y ait pas une goutte de sang, ni sur les vêtements, ni sur le trottoir?
[Hello Charles, I know that this “campaign” as you call it isn’t much fun for you, but I attended Philippe Karsenty’s inquest and I found it quite convincing. I was also at an evening where, after the presentation, a debate opposed Mr. Karsenty to one of your defenders. The latter was pathetic, only reinforcing Mr. Karsenty’s presentation. Among the dozens of arguments, there is one, one only, to which I have not found a response: How is it that there’s not a drop of blood, neither on his clothes, nor on the sidewalk? - rl translation]
To which, one might add, “nor on the wall.” Enderlin replies:
On m’a signalé que tu donnais également des conférences dans le cadre de cette campagne de diffamation. Néanmoins je vais te répondre:
Comment peux-tu, toi un journaliste de télévision analyser des rushes d’un reportage filmé sous le feu comme si c’était une vidéo de supermarché… Talal, le cameraman, a filmé ce qu’il pouvait. Il y a des coupes caméra avec un time code qui courre d’un bout à l’autre.
Quand au sang, il y a bien sur ce que vous qualifiez de chiffon rouge…. Quand à la tache de sang sur le sol… Elle existait bien. Le général palestinien qui s’est rendu le lendemain sur place pour ramasser les balles l’a fait couvrir de sable (devant la vingtaine de soldats israéliens qui étaient dans la position et ont donc tout vu). Nous avons l’image du général… Si toi et les autres experts qui n’ont jamais mis les pieds à gaza ou assisté à un clash entre israéliens et palestiniens aviez posé la question à un chirurgien opérant des blessures de guerres, il vous aurait dit que souvent, elles saignent peu.
Enfin, visiblement, vous croyez être mieux informés que les renseignements militaires israéliens et le Shin Beth qui n’ont jamais trouvé trace d’une conspiration à laquelle auraient participé des dizaines de palestiniens devant une position militaire israélienne, des dizaines de médecins, d’infirmiers de d’infirmières de l’hôpital Shiffa à gaza. Les médecins-généraux jordaniens qui ont opéré le père à Amman etc.
Pour la sécurité israélienne le caméraman, Talal, est blanc comme neige. Mais, bien sur les experts parisiens dont tu fais partie sont mieux renseignés. C’est une campagne absolument ignoble. je continue d’ailleurs à recevoir des menaces de tes amis.
[I’ve been told you were also giving talks in the framework of this campaign of diffamation. Nevertheless, I’ll respond.
How can you, a television journalist, analyze rushes from a report filmed under fire as if it were a supermarket video… Talal, the cameraman, filmed what he could. There are cuts in the filming with a time-code that ran from the beginning to the end.
As for blood, there is, of course, what you qualify as the red rag… As for the blood stain on the ground… it really did exiswt. The Palestinian general who was there the next day to pick up the bullets, had it covered with sand (in front of some 20 Israelis soldiers who were in their bunker and therefore saw everything). We have the picture of the general… If you and the other experts who have never set foot in Gaza or been involved in a clash between Israelis and Palestinians had asked a surgeon operating on war injuries, they would tell you that often, they bleed very little.
Finally, obviously, you think you’re better informed that the Israeli military intelligence and the Shin Bet qui have never found any trace of a conspiracy in which dozens of Palestinians would have had to participate in front of an Israeli military position, dozens of doctors and nurses at Shiffa hospital in Gaza, and the Jordanian doctors who operated on the father in Amman, etc.
As far as Israeli security is concerned, Talal is as white as snow. But, of course, Parisian experts, of whom you are one, are better informed. Its an absolutely ignoble campagne. I continue, by the way, to receive threats from your friends.] - rl translation
Philippe Karsenty has been threatening to write a piece about the behavior of the American Jewish Committee in the al Durah affair for years now. He’s finally done it. It lays out a classic dilemma between the confrontational and the accommodational approach to dealing with the problems of anti-semitism in the current scene.
If ever an issue begged for the intervention of a Jewish organization of international stature, it was the Mohamed al Dura affair. This notorious blood libel accused Israeli soldiers of shooting to death an Arab boy in Gaza on September 30, 2000. Though the event was actually a staged hoax, it was broadcast the same day on French public television station, France 2. Mohamed al Dura became an icon for all Muslim children. The story triggered rioting, terrorism and mayhem throughout the Muslim world; unleashed the Second Intifada; was the pretext for Daniel Pearl’s beheading, and was referenced in Osama bin Laden’s recruitment tapes prior to 9/11.
For seven years I worked to expose that hoax, and was sued for my effort.
The American Jewish Committee is one of the world’s most active Jewish institutions. It would have been entirely consistent with its mission to have stepped forward to aid me in my efforts to counter a libel that dishonored every Jew.
But under David Harris as executive director, only silence and obstruction were forthcoming.
Harris is renowned for his diplomatic skills, his warm friendship with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and his contacts at the highest levels of other European governments. Some have complained to him that his representative in France, Valerie Hoffenberg, never once objected to France 2’s hoax or supported my efforts to expose it. In fact, Hoffenberg was waging a behind-the scenes counter-offensive to cover-up the al Dura lie by blocking my access to some French officials, lobbying Jewish leaders against me, and claiming that the phony news report was authentic. Harris’ response was always polite and reassuring: “I will look into it,” he promised.
Yet nothing ever changed. It finally became clear that Hoffenberg was not acting on her own initiative, but faithfully adhering to AJC policy. Because of Hoffenberg’s activities, AJC France was actually my most destructive foe.
That would be a significant exaggeration. Enderlin and France2 were Karsenty’s most destructive foes. I don’t think it helps to exaggerate. (more…)
Esther Schapira, whose groundbreaking work on al Durah represented the earliest reconsideration outside Israel, and whose material I used extensively (with her generous permission) in my own documentaries, has now come out with a new study. Given how much (she has subsequently admitted), intimidation played a role in her modest conclusions last time (”the Israelis didn’t do it,” but nothing on what did happen), this claim of staging is an important stage in the al Durah critique.
The following letter was written by a Turkish man to an Israeli government website. In it he mentions what a powerful grip the al Durah image had on his imagination, and what a revelation “Icon of Hatred” was for him. (The specific identity of the Youtube video is confirmed by my source for reasons I cannot go into because it would make it possible to identify the individual whose name I have removed to protect him.) I have not corrected his grammar and syntax in order to give a sense of the great effort he expended in writing this.
Here we have some of the great themes of mankind on display: independent intelligence, brotherhood between races and religions, a sense of gratitude for good deeds, the battle between malevolent propaganda and truth, and the importance of the one slandered to defend himself. What to challenge – granted it’s only a tiny minority – to the pessimism of a cynic.
Ah M. Peres, I do hope you see this.
Shalom From Turkey
Dear Sir or madam,
I am a 31 years old Turkish man
I do not want to take a risk or maybe advance my self by not showing my identity. So i am not posting via email. I just want to express my feelings.
All my life, there was always some hate to Israel in me. But i dont know why? In my country, it was always like a duty that everyone should hate Israel and their religion without any reason
Everyone hates israel here, but no one knows why. As usual, i grow up with this meaningless hate in me.
But i think, Turkey is not the only country like this. Most of non israilian people talks dirty against Israel. Its very common in all around the world.
But this is your fault. Because, when i hear the word “israel” always that scene comes to my mind. The scene that israel soldiers killed the son and his father on the wall.
And this year, god bless youtube (its banned in turkey) i see that it is a fake video. But i think only one in a million in Turkey knows this.
This is your goverments fault. You have to show the truth to the other people.
From my childhood, everynight i see an israel soldier beats a palestanian in news. Or shoots civilians etc etc. I realise the truths lately. But im sure millions of Turkey still dont realize
Indeed, if I might humbly suggest, particularly after the debacle of media coverage in Operation Cast Lead, they should be required viewing for any journalist claiming to want to do professional work in covering the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Daniel Pearl’s father, Judea, reflects on the world seven years after his son’s death. Not a pretty picture. In so doing he raises some critical issues about the vulnerability/stupidity of the Western world when faced with the remorseless hatreds that (among many other deeds) killed his son with such deliberate brutality. My comments attempt to bring out some of the issues he merely raises in order to stay within his word-limit for an op-ed.
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today’s world emerged after his tragedy?
The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.
Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters.
I’ve found references to the trial, but not to the cheers of jihadi supporters. Anyone have a link?
Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of “the resistance.” Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.
No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny’s murder would be a turning point in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.
Although Pearl does not go into it, his son’s murder was the first “beheading video” to get put up on the internet. That grotesque snuff film has spawned a whole industry, and the posted films get millions of downloads in days. One of the less salubrious impacts of the new communications technology of cyberspace.
The larger issue, however, concerns the trends at work in 2002. Pearl may not have begun to catch on seriously until after the death of his son. Indeed he may have shared his son’s optimistic (if “realistic”) world view — that we can work out, talk out, negotiate out of any conlfict.
But for those of us who understood why the Oslo Process had blown up in our faces, who understood the Jihadi vision that lay behind the Intifada, who understood how massive an intellectual and moral failure had occurred, starting in late 2000, when, inspired by the wrenching image of poor little Muhammad al Durah, the European “street” and the activist “Left” turned against Israel and embraced the “Palestinian” cause, for those of us who had been watching in dismay at the spread of a new wave of anti-Semitism thinly disguised as delirious anti-Zionism spread unopposed by the liberal and progressive authorities… for us, Daniel’s death was just one more roadsign on the path to the present. (more…)
Another epistemological challenge. Tim McGirk of Time Magazine has a report of an Israeli randomly murdering three little girls and an old lady. Pay attention to his idea of what constitutes confirmation of allegations he repeats as true. (H/T Cynic)
Voices from The Rubble
By Tim McGirk / Jebel al-Kashif Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009
A scene of the devastation near a house in Jebel al-Kashif where Palestinians say three young girls were shot by an Israeli soldier. Two of the girls later died.
Standing with his grieving wife, Khaled Abed Rabu insists on showing the old report cards of his 7-year-old daughter Suwad as if the fact that she was an excellent student makes her death any more unfair or inexplicable. He reads out the teacher’s comments in a faltering voice. “See?” he says. “She was the best student in her class.”
You can measure the destruction in Gaza by the number of bombs dropped or buildings flattened or the price to rebuild it all, but the real cost lies within people like Abed Rabu, whose pain and sense of loss are apparent from the moment you meet him. Two weeks after the end of Israel’s 22-day operation against Hamas militants, the battle to control the story of what happened in Gaza continues. The U.N. and human-rights groups accuse the Israeli military of using disproportionate force and even of committing war crimes. The Israeli government has responded to such charges by arguing that Hamas deliberately positioned weapons and fighters in areas populated by civilians. Israel has begun investigating some of the more egregious allegations about civilian deaths, which are multiplying as Gaza picks itself up from the rubble. One such account was presented to Time by Abed Rabu. (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.)
Abed Rabu says his daughter Suwad died in Gaza on Jan. 7, the day Israeli tanks churned across the strawberry fields and knocked their way into a little park about 20 yards (18 m) from the family home. Residents of Jebel al-Kashif recall being warned by the Israelis through loudspeakers to evacuate their homes. “There was no fighting, so we weren’t too worried when the Israelis told us to leave,” Abed Rabu recalls. “I told my girls, ‘Don’t be scared. We’ve done nothing to the Israelis, so they won’t hurt us.’”
Talal made the same verisimilitudinous remarks about Israelis not attacking unarmed people in the al Durah case: “I was afraid the Israelis would think that my camera was a weapon and shoot me,” implying that they don’t shoot cameramen.
The patriarch says he herded his wife, mother and three young daughters, Amal, 2; Samar, 4; and Suwad to the door and gave the children a white flag to wave. “Two Israeli soldiers were beside their tank, eating chocolate and potato chips,” he recounts, waving empty wrappers bearing Hebrew writing that he found later in the debris. “It was like a picnic for them.”
According to Abed Rabu, a third Israeli soldier then popped out of the tank with an M-16 and fired a single shot. “I didn’t understand what happened,” says Abed Rabu. “I thought he was firing in the air, and then I looked down and saw my 2-year-old daughter lying there with her insides spilling out.
“I started screaming, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And then the soldier shot my two other girls. My wife fainted. And when my mother tried to drag Suwad inside the house, the soldier shot my mother in the chest, her shoulder and her leg.”
This is an incomprehensible narrative. What — other than sheer malice and a reckless disregard for the IDF rules of military activity — could motivate this series of murders? Who — other than someone who believes that the Israelis are covert Nazis — would find this account reliable? And, as E.G. noted, if the Israeli soldier shot the girls and the mother, why did he not shoot the rest of the family, especially the father? (more…)
The CNN footage from the Gaza Hospital is still hotly contested. Follow the multiple postings at LGF and an update at Powerline. Here below, I deal with CNN’s defense of the footage in detail because it so resembles the kinds of arguments that Charles Enderlin made about his own monumental gaffe with Talal abu Rahmeh and his “Al Durah” story.
You wouldn’t know it from the title, but there’s only one “journalist” whose opinion is cited in the article (unless Mashharawi the cameraman under suspicion is also considered a journalist).
(CNN) — There’s no truth to accusations by bloggers that a Palestinian camera crew staged a video showing the death of the videographer’s brother after an Israeli rocket attack, said the team’s employer.
In the video, camerman Ashraf Mashharawi is seen holding his brother.
“It’s absolute nonsense,” Paul Martin, co-owner of World News and Features, said of accusations leveled by bloggers at videographer Ashraf Mashharawi.
“He’s a man of enormous integrity and would never get involved with any sort of manipulation of images, let alone when the person dying is his own brother,” Martin said. “I know the whole family. I know them very well. … [Mashharawi] is upset and angry that anyone would think of him having done anything like this. … This is ridiculous. He’s independent.”
I don’t know much about Paul Martin, but it’s clear he spends lots of time in Gaza, and manages to have considerable access to Hamas “militants” whose narrative he seems to feel the world needs to understand. In any case this remark is nothing short of breathtaking. Mashharawi’s about as “independent” as Diana Buttu. The idea that a cameraman working in Gaza is not a militant for the Palestinian cause (perhaps not Hamas, but even that’s unlikely in the last years), is close to preposterous. No genuine independent could survive there for any period of time.
But the rhetoric is crucial here. Just like Charles Enderlin defending Talal, the ploy here is to present Palestinian cameramen as living up to the highest Western standards of journalism. And of course, this is only for public consumption. As Charles told me off the record when I pointed out that Talal’s rushes were full of staged scenes, “Oh sure, they do this all the time.” But on the record, “Talal is a top journalist.”
As for the “I know the whole family…” that’s just what Charles told me that Talal would never lie to him because their families had shared meals together. The credulity of these Western journalists who think that because they’ve sat down with their Palestinian colleagues and broken bread that means that their newfound friends would break ranks with their people’s struggle, is somewhat breathtaking.
Raafat Hamdouna, administrative director at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said Friday that “Mahmoud Khalil Mashharawi, a 12-year-old, was brought to the hospital, and he was breathing, but he was hit in the head and all over his body by shrapnel. He died later in the hospital. He was treated by the Norwegian team. When he was brought in, he was breathing. The team did their best to save him. I am not really sure if they even tried to rush him to the surgery room, because he was badly hurt.”
Mashharawi’s video footage originally appeared on British television’s Channel 4 and later on CNN. It showed futile attempts by doctors to resuscitate Mashharawi’s 12-year-old brother, Mahmoud, after he and his 14-year-old cousin, Ahmed, had been wounded in what the family said was a rocket attack from a remote-controlled drone Sunday.
Ahmed also was taken to the hospital, but he had been fatally struck in the head and chest by shrapnel and had lost a foot, Hamdouna said. Hamdouna said the hospital records reported Ahmed’s age as 16, not 14, as the family said.
At the time of the attack, the family said, the two boys were playing on the rooftop of the family’s three-story house. The video showed a blood-splattered area where an explosion had taken place and where shrapnel had pierced the roof.
Mashharawi has regularly worked with World News and Features since 2004, Martin said. His multimedia company serves television, radio and newspapers.
Martin said accusations that Mashharawi owns a company that hosts Hamas Web sites were falsely based on Mashharawi having worked at a company that created the PS suffix to allow anyone of any political persuasion to create Palestinian Web sites.
The video footage appeared on CNN television networks and on CNN.com for 24 hours before CNN removed the material in the belief that it had no further right to use it. CNN, standing by the video, has since reposted it. Some bloggers had cited its removal as evidence that CNN did not stand by its reporting.
Responding to accusations that the resuscitation efforts of Mashharawi’s brother appeared inauthentic, Martin said that, based on his years of reporting from Gaza, doctors often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved.
This is rich. Note that CNN did not consult a doctor on this one, but Martin’s experience in Gaza. I’ve consulted a doctor and a number of people with experience in CPR have commented both at my article at PJMedia and at LGF. But here it’s Martin’s long experience in Gaza that comes into play. There are two ways to explain this remark, neither of them working in the way Martin would like.
1) Doctors in Gaza are so incompetent that what appears to Western experts as a joke, really is their best effort. The incompetence is doubled by Martin’s qualifying remark: as commenters have noted, if the patient is dying, the CPR should be more vigorous.
2) Doctors “often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved” as long as the cameras are rolling. Maybe Martin wasn’t paying attention to that detail.
In the video of the incident, the boy appears lifeless when brought to into the hospital.
In a brief conversation with CNN, Mashharawi said that doctors tried everything they could to save his brother and that he rejected suggestions that any of his work was inauthentic.
Before bloggers made their accusations, Mashharawi told CNN, “I believed at that moment if I didn’t record that nobody will believe what’s happened to my brother. Because it is unbelievable. Until now, I can’t believe what’s happened.”
It’s not clear what’s “unbelievable. That a child would be hit by rockets in a war zone and die in a hospital is hardly unbelievable. That one needed to film it for the sake of “proof” strikes me as pretty unconvincing. That he filmed it to arouse anger against Israel with the pathos of the scene, strikes me as more likely; and as I argued in the Gaza Beach tragedy documentary I made, this is “exploiting grief.”
To get a sense of the difference in cultures here, no Israeli cameraman would film the death of a family member (or anyone else) and then give it to Western media to show the world the plight of the Israelis. None.
What’s most appalling about this article — but will eventually, I suspect, redound to CNN’s discredit — is that they ran this article based on the denial of two already committed sources. CNN made no effort to corroborate any of this. It’s just “he said, she said.”
What we need is the rushes that Ahraf Mashharawi shot that day, that we see in edited form. Like the rushes of Talal, we’ll be able to judge better what was going on that day if we could see them. And unlike Talal’s rushes, let’s see them uncensored. I suspect we won’t, because when it comes to the clash between Palestinian journalism, channeled through advocacy journalists, the clash between narrative and evidence is so great, they cannot afford to let us see.
I may be wrong. This may be genuine footage. I am open to being convinced so. But let us see the evidence.
I just participated in a panel at American Jewish Studies Conference in Washington entitled Rethinking the “Other”: Problems in Post-Modern Jewish Thought, Politics and the Media. The first two talks by Susan Handelman and Jacob Meskin addressed the problem of the “other” in the philosophico-theological works of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-born Jew who became one of France’s most notable philosophers of the 20th century, and a notable influence on Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction and the works of Leon Ashkenazi, known by his scouts name, Manitou, a North-African Jew who first went to France and then after 1967 to Israel.
Their points, boiled down to a crude minimum were that Levinas and/or his followers have taken the manner in which he privileged the “other” to such a point that they have ended up failing to actually interact with the other and particularly in the Arab-Israeli conflict have given a hostile “other” an undeserved, even dangerous, priority. Handelman brought in a less-well-known thinker, Leon Ashkenazi, who, among other things, warned against a particular kind of “other”, namely Cain, the murderous and envious “other” against whom one can and must defend oneself. I was asked to give an example of how the “Cain” type views the other. Not surprisingly, my “text” was the Muhammad al Durah affair, which I post below.
The Media and the Construction of the “Other” in the Arab-Israeli Conflict”
[Note the bland title, done so as not to set off flags among the programming committee and get rejected. For those who already are familiar with the Al Durah affair, you may want to skip below to Analysis.]
My topic today concerns how Palestinians “narrate” the Israeli/Jewish “other.” Let me begin with a discussion of a particular case — that of Muhammad al Durah — and then analyze what it tells us about dysfunctional attitudes towards the “other” in post-modern Jewish and Western intellectual circles.
Since we are very short of time [I had 20 minutes], let me cut to the chase. I think this is a staged scene, a deliberate lie and libel. In order to understand such a phenomenon, first you need to understand how, as a fake, it is one of many carried out that day. Indeed, I coined the term Pallywood in order to designate the existence of a whole school of film-making in the Palestinian territories designed to present the television news audience both at home and abroad with a constant stream of issues depicting the vicious Israeli Goliath crushing the plucky Palestinian David. Let’s begin with a scene from Netzarim Junction that day.
The picture seems to be a scene of Palestinians under fire, taking cover, running, and presumably looking at the position from which they are being fired at. Except that the Israeli position is behind the building in the upper right, and the Israelis never left their position that day. This whole scene is staged; they are looking at cameramen.
For anyone who wants to examine the nature of Pallywood further, I recommend viewing my movie of that name:
As for the analysis of the Al Durah staging, see my movie, Al Durah: Making of an Icon.
But this is not just a libel, it’s a blood libel, it’s about Israelis intentionally killing an innocent defenseless child, according to the cameraman Talal abu Rahmeh, “in cold blood.” In order to make the case, the Palestinian broadcast authority inserted into the footage taken by abu Rahmeh a scene of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle (rubber bullets) which was taken during the riots caused by the Al Durah footage. This billboard put up by Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon makes the point graphically.
When asked to explain how they could do something that violated every principle of modern journalist, a PA official explained:
These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.
One could not ask for a better illustration of a pre-modern mentality: the (higher) truth is what counts, and any kind of dissembling is permissible to convey that truth, even if — especially if — it’s a blood libel against your enemies.
What’s even more tragic in this tale is not just that it appeared and spread (like wild-fire) in the pre-modern, scapegoating culture of global Islam, but that it jumped from there to spread (again like wild-fire) in the post-modern culture of the West. Sharon, who was not even prime-minister at the time of the incident was a particular target of venom.
Here in the Hartford Courant, the barrel is gone, the Israeli soldier has been replaced by a pistol-toting Sharon who smiles sadistically at his murderous deed.
Blood libels proliferated in the Arab world, and, via Palestinian and Muslim student groups, made it onto American campuses.
San Francisco State University flyer, Spring 2002
Dave Brown cartoon for the Independent, January 2003. The cartoon won the annual award as the best cartoon from the UK Political Cartoonist Association.
Europe was the Western cultural sphere especially in Europe, where it was hailed as a liberating narrative that freed from Holocaust guilt. In particular, the image opened the floodgates to comparing the Israelis to the Nazis. (more…)
This just in a few days ago: France2 has met with the head of the French-Jewish organization CRIF, Richard Prasquier, who held a news conference a month ago demanding a committee of investigation into the al Durah affair, and has agreed to one. It’s hard to know what’s going on, since such an investigation, pursued impartially will be very harmful to France2, but initial responses from French sources close to the event are cautiously optimistic. Article below with brief commentary.
The head of the state-owned France 2 television station has agreed to a demand from a Jewish community leader to establish a panel of experts to probe the controversial “Muhammad al-Dura broadcast,” the European Jewish Press reported Friday.
Footage from the controversial Muhammed al-Dura video, aired by France 2.
Photo: AP [file]
As usual, lazy journalists put up the inflammatory picture Enderlin broadcast, not the anomalous one that Enderlin cut:
Take 6, two “takes” after Enderlin has declared the child dead, according to Talal after bleeding to death from a stomach wound for 20 minutes.
In September 2000, a France 2 broadcast showed the “killing” of Muhammad al-Dura,12, during an exchange of gunfire between IDF soldiers and Palestinian gunmen.
The report was based on footage taken by the station’s Gaza-based Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, and accused the troops of killing the boy as he and his father tried to find cover.
The images shocked the world and caused outcry over Israel’s policies in the Gaza Strip. But Philippe Karsenty, head of French media watchdog Media-Ratings, raised questions on the report’s authenticity. Karsenty argued that Dura’s death was staged, and accused France 2’s Jerusalem then-correspondent Charles Enderlin of doctoring the footage. Enderlin was not in Gaza at the time of the incident.
France 2, however, stood by Enderlin and the Palestinian cameraman who submitted the footage in question. The station sued Karsenty for libel.
In May of this year, a Paris appeals court reversed the original decision against Karsenty, saying that the examination of the footage had not resolved the question of the film’s authenticity. Karsenty presented judges with new evidence including a ballistics report and footage from other sources, which he said proved the boy’s death had been staged.
Karsenty’s claims are based on inconsistencies in the footage, including a publicly available video-taped admission by Abu Rahma that there are untold secrets related to the case, the fact that only seven bullet holes are seen behind Dura despite Abu Rahma’s repeated statements that the child survived 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli forces directed at the boy, footage clearly showing pretend gun battles and faked ambulance runs at the junction that day, testimony of the IDF soldiers stationed at the junction who said they did not participate in any firefight that day, and the lack of footage of Dura’s actual shooting.
Abu Rahma’s video shows Dura hiding, and then cuts to footage of him lying, apparently dead, at the junction. It does not show the child being killed.
In addition, the 55 seconds of video footage broadcast by France 2 in the original TV report were only part of some 18 minutes. The full film was shown in court, and detractors of France 2 claim that there is still more footage that has not been released.
The ruling absolving Karsenty of libel said that he had “exercised in good faith his right of criticism against the power of the press. [The watchdog head did not] exceed the limits of freedom of expression recognized by the European Human Rights Convention.”
The Anti-Defamation League has expressed support for the call for an independent investigation into the report. The panel of experts is expected to be established in November, and will be headed by Patrick Gaubert, chairman of Licra, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, who is also an EU Parliament member.
I don’t know much about Gaubert, but the LICRA looks like a good organization, and is certainly on the right side of the UN/human rights debate. That, in and of itself, is extremely encouraging, since Al Durah played such a prominent role in what LICRA justifiably sees as a travesty of human rights, namely Durban I.
Karsenty called the decision to set up a panel “good news” but said he would monitor who was selected as “experts” as well as what material was submitted for the panel’s consideration.
France 2 has appealed against the latest ruling to France’s Supreme Court.
The IDF concluded in its own investigation of the incident that Dura was not killed by soldiers. In 2007, deputy commander of the IDF Spokesman’s Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, wrote to France 2 asking for the entire unedited 27-minute film shot by France 2’s Palestinian cameraman on September 30, 2000, as well as footage the cameraman filmed on October 1, 2000. Am-Shalom stressed that the IDF had ‘ruled out’ the notion that Dura was killed by Israeli fire.
Citing the findings of the IDF’s probe into the incident, ordered by then-OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia, Am-Shalom wrote, “The general has made clear that from an analysis of all the data from the scene, including the location of the IDF position, the trajectory of the bullets, the location of the father and the son behind an obstacle, the cadence of the bullet fire, the angle at which the bullets penetrated the wall behind the father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF soldiers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed position [at the junction].”
In one of my lengthy responses to Derfner’s rattled cage I discussed his strange argumentation for dismissing the “staged” hypothesis. He invoked a list of “respectable, impartial” journalists — Fallows, Schapira, Weimann, Leconte, Jeambar — and, after accepting their conclusion that the Israelis did not kill Muhammad al Durah, then proceeds to the following logical syllogism.
Furthermore, that each of these investigators also dismissed the possibility that the shooting was “staged” - I think that alone is reason enough to brush aside the idea that Abu Rahme, the al-Duras and a cast of helpers pulled off a colossal hoax to blacken Israel’s name by faking the death of a 12-year-old boy.
This is classic Enderlinian logic: If the Israelis don’t object loudly to what I’ve done, then it must be true. We historians call this an argument ex silentio — from silence and consider it a fallacy. The problem is that there are more reasons for silence than the one the argumenter wants his audience to assume.
In Derfner’s case, there are two problems with this formulation. First, even if these journalists had dismissed the possibility of “staging,” both Derfner and the public need to look at the evidence themselves. But second — and here we come to the more disturbing element of Derfner’s method of argumentation — it systematically misinforms the reading public to tell them that “these investigators also dismissed the possibility that the shooting was staged.” (more…)
This constitutes a longer version of the op-ed piece at the Jerusalem Post where I exercise my “right of reply” to respond to Larry Derfner’s most recent attack on my arguments. The essay contains links (more to be added), three additional documents, and a number of paragraphs dropped from the published piece.
The Self-Destruction of the Al Durah Faithful
When I first began work on the al Durah affair, I knew I was on to a story whose unraveling would reveal a wide range of cultural dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century –
• the dramatic dysfunctions of the Mainstream media’s news reporting,
• the resurgence of various forms of Judeophobia, from the paranoid anti-Semitism of the Muslim world to the joyous moral Schadenfreude of the European “left”,
• the mainstreaming of an active-cataclysmic apocalyptic movement in global Jihad and its weapon of choice, suicide terrorism,
• the cultural vulnerabilities of Western democracies faced with an asymmetrical war so lopsided they cannot take it seriously
• the pathologies of Leftist and Jewish self-criticism,
• the disorientation of liberals prisoner of their cognitive egocentrism, and
• the moral failure of the “progressive left.”
By any standards this offers a fairly good scope of issues to illuminate with a “thick description” of one single incident, even if it strikes many as what one French friend classed as a “human interest story” (faits divers).
Part of what attracted me to the topic was its quality of “public secret.” Everywhere I looked there were public secrets: from the obvious staging of Pallywood and the stunning complacency in private of the Western media (“oh, they do that all the time”), to uncanny refusal of otherwise rational people to reconsider despite the deeply troubling evidence. Karsenty calls it the “so what” defense: No blood… so what; no bullets… so what; 55 seconds not 27 minutes filmed of an alleged 45 minutes of non-stop Israeli firing… so what; no “death agonies” that Enderlin cut to “spare the public”… so what; no ambulance evacuation scenes… so what; the kid moves after he’s supposed to be dead… so what; Talal lies… so what; Enderlin lies…
Indeed quite early on, in addition to seeing this story as having strong parallels to the Dreyfus Affair, I began to see it as a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Here the tailors are Talal and his friends who spin their story; Enderlin is the chamberlain who comes back from examining the evidence and announces that the tale is good and true, the MSM are the courtiers to whom he gave both the evidence and the talking points for announcing the great news in order to prepare the tale’s public exposure, the media launch of the icon of hatred, the martyr Muhammad al Durah. And a string of lonely individuals, from Shahaf, to Juffa, to Huber, to Poller, to Landes, to Karsenty, tried unsuccessfully to say, hey wait a minute, this martyr’s narrative robe is woven of wholesale deception. And each of us were told, as does the father of the child in Andersen’s tale, “Hush child.” Only whereas in the original tale, the “revelation” was that those who couldn’t see the magical cloth were “fools and unworthy to rule”, in this one, those who saw a fake were “far-right-wing Zionist conspiracy freaks.”
Like many such “public secrets,” this tale does not wear well over time. (The French call them secrets de Polichinelle, secrets like pregnancy that will, eventually, out.) What I did not expect, was how often the defenders of al Durah would reveal the nature of these dysfunctions I was trying to chronicle and explain. Now Larry Derfner has added his text to the dossier of self-revelatory texts that explain so much about the al Durah affair. He has, as a result, inspired the formal launching of the Al Durah Affair’s Public Secret Dossier. So in his honor, I propose to go over some of these extraordinarily revealing texts and compare and contrast them.
1) Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000.
2) News analysis of William Orme for the New York Times, October 24, 2000
3) Response of Adam to James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly article June, 2003
4) Nouvel Obs Letter of Support to Charles Enderlin, May 27, 2008
5) Larry Derfner’s Second Column on Al Durah in Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2008
Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000
On October 12 (less than two weeks after the al Durah footage first aired and provoked rioting throughout Israel’s Arab population), two Russian-born reservists took a wrong turn and landed in Ramallah, Arafat’s “Oslo” capital. Palestinian police took them into custody, but the rumor of their presence spread rapidly. A lynch crowd soon stormed the police station, and in a frenzy, Palestinian men beat the soldiers to death with their bare hands, threw their bodies out the window, and a mob below literally tore apart their bodies, beaten to a pulp, dragging the parts through the street, shouting all the while, “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.” (more…)
Ed O’Loughlin writes for the Sydney Morning Herald did a piece on the al Durah controversy shortly before the showing of the rushes in court in November 2007. Although it might appear to the simple reader that this is a balanced piece, it’s worth a close look to see the embedded prejudice (in the etymological sense of the term, judgment before [viewing the evidence]. Note that he has only spoken with the people who support the original story, and that he presents none of the extensive evidence that there’s something terribly wrong with the report as Enderlin first broadcast it. Also note that he considers any question about the evidence, including the question of where the bullets came from, “conspiracy theory,” even though, at the end, he allows that it may have been Palestinian bullets that hit.
“We were the target” … Jamal al-Dura.
Photo: ED O’Loughlin
October 6, 2007
There are hopes the real story of the death of a boy in Gaza may emerge at a court case, writes Ed O’Loughlin.
Note that at no point does O’Loughlin refer to the case as the “alleged” death, even though that was the issue at contention in the court case. Has the author of the article even looked at the evidence for staging? Will he discuss “take six”? And is his “hopes [that] the real story of the death of a boy in Gaza may emerge” just hoping that the court will confirm the original story? By the end of the article, that seems a fairly likely conjecture.
The death of Mohammed al-Dura is a harrowing piece of footage: a 12-year-old Palestinian boy dying in his father’s arms as the pair seek cover from withering crossfire in Gaza.
The reader is immediately told, without any mention of “alleged,” how harrowing the footage of the death.
It is also, a senior Israeli spokesman declared this week, fake.
Danny Seaman, the director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said the television station France Two “essentially staged” the footage seven years ago this week as a “blood libel” against the Jewish state.
Seaman is the most senior government official to express a view which is increasingly popular among supporters of Israeli policy.
Immediately, the journalist labels the position a political one, rather than a response to the evidence. This is, essentially, Charles Enderlin’s position. But one might actually argue the opposite: that the insistence, despite the evidence, that the footage is real, corresponds primarily to those who favor the Palestinians.
Under this view, the killing of Mohammed al-Dura, like several other incidents which produced television images particularly unfavourable to Israel, was a smear contrived by foreign journalists against the Jewish state.
Significant misrepresentation here. No one is arguing that Enderlin was in on the staging action. No foreign journalists were involved. This was a Pallywood production with Talal as both cameraman and director. To present this as an criticism of “foreign” journalists is to replicate in a new form the error of early journalists who described the scene as “captured by a team of French journalists” when, again, it was Talal without supervision. (more…)
Charles Enderlin has responded to Elie Barnavi’s article in Marianne at his blog. It is vintage Enderlin — no real evidence, just indirect logic. If the Shabak doesn’t think he’s a criminal, then he isn’t; if Israeli journalists visited him in the hospital and the King of Jordan shook his hand, then he’s not a faker… I present below the French, followed by my translation and comment. I recommend visiting Enderlin’s blog, where he has an exchange with one of his critics, a Fracophone Israeli blogger named Victor Perez.
Vous avez toujours su défendre avec talent les positions israéliennes et j’attendais votre intervention dans ce débat avec curiosité, mais, là, vous m’avez étonné. Ancien ambassadeur, vous avez certainement un niveau d’habilitation « sécuritaire » vous permettant l’accès à certains dossiers du Shabak, le service de sécurité intérieur israélien. Un simple coup de fil à Tel Aviv vous aurait évité de publier des inexactitudes. Pour le Shabak, Talal Abou Rahmeh qui a filmé la mort de Mohammed A Dura n’est pas un propagandiste palestinien et n’est soupçonné d’aucune activité subversive anti-israélienne comme vous l’affirmez. La réponse que nous avons reçue de ce service – et d’autres – lorsqu’il a fallu obtenir pour Talal une autorisation d’entrée en territoire israélien était la suivante : « Il est blanc comme neige ». Les accusations que vous portez contre lui sont fausses et inadmissibles.
Vous mettez en doute la crédibilité des rushes tournés par Talal. Là aussi, je dois prouver que l’absurde est faux. Que des images tournées par un cameraman sous le feu ne sont pas l’équivalent d’une caméra de surveillance, comme dans un super marché… Oui, Talal n’a filmé que ce que les circonstances permettaient. Ces scènes d’Intifada ont également été tournées par d’autres cameramen qui se trouvaient sur place, notamment d’Associated Press et de Reuters.. De nombreux confrères y étaient dés le lendemain, le 1er octobre 2000, ainsi que les jours et les semaines suivantes. Plusieurs se sont retrouvés, couchés au sol, entre deux feux. Nous avons présenté à la justice des témoignages qui contredisent l’opinion de vos « experts » parisiens. Pourquoi vous contentez-vous de l’avis de gens qui n’ont jamais mis les pieds à Gaza ou assisté à ce genre d’affrontement ? Pour notre part, lorsque cette campagne de diffamation a débuté, nous avons présenté les images à un médecin légiste qui a conclu que les mouvements de l’enfant étaient consistants avec l’agonie. (Selon le dictionnaire : les instants qui précédent la mort).
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is one of the people I have consulted with often in the course of working on al Durah. I cite her a number of times anonymously in my essays in France, including one of the most striking comments: “In France no one apologizes publicly for a mistake. It’s considered a sign of weakness.” Now she brings her formidable capacities to bear on the al Durah affair. Knowing two thirds of the people who signed the Nouvel Obs petition, she called them up and asked why they had done it. The result… a pathetic and hilarious insight into the corporatist mentality of the French intellectual elite — Jewish and non-Jewish. This may be the best piece on the French cultural context of the al Durah affair.
To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can’t own up to a mistake. This is a country where the law of the Circus Maximus still applies: Vae victis, Woe to the vanquished. Slip, and it’s thumbs-down. Not for nothing was Brennus a Gaul. His modern French heirs don’t do apologies well, or at all if they can possibly help it. Why should they? That would be an admission of weakness. Blink, and you become the fall guy.
So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura-a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000-it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel’s regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.
[snip]
Meanwhile, Enderlin and his bosses at the state-run France 2, who had distributed their news item free worldwide, were refusing to answer questions. They flatly declined to provide the complete 27 minutes of footage taken that afternoon by the cameraman, or to concede any possible error, ping-ponging in the classical obfuscating pattern of bureaucracies everywhere. (”It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” hasn’t yet made it to France.) It took two years for Enderlin to give his first interview, to a friendly colleague, Elisabeth Schemla, the respected editor of the Proche-Orient.info website and a former L’Express associate editor, in the course of which he confused “protecting one’s sources” with not providing the tape. (Personal disclosure: I was at the time deputy editor of Proche-Orient.info.)
(Article by Ben-Dror Yemini, Ma’ariv, 20.6.08, Weekend Supplement, pp. 18-19) En français au site de l’UPJF.
Everyone remembers the death of Muhammad Al-Dura. France 2 accused the IDF; the Israeli media went along. One Frenchman dared to doubt and began a kulturkampf; the Israeli media was silent. It has now become clear that he was right. Israel is still silent.
The Muhammad Al-Dura affair refuses to die. In Israel, it is mainly the first part that is recognized. In France, in recent weeks, there are those who are already calling it a new Dreyfus Affair.
The beginning is well-known. The pictures that were broadcast seven and a half years ago shocked public opinion in the country and around the world. They saw a father and boy hiding behind a barrel. They shout for their lives as the bullets strike them. The father tries to protect his son. Unsuccessfully. Tal Abu-Rahma, the France 2 cameramen, delivered the material to the network’s well known and veteran Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin. From the raw material, the latter filtered less than 60 seconds of harsh and horrifying footage, and added commentary that cast the responsibility on IDF soldiers. Within a few days, this item became the harshest propaganda ever against the State of Israel. Whoever tried to cast doubts then was considered a heretic. After all, there was photographic evidence and there is nothing higher.
Muhammad Al-Dura became a symbol. Public squares have been named after him. Stamps have been issued in his honor. The Palestinian poet Muhammad Darwish dedicated a poem to him. His pictures became much better known than that of the Jewish boy raising his hands opposite a Nazi soldier. Already, one can no longer count the number of times Al-Dura has been cited in articles written against Israel around the world. And not just against Israel. For some of the writers, well-known authors, Nobel laureates, Israel became a Nazi, child-murdering country. This did not happen solely due to Muhammad Al-Dura’s 60 seconds. But the weight of that short clip was very high. This was biting, ultimate evidence of Israel’s murderous character.
But there were a few among us, and around the world as well, who thought that something was amiss in those 58 seconds that became a global sensation. Among those was Israeli physicist Nahum Shahaf, who was a member of the committee of inquiry that was appointed shortly afterwards. There was also Esther Schapira from German television, who came to curse because she was convinced that the IDF had killed the boy, but it became clear to her that France 2’s version had more holes in it than Swiss cheese. There was also Luc Rosenzweig, a respected French journalist, formerly of Le Monde, who had prepared his own investigation. His editor did not believe what he saw. They went together, along with another journalist, to the heads of France 2 in order to view all of the footage that was filmed that bitter and hasty day. They saw and were surprised. Their doubts only grew. The investigation was published in L’Express.
Among Charles Enderlin’s and France 2’s most outspoken critics was Philippe Karsenty, a young and successful Jew, who set up a media criticism internet site (”Media-Ratings”). Karsenty claimed that Enderlin had lied and that he and the channel had to draw conclusions.
France 2 is not just another television station. It is a superpower. It is a flagship and establishment channel in one. The channel and Enderlin sued Karsenty for libel. Karsenty demanded one thing: Show the full film that was shot of the event. The court refused. Karsenty lost and was convicted of libel. He did not give up.
In the appeals court, Karsenty reiterated his demand. This time his demand was met. It was a turning point. The full film, to all those who have seen it, leaves no room for doubt. The verdict was handed down four weeks ago on May 22. It was determined that Karsenty is not guilty of libel. The verdict analyzes the item that was broadcast, the full film, the evidence, the contradictions. The conclusion is unequivocal. The plaintiffs, Enderlin and France 2, come out not well at all.
The verdict did not cause many reverberations. In France, there was scant mention. In Israel, the affair came up against the Olmert affair and the talks with Syria, so that the story received very little coverage. What could have been a great achievement for Israel was about to go out with nary a whisper. But this is not what happened.
Before we continue, it would be worthwhile to recall the Israeli side. Articles appeared in Israel that were critical of Karsenty. What does it matter who killed him, wrote Arad Nir on Ynet. Gideon Levy went further and wrote that it did not matter since it is known that Israel kills children. It is certainly known. There is an old hobby to this effect. Jews. Children. It is a matter of history. Even journalist and historian Tom Segev mocked the inquiry of German journalist Esther Shapiro, who prepared a report for German television. It was not really proper on her part to exonerate the IDF soldiers of blame for the killing. She is not serious.
A series of prominent Israeli journalists were recruited not only to enshrine the libel that it was Israeli soldiers who killed or murdered Al-Dura. They were against the very idea of an inquiry. After all, they are energetic journalists. They had vigorous conclusions. Why confuse them with facts?
Let us return to France. Just as the affair was due to expire, Enderlin’s supporters decided to organize a petition of support for him. True, Enderlin said that the full footage included harsh segments of Al-Dura dying and it became clear that this was a lie. True, the verdict is unequivocal regarding the lack of credibility of those who were involved in broadcasting the doubtful segment. True, that Enderlin himself was nowhere near the scene when the events took place. But Enderlin’s friends, or those who believe that their enlightened state finds expression in besmirching Israel, lined up alongside one of their own. After all, he belongs to ‘the vanguard.’
The initiative for the petition came from Le Nouvel Observateur, an important and prestigious weekly, founded by Jean Daniel. His daughter is Sarah Daniel, a journalist in her own right. We will return to her. Nobody among the signatories is familiar with the affair. But all of the signatories, without exception, are identified, to one degree or another, with the anti-Israeli line. Most, like Daniel and his daughter, are Jews. And this is strange because Daniel himself, as a leftist, has criticized the French media in the past for exaggerated hostility towards Israel. It is interesting when he will write the article against himself.
Among the signatories are Hubert Védrine, former French Foreign Minister, and Theo Klein, former president of CRIF, the French Jewish umbrella organization. The petitioners also succeeded in recruiting an Israeli supporting player, who is only a millimeter away from comparing Israel to the Nazis. He is Avraham Burg, the former Speaker of the Knesset.
What is strange is that the petition is not only a defense of Enderlin’s impugned integrity. The petition, in a precise manner, supports the first version, on Israel’s guilt: “Seven years. For seven years a despicable campaign of hate has been trying to stain the professional honor of Charles Enderlin. For seven years, there have been those who have tried to present as ‘fabricated’ and as a ’staged scene’ his report that shows how a twelve-year-old boy was killed by shots fired from an Israeli position.” Yes, that is their one-sided conclusion despite the court’s verdict. Like the anti-Dreyfusards, who also stubbornly clung to the first version.
The signatories are correct about one thing. For seven years, in their words, “A despicable campaign of hate has been conducted”. But the campaign has been waged against Israel, not against Enderlin. The many and the prominent were on Enderlin’s side. The few and the negligible came out against him. The French system of justice, after entering into details, after viewing the entire footage, after having heard expert testimony, after uncovering the lies, arrived at a sound verdict. It was a victory of David vs. Goliath. One stubborn, unknown young man forced the large network and the celebrity journalist to reveal the truth. The libel was refuted. The verdict leaves no room for doubts.
So how exactly did the signatories reach the conclusion, which has already been refuted in court? As usual, hostility against Israel forced the hand. It is possible to assume that none of the signatories were well versed in the details. But they all share one thing in common: They all belong to the same loathsome and fashionable anti-Zionist stream, in France as well as in Israel. Not all are on the same level of hostility. But they are all in the same direction.
Among the signatories, as we have mentioned, another name pops up, unknown to most Israelis: The journalist Sarah Daniel. In November 2001, this same Sarah Daniel wrote about Muslim girls murdered for reasons of family honor. Except that she added one paragraph: “Palestinian women raped by Israeli soldiers are systematically murdered by their own families. The rape, in practice, is a war crime, because the Israeli soldiers act in full awareness of the consequence of their deed”.
From where did Daniel take this fabrication? That is it. From nowhere. In fact, this is another libel disseminated in very marginal circles. And where was it published? In Le Nouvel Observateur, the journal of her father, Jean Daniel. The same paper and the same people who just sponsored the petition for Enderlin.
The petition took flight. In the last two weeks, it has become the focus of conflict between opposing camps in France. The defensive text of the signatories, against journalists in service of the truth, recalls the text of the anti-Dreyfusards, against officers working in the service of the state. One must not criticize them. The truth is theirs. Harming them is harming the holiest of holies. Then they were anti-Semites. Today they are anti-Israelis.
In the wake of the petition, a courageous and important verdict, that almost foundered in deep water, received a new lease on life. The debate on the petition put the Al-Dura affair back on center stage, in France, not in Israel. The historian, Professor Richard Landes from Boston, who followed the affair and even testified himself, wrote a comprehensive and very un-complimentary article about the signatories. Landes is the one who coined the phrase “Pallywood”, about the media of Arab and Palestinian propaganda. He also investigated the Al-Dura affair in depth. He came to Karsenty’s side.
The argument also spread to France’s leading newspapers. Professor Eli Bar-Navi, former [Israeli] Ambassador to France, wrote a scathing article against the signatories. “Since Deir Yassin,” he wrote “there has not been an affair which has caused so much damage to Israel.” Afterwards, additional articles appeared, most in the same vein. An editorial appeared in Le Figaro this week asking the signatories whether media personnel are beyond criticism. Also the big guns, like philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, expressed serious doubts about the petition, and the CRIF has already announced that it has joined the appeal for a commission of inquiry into the entire affair.
Enderlin’s supporters are trying to paint him as the new Dreyfus. Poor guy. It is a little hard for him on Devil’s Island. He made a nice little career for himself out of the Muhammad Al-Dura story. Now the achievement has become a stain. Enderlin is not an Israel-hater. He is no different than most of the foreign journalists in Israel, and he is even an Israeli citizen. He is part of the herd. A herd which is also well-represented in the Israeli media.
And where is Israel? It does not exist. It is the Dreyfus in this affair, but a strange Dreyfus. A Dreyfus who has had a libel stuck to it, but who remains nonchalant. Others fight for it. Official Israel has never bothered to thank Karsenty, or others who have fought to dispel the libel. Regarding assistance, there is nothing to even discuss; on the contrary. Unofficial Israel was on Enderlin’s side. Most of the articles, mind you, were against Karsenty and for Enderlin.
Justice came to light, in France, not in Israel. This is not by chance. If the trial had been held in Israel, there is concern, only concern, that the result would have been different. Freedom of speech is indeed a supreme value but on one condition: That it is found in the hands of very specific people. But that is the subject of a different article.
The principle Palestinian Newspaper, Al-Quds published a translation of an article on the Karsenty-Enderlin decision written by a reporter at The Media Line. This is the first time (to my knowledge) that Palestinian media have covered the unraveling of the Al Durah story.
Eight years on, the case of Muhammad A-Durra, the 12-year Palestinian who became the “poster boy” of the Israeli-Palestinian violence will not go away.
Last week a French activist, who has been fighting a legal battle to prove that the television footage of the boy’s death was faked, triumphed when a French court ruled he would not be condemned for defamation for saying the state-owned television station France 2 falsified footage from the scene.
But French media activist Philippe Karsenty feels let down that the Israeli government has not come to his aid on this issue, and says Israel should use his legal victory as leverage to boost the country’s image.
John Rosenthal, one of the most astute journalists at work in Europe today, whose work I have featured a number of times here at the Augean Stables, has an excellent article up at PJMedia on the French media’s reaction to the Al Durah affair. For the first time in the history of this blog, not only has one of my posts been mentioned, but still more important, the commentators who contribute so much to the discussion with their learned and lively comments.
Le Nouvel Observateur’s “Appeal for Charles Enderlin” positively exudes such a sense of corporate privilege, as Richard Landes and his commentators on Augean Stables were quick to point out.
Rosenthal examines a number of the signatories (the “List of ignominy”) of signers of the Nouvel Obs petition, including the head of “Reporters without borders” an organization, as Rosenthal points out, one would have expected to view Karsenty as a classic “cyber-dissident” taking on the “grands medias.” Alas, not really an NGO, it appears to be another PGO (para-governmental organizations). I suspect that this list will serve as the starting point for PhD theses in media studies (if civic polities survive).
Earlier this month, the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur launched a surreal “Appeal for Charles Enderlin” in response to a French court judgment clearing media critic Philippe Karsenty of charges of having “defamed” Enderlin and his employer, France 2 public television. The court thus overturned the October 2006 condemnation of Karsenty by a lower court.
A full professional translation of the higher court’s judgment is available here on Richard Landes’s Augean Stables blog. (The complete judgment in French is here.) Richard Landes’s translation of the Nouvel Observateur’s “Appeal for Charles” is here. The “Appeal” has in the meanwhile been signed by hundreds of Enderlin’s colleagues in French journalism, plus several “personalities,” and even some simple “web surfers” [internautes].
I say that it is surreal, since it is by no means clear what the point of the appeal is supposed to be or what exactly the signatories want done “for Charles Enderlin.” It was not, after all, Enderlin who was on trial: he and France 2 were the plaintiffs. The “Appeal for Charles” identifies Karsenty as the “person mainly responsible” for an “obstinate and hateful campaign” against Enderlin. But, as PJM readers will know (and Nouvel Observateur readers might not), Karsenty is in fact just one of numerous critics who have challenged the authenticity of Enderlin’s September 2000 report allegedly showing the killing of the Palestinian boy Mohammed Al-Dura by Israeli troops.
It was indeed France 2’s legal strategy of singling out Karsenty and two other website owners for prosecution - as well as Karsenty’s “obstinate” refusal to be intimidated - that converted him into one of the chief protagonists of what has become the “Al-Dura affair.”
The authors of the “Appeal” - like Enderlin himself in a blog post published shortly after the rendering of the court’s decision - take heart in the fact that the higher court “recognized” that Karsenty’s litigious remarks regarding the Al-Dura report “unquestionably do damage to the honor and reputation of news professionals”: i.e. Enderlin and France 2 as a whole. But the court’s observation in this connection is in fact a mere tautology. In his November 2004 text - in which, incidentally, Karsenty called for the “immediate dismissal” of Enderlin and France 2 news director Arlette Chabot - Karsenty himself describes Enderlin’s Al-Dura report and, above all, France 2’s defense of it as “a masquerade that does dishonor [déshonore] to France and its public television.”
The real question, of course, is whether Karsenty’s criticisms of France 2 are well-founded and whether the underlying accusation that the Al-Dura report was a fake is true - or, in other words, whether it is not in fact, as Karsenty’s remarks suggested, Enderlin and France 2 that brought the “dishonor” upon themselves. The French court did not answer this question. Nor indeed did it have any need to do so.
Larry Derfner sets his cap on being the only informed and responsible media expert willing to take on the al Durah case which, he seems to believe, is now dominated by the extreme “right-wing,” at least in the Anglophone press. He’s informed, I’ll grant him that. Can he analyze evidence? Doubtful. What’s his problem? The strictures of politically correct utterances about the Palestinians.
The piece is long and involved and riddled with error. For those who are interested, it offers important insights into a kind of bizarre thinking disorder in which a priori established boundaries of what is moral or immoral to say, not only prevent someone like Derfner from thinking through the evidence, but heaping scorn on anyone who follows that evidence where it leads. As a detailed study of how the PCP (with its commitment to Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism, and cultural relativism) processes evidence it’s close to incomparable.
If I thought Jerusalem Post readers were being exposed to a full debate about the Muhammad al-Dura affair, I wouldn’t feel the need now to go into the specifics of why I think it’s ludicrous and morally blind to claim that the Palestinian boy’s killing was a “hoax,” a staged event. If there were other people writing in English against the hoax theores, I would rest my case with my column (”Al-Dura and the conspiracy freaks,” May 29), and not react to the rebuttals by Philippe Karsenty and Richard Landes (”Conspiracy theories and Al-Dura,” June 12), Jonathan Rosenblum (”For once, the good guys win,” June 13), and a couple of hundred Talkbackers.
“Ludicrous and morally blind…” I can think of lots of reasons to argue that the al Durah affair was not staged, but “morally blind”? What’s that supposed to mean? That if you think it’s staged (an issue of evidence, I believe), then your are somehow defective morally? (Apparently, when one reads on, yes.)
But the debate on al-Dura, at least in English, is completely one-sided. The Web is swamped with right-wing Jewish writers continually piling up the “evidence” for their conspiracy theories, while all the prominent, disinterested investigative journalists who waved off that idea - even while disputing the original story that the IDF killed the boy - have moved on to other things. So since no other writer I know of is still busy taking up the cause of reason and decency in this unrelenting, supremely charged Israeli-Arab issue, I guess I’ll have one more try.
Why is arguing staged a “right-wing” phenomenon? Because we who believe it are depraved enough to believe that the Palestinians would stage such an event? Does that mean that in order to be a member of the “Left” (which apparently Derfner believes he represents), you have to be credulous on principle?
FIRST OF all, let me restate my basic point of view. I think it was probably Palestinian gunmen, not Israeli soldiers as first believed, who shot al-Dura to death and wounded his father, Jamal, at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000. I never believed that Israeli soldiers deliberately, with malice aforethought, shot a cowering boy and a father pleading for mercy, which is how the Islamic world and the international Left typically portrayed the killing. As I wrote: “Israel and the Jewish world are right to be appalled at how the Palestinians and the Arab world distorted and exploited al-Dura’s death as grotesquely as they did. They took what was at worst an accidental IDF shooting and turned it into a mind-shattering act of Israeli sadism.”
In that column, I didn’t make any judgments on the original reporting by France-2 TV correspondent Charles Enderlin and cameraman Talal Abu Rahme, or on their handling of the challenges to their story afterward, except to say it was absurd to claim they cooked the whole thing up. (I was writing in reaction to Karsenty’s May 21 acquittal on appeal of the libel charges filed against him in France by Enderlin and France-2 TV.)
NOW, THOUGH, I think it’s fair to say that Abu Rahme - the only cameraman who filmed the shooting - made extremely rash, hot-headed accusations against the Israeli soldiers involved, which damages his reliability and that of his assertions to Enderlin that the IDF had positively shot al-Dura, which is what launched the story in the first place.
This is good. Of course, if Talal is so unreliable, then why is he not capable of staging the scene? (more below)
As for Enderlin, he has been accused of shoddy reporting, stonewalling and even lying not only by the conspiracy theorists, but by some of those prominent, disinterested investigators who nevertheless dismiss the idea of a hoax. After speaking by phone with him, I don’t say he stonewalled or lied. He has reasonable answers to the accusations against him, and he still believes that what he reported and what Abu Rahme told him - that Muhammad and Jamal al-Dura were shot by Israeli soldiers - was accurate. He even has a reasonable answer to what seems the most damning accusation against him - that since there is no raw footage of Muhammad clearly dying, Enderlin had to have been lying all those years when he said he’d edited the boy’s “death throes” out of the broadcast because they were “too unbearable” to watch.
In response to my questions, Enderlin stands by his statement that the death throes can be seen in the raw footage. Evidently, he is referring to the final seconds of film that show the prone Muhammad raising his arm a little, then gradually drooping back down to a prone position. “The French term I used [translated as ‘death throes’] was ‘agonie,’ which means the moments preceding death, not ‘agony’ as in the English term. We showed the tape to a coroner in France, and he said it was absolutely consistent with the moments just before death,” said Enderlin.
Now it gets interesting. Thank you LD for calling CE, because I think this is the first time we have Charles addressing the issue of what happened to the “agonie.” Did you ask him if he has the “coroner’s report”? Did you ask him why, if the boy is still not dead in “take 6″, he told his viewers that he was dead two takes earlier, and Talal’s audience was screaming he was dead three takes earlier? Why would you accept so unlikely an explanation from Charles and be so ferociously skeptical of what we have to say? Because Charles is a “colleague”? (more…)
