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Category Archives: journalism
The Place of Journalism in Palestinian Cognitive Warfare (Talk at AIS, Haifa, June 2012)
[I thought I had posted this last year when I gave it, but find I haven't. So here it is, particularly relevant in light of the latest Al Durah developments.]
The Place of Journalism in Palestinian Cognitive Warfare
Paper delivered at Association of Israel Studies, Haifa, Israel, June 2012
Everyone knows that the news media constitute a key battleground in the conflict between Israel and its neighbors, that both sides try to influence the manner in which the news depicts what’s going on. Indeed, both sides of the conflict and their ideological allies in the West have produced prodigious efforts to depict the “other” side as cheating.
Those inclined to even-handedness find such formulations as above attractive. There’s something balanced and fair about them, something approximating such prized journalistic values as objectivity and openness to “all sides.”
And yet, I argue, and I think that the historians of the next generation who look back on the Middle East journalism of the early 21st century will agree with me, that those very people who so valued these principles, systematically failed to either exercise or defend them against a systematic assault. Those journalists who could not distinguish reliable testimony from lethal narrative, who could not tell the difference from the arsonist and the firemen, who even as they sought to be “even-handed” played into the stratagems of one side, and the wrong side, these people failed to play their role as professional journalists, indeed, ended up often enough, willy-nilly, playing the role of arsonist. To paraphrase Pascale, more they more they sought to put out the fires of conflict, the more they fed those fires.
Derfner’s Brand of Kool-Aid: You Gonna Believe me or your Lying Eyes?
Really didn’t want to do this. Have responded thrice in the Spring of 2008 to Dernfer’s rattling his cage about Al Durah – here, here, and here – and I probably should leave him to rattle in peace. But there’s something about his tone which I think is particularly revealing, and that readers should be aware of when they hear it. It’s the sound of a lethal journalist being denied his foundational myth.
And the irony is that, at the end of the article, he concedes major terrain in the argument, even as he maintains his tone of contempt… a little like the naked emperor who, realizing everyone knows he’s naked, continues his charade showing even more disdain for the crowd.
In the following article there is not one substantive argument, only one case where Derfner grapples (unsuccessfully) with the empirical evidence (which I’m beginning to think he hasn’t watched – or watched peremptorily). It’s all about name-calling (when it happens to them, people like Derfner like to use the word “smear,” as in the critics are “Desperately smearing Goldstone“), and circuitous arguments all drawn directly from Charles Enderlin. In some senses, the best parallel to Derfner’s prose is the Vultures, except that Derfner does it in public.
Warning in advance. This is long. I will extract the key issues for an article next week, but each of the elements of Derfner’s article deserve analysis, if only because so many people, especially journalists, share his attitude.
On the al-Dura affair: Israel officially drank the Kool Aid
A look at the right-wing conspiracy-nut thinking that informed this week’s blue-ribbon report on the infamous 2000 killing of a Palestinian boy in Gaza.
In the 13 years since Muhammad al-Dura was killed in an Israeli-Palestinian shootout in Gaza while cowering behind his father, masses of right-wing Jews have eagerly embraced a conspiracy theory of the 12-year-oid boy’s killing – that it was staged, a hoax perpetrated by Palestinians to blacken Israel’s name. This theory, promoted most avidly by Boston University Prof. Richard Landes and French media analyst Philippe Karsenty, depends on a view of Palestinians being superhumanly clever and fiendish, and a view of reality that comes from the movies.
As I noted at your site: The difference between you and me is you think the journos are too sharp to be fooled by anything unless it’s a major conspiracy, whereas I, looking at the evidence, sadly come to the conclusion that the Palestinians can put out the shoddiest crap (Talal’s pathetic 60 seconds) and our journos (led by the lethal journalists who pass on anything the Palestinians cook up) will gobble it up. Given your long career as one who regularly feeds these Palestinian lethal narratives to your readers as news, it’s probably no surprise that you need to believe in the necessity of conspiracies that can’t exist, in order to keep on trucking.
The mentality here is essentially the same one that drives the 9/11 “truthers,” the anti-Obama “birthers,” those who say the Shin Bet assassinated Rabin, or those who say ultra-rightists assassinated JFK – a fevered imagination activated by political antagonism that knows no bounds. In the right-wing conspiracy theories of the al-Dura shooting, the boundless antagonism goes out to the Palestinians and their supporters.
Aside from comparing the Al Durah scam, where at most a couple of dozen people were necessary to pull it off, with schemes that took massive levels of participants (9-11, Kennedy Assassination), there’s a fascinating reversal embedded in this comment: the boundless antagonism in this conflict comes from the Palestinians, it not only drove the creation of the Al Durah story, but its systematic deployment as an icon of hatred in order to inject a death cult into Palestinian culture. Of course people like me are hostile to this kind of appalling behavior and hostile to people, like you, who, instead of condemning it roundly, constantly run interference for, and encourage it. As often in conspiracy theories, the person accusing the other of secretly evil intentions projects his own behavior and attitudes.
This week, the State of Israel officially joined the movement. Its report on the al-Dura affair adopts the conspiracy theory in full. (To be precise, it adopts the relatively “restrained” conspiracy theory – that the al-Duras were never shot. The other, wholly unrestrained conspiracy theory in circulation holds that the Palestinians killed the boy deliberately to create a martyr.)
Welcome, Refugee from rekaB Street: Shmuel Rosner’s Mea Culpa
In the flood of commentary and analysis of the Al Durah controversy, I’ve tried to fisk the most important typical responses. And of course, I have a backlog of articles to fisk. But this one by Shmuel Rosner jumped to the top of the pile because of its honest reappraisal. It helps to understand some of the factors that played at the time the story broke, and answer Vic Rosenthal’s question:
Why didn’t then Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and then Prime Minister Ehud Barak demand that all the footage shot by France 2 on that day be placed at Israel’s disposal to do a proper investigation?
Before adding my commentary to Rosner’s mea culpa, I’d like to acknowledge the courage involved in this piece, and the remarkable fact that the New York Times published it. As someone laboring in the wilderness for a decade, all I can say is, this is unexpected.
The Skeptic’s Curse
By SHMUEL ROSNER
Ahmed Jadallah/ReutersOn Oct. 6, 2000, Palestinian boys in the Gaza strip walked past graffiti representing Muhammad al-Dura as he was shown in a television report.
TEL AVIV — In late September 2000, at the beginning of the second Palestinian intifada, the French TV station France 2 aired some 60 seconds of footage allegedly showing the killing of a Palestinian boy in the Gaza Strip.
Muhammad al-Dura, who was 12 at the time, and his father are shown caught in an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters. The boy cowers behind his father, with what sounds like gunshots crackling in the background. Smoke then blocks our view. When it lifts the boy is flattened, listless, and his father is lying against the wall, apparently in serious physical distress. The footage soon became one of the most memorable and heart-wrenching of the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
No one knows what happened exactly at the Netzarim Junction that day. The French broadcast claimed that gunfire from Israeli soldiers killed the boy. That version of the facts immediately became the official Palestinian account. Israel did not accept responsibility, nor did it deny being involved. And so the French-Palestinian narrative stuck.
But this Sunday, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs released a report undermining that account. The document concludes there is “strong evidence” that Muhammad and his father “were not hit by bullets at all in the scenes filmed.” It also details many errors, omissions and open questions in the widely accepted narrative of the event.
I first heard that there might be a problem with the al-Dura story soon after the incident. I was the head of the news division at Haaretz at the time, and a young reporter approached me to say that a high-ranking official at the Israel Defense Force would be staging, in front of a crew from “60 Minutes,” a re-enactment of the shooting to prove the French and Palestinian chroniclers wrong.
I believed the initial story about al-Dura, and I was highly suspicious of the motivations of anyone attempting to disprove it.
Note a few things here. “I believed the initial story about al-Durah.” This readiness to believe the worst of the Israeli army – that they’d target a father and child and rain down bullets upon them, was pervasive, particularly among the journalists who were most proud of their self-critical attitude. As Bet Michael said to me in November of 2003 (after I had studied with Shahaf and seen the France2 raw footage with Enderlin),
BM: 100%. The israelis killed the boy.
RL: Really? Are you aware of the investigation and its findings?
BM: The investigator was a nut… some engineer with the army who argued a conspiracy theory that he kid committed suicide.
RL: Suicide?
MS: (to me while BM waxed eloquent to NB)
NB) He’s being sarcastic.
RL: Were you being sarcastic?
BM: Not at all. I meant every word.
RL: Suicide?
BM: Oh, that was sarcastic, but since then the IDF has killed over 200 palestinian children, you can check with B’tselem.
Here’s a close-up view of the world of aggressive lethal journalism, backed by their “researchers” who systematically compile the lethal narratives. At the time I did not realize it, but I should have after Jenin in 2002, that the lethal journalists – in the case of many, probably not even knowingly – were now dominant in the journalistic scene in Israel.
The Al Durah Affair: What makes journalists behave so badly?
The Israeli government finally came out with a report – thirteen years late – on the Muhammad al Durah affair. It’s thirteen years late. But not too late. It can never be too late to take on so nasty a tale, and particularly from the perspective of any journalists, this may be the biggest hoax in modern history – at once the longest and the most damaging to everyone but the war mongers.
The scandal today is not that the Palestinians faked it. We’ve seen them at work time and again, exploiting every occasion to paint the Israelis as child-killers, even when they themselves killed their children. The scandal today is, thirteen years later, the journalists themselves not only have not confronted their shocking initial failure – dupes of a cheap fake – but their continued refusal to reconsider even as they continue to fall dupe to subsequent hoaxes. On the contrary, the go on practicing the kind of “lethal journalism” that the Al Durah affair epitomizes – injecting the information circulation system with malevolent lethal narratives designed to incite hatred, vengeance and war.
How many of the journalists who have written about this report have even seen the evidence? I’m betting, although I’d be glad to be proven wrong, that the Daily Telegraph Middle East correspondent, Robert Tait hasn’t even seen the evidence that the Israeli report analyzes. If so he’d be like so many of the journalists who signed the petition protecting Charles Enderlin from criticism from – horrors – non-journalists.
In part this is the Israeli government’s fault. They should have held a press conference and forced the journalists to look at the damning evidence. But anyone who wants to examine it can consult the best (only) compendium of the evidence at The Al Durah Project. Once they’ve viewed the evidence, they can move on to the analysis.
Tait, however, prefers a different line, one taken by a number of journalists who do not want to confront the unhappy truth that the community of journalists – including many Israeli ones – has, willy nilly, carried on a devastatingly damaging fraud for over a decade, despite the overwhelming evidence that it’s not only staged, but very badly done.
On the contrary, to inform his readers what to think of this new report, he goes for Charles Enderlin’s “conspiracy theory.” And to do so, he interviews the director of one of the most far left media sites (the equivalent of FAIR or Media Matters in the USA), on whose board Charles Enderlin sits.
“I believe [italics mine] that what we saw on the France 2 news item was exactly what happened and the camera caught exactly what happened,” [Yizhar Be’er] told The Daily Telegraph. “It is mission impossible to fake such a huge event. Nobody, least of all the Palestinians, can create such a fabrication.”
Now despite Tait’s assuring his readers that Be’er and his organization “have extensively studied the case,” their site shows no evidence of such a study.
Be’er’s use of the word “believe” may give us a clue to his astonishing statement that the camera caught exactly what happened (by which presumably he means what Charles Enderlin says happened). As Jon Randall told Anne-Elisabeth Moutet:
Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don’t care if it’s the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn’t make a story up.
Neither Randall, nor Be’er could have seen the evidence and made such professions of belief. Even if you don’t want to see it, even if you want to claim it’s not staged, it’s impossible to look at the footage Talal Abu Rahma shot and insist that it confirms Enderlin’s narrative, not the “targeted by fire from the Israeli position” nor the “the child is dead” when twenty seconds later he’s moving quite deliberately. Asked how he could proclaim the child dead two scenes earlier, Enderlin replies:
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?
Not looking at the evidence is bad enough. But using a conspiracy theory to excuse it just compounds the problem. Be’er’s comment illustrates exactly what’s wrong with the current media scene:
“It is mission impossible to fake such a huge event. Nobody, least of all the Palestinians, can create such a fabrication.”
Be’er (and Enderlin whom he’s channeling) assume that the Palestinians are too incompetent to fool them, and only a massive conspiracy – which they assume couldn’t happen – could have fooled them. Enderlin, confronted with the extensive staging visible in his own cameraman’s footage, responded, “Oh they do that all the time.” But dismissed the possibility they did it with Al Durah: “they’re not good enough” – a comment echoed in Be’er’s “least of all the Palestinians.”
The sad thing, the pathetic thing, is that it didn’t take much to fool them. If I were a professor of videography and a student came to me with this footage, I’d give him an F: get better focus, have the kid look wounded rather than stretched out, have him clutch his stomach rather than his eyes, give him some blood to spill, don’t break it up into short clips. It turns out it’s “mission easy” to put together a shoddy piece and, as long as it’s the kind of story for which too many Westerners and way too many journalists have an insatiable appetite – lethal narratives about Israel – they’ll bite at the poison meat no matter how rancid, no matter how ultimately self-destructive for their own profession and society that depends on them.
The conspiracy theory depends on the idea that the news media is full of sharp, skeptical professional journalists who can’t be fooled easily and it would take a massive and elaborate scheme to do so. The story, alas, is the opposite: no need for conspiracy, not even for high quality staging. Apparently the journalists, like Charles Enderlin, are so used to looking at this staged material that they no longer see it as anything but “reality.” As Enderlin put it to Esther Schapira of ARD:
This is not staging, it’s playing for the camera. When they threw stones and Molotov cocktails, it was in part for the camera. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. They wanted to be filmed throwing stones and being hit by rubber bullets. All of us — the ARD too — did reports on kids confronting the Israeli army, in order to be filmed in Ramallah, in Gaza. That’s not staging, that’s reality.
This comes from a man who’s “gone native.” Staging is reality in the Palestinian world, and apparently his too. Enderlin has the famous quote from Tom Friedman at the top of his blog: “In the Middle East, if you can’t explain something with a conspiracy theory, don’t bother.” For Charles, if your own incompetence has put you in a terribly embarrassing situation, cry conspiracy theory. And count on journalists like Jon Randall and Robert Tait, and all the people who work on blind faith, to give him support. And alas, just as the Palestinians are right that they can put anything (French: n’importe quoi) out and have the Western media snap it up, so Charles Enderlin can make the most outrageous comments (at least where professional journalism is concerned), and have his colleagues circle the wagons.
Alas for Western civilization. Democracy and a free and honest press were such a good idea.
Reflections on Al Durah Staged and Conspiracy Theory
One of Charles Enderlin’s favorite defenses is to accuse his critics of believing in “conspiracy theories.” Here is Larry Derfner, whom Charles cites approvingly in his book on the subject, dismissing Philippe Karsenty and me as “conspiracy nuts”:
No doubt about it – Phillippe Karsenty and his allies have a lot of evidence that the killing of Mohammed al-Dura was a hoax, that it was staged by France 2 TV in cahoots with the Palestinians. In fact, Karsenty, Richard Landes and the rest of the conspiracy theorists have so much evidence that it may even add up to .001% [Enderlin mistranslates as 100% - rl] of the evidence that the Mafia, or Castro, or the Pentagon killed JFK. They may have the merest, slightest fraction of the evidence there is that Shimon Peres masterminded the Rabin assassination, or that the Mossad was behind 9/11.
Now that the Israeli government has come out with a report on the al Durah affair which is at least as sharply critical of his work as the French Court of Appeals in 2008, we can expect Charles and his defenders to come out with both conspiracy barrels blazing.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between a “coup montée” (a planned sting) and a conspiracy.
In the former case, it’s a small group of people who coordinate their activities in order to violate rules without the knowledge of the wider public. In this case, we are dealing with a cognitive or narrative hoax, in which some group of players wants the public to believe even though it didn’t happen. These are common in the history of the modern press, and they play a key role in broader “propaganda” campaigns aimed at swaying public opinion.
The Al Durah coup was pulled off by a core of planners and actors, a larger circle of people who cooperated once the tale had been set in motion, and finally a broader circle of believers who were duped by the coup. In a basic sense, the issue is how many people need to know it’s a fake, and how many are duped? If it takes a really broad group of people who know it’s a fake and play along (including people at high public levels), then we’re dealing with a conspiracy. If it only takes a few who know and many more who are duped, it’s a sting.
Here are a survey of the minimum of planners of the hoax to pull this off the Al Durah hoax:
- the crew at the site:
- certainly: Talal abu Rahmah, the gang around his shouting and yelling “The boy is dead” when he’s still sitting up, the al Durahs, the people charged producing automatic gunfire, the “street” who watched this, as other staged scenes.
- possibly: The two other cameramen (AP Reuters) who left when their jobs were done, a Palestinian marksman tasked with firing at the scene, starting with the jeep scene…
- at the hospitals (Gazan and Jordanian):
- certainly: Gazan doctors willing to identify the body of an older boy with a tattoo as that of Muhammad al Durah and to produce an official report; Jordanian doctors willing to continue the hoax of the father’s “wounds”.
- possibly: a wider range of hospital officials and journalists.
- at the funeral:
- certainly: the people who had already prepared posters of the “dead boy.”
- possibly: a larger group of people who knew this was a fake
The key to understanding how this is not a conspiracy theory is to understand that it did not have to be a conspiracy, that on the contrary, a small group of people could work together to launch the hoax and a much larger circle of people, for various reasons well worth considering, eagerly adopted the hoax.
The circle of dupes involves most of the people Enderlin cites when he mocks the notion of a conspiracy:
- in the media
- a Western chief correspondent willing to edit the material in a way to give it believability and a TV station ready to run with the story. Charles Enderlin may or may not have been part of the planning committee. My guess is, he’s a dupe, at least in part because of his arrogance. When he admitted to me that the Palestinians stage scenes all the time, I asked him if so, why not al Durah? To which he responded, “They’re not good enough to fool me.” Apparently not. As for his superiors in France2 who gave him the green light, they were almost certainly fooled by believing in their correspondent.
- a compliant press ready to run with the story once it broke. Among these, most notably, were journalists like Suzanne Goldenberg and Robert Fisk who found proof of abu Rahma’s account at every turn, and fed the flames of a post-moden blood libel.
- in the higher echelons of Arab culture
- King Hussein of Jordan, who visited Jamal al Durah in the hospital and donated blood almost certainly did not know that he was being duped. He had no reason to question the fact that the bandages and blood on Jamals wounds might not be real.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and a scam/hoax/sting is that in order for a conspiracy to take place on a large scale (e.g., the US government planning the 9-11 attacks, or the Jews planning to take over the world), it would take thousands of people in very high places. In order for a hoax to take place it just takes a lot of dupes. And in the case of Muhammad al Durah, it was a lot of willing, even eager dupes.
When people think that claiming al Durah was staged necessitates a conspiracy, they assume that the mainstream news media could not be fooled across the board by a fake, that if there were serious evidence against the story as the media reported it, then surely investigative journalists would have spoken up.
Alas, no. The current state of the mainstream media, especially where coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned, is an Augean Stables of encrusted bad habits. As Charles Enderlin said, when confronted with evidence that his cameraman Talal abu Rahma had filmed multiple staged scenes, “Oh yes, they do it all the time.” And the journalists who should have put an end to such behavior, apparently had/have no problem with that.
Poisoning the Western Public Sphere: The Roths on the Tamimis and the NYT that Romanticizes Them
When I saw the cover story on the NYT Magazine yesterday, my stomach sank. It didn’t take more than a few moments to know what kind of a fluff piece for the Palestinians and hit-job against the Israelis it would be… part of a systematic campaign against Israel that the NYT is engaged in, documented by CAMERA, illustrated only recently by a cruel piece by Joseph Levine (soon to be fisked here), and again today with a piece by Jodi Rudoren predicated on the principle that the Palestinians should and must have a piece of Jerusalem for their own, and therefore anything the Jews do to jeopardize that outcome is hostile to peace.
Fortunately someone – a man I greatly admire for his work on these painful issues – Arnold Roth and his wife Frimet, took up the cudgels and critiqued yet another example of the sickness of self-loathing and the romanticization of hatred that so characterizes the NYT coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Please read it all.
17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns
If you want to affect how people think about an issue, putting your case onto the cover of the New York Times Magazine must be one of the most effective things you can do. And, given the intense competition, one of the hardest.
So if the editors of the NYT (108 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization; 30 million unique visitors per month to its website; the largest local metropolitan newspaper in the United States – according to Wikipedia) give you the cover of the prestigious Magazine, it’s a massive vote of confidence, a huge privilege, a platform of the most effective kind that (probably) can’t be bought for money.Friends have pointed us to this week’s NYT Magazine cover story, published today. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. It’s a place the author calls “spirited”, where “on warm summer evenings, life… could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone.” He says “a pilgrimage”to this magical place “has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s”.
Read the rest.
Invitation to a Talk I’m Giving on Sunday, March 3, 2013 in Newton
The Addiction of the Western News Media
To Lethal Narratives about Israel
And its Disastrous Consequences for Everyone
Richard Landes, PhD, Presenter
Kenneth Levin, MD, Discussant
Part of the Series, Rising Antisemitism: The Need to Respond
Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 11:00 AM
Palestinian cameramen produce an endless line of items that Dr. Landes terms Pallywood. B-roll Pallywood is basic background for the Palestinian-David vs. Israeli-Goliath story frame: rock throwing, ambulance evacuations. A-roll Pallywood blames Israel for deliberate murder of children. These “lethal narratives” inspire loathing among Westerners and hatred and a desire for revenge among Muslims. This film production would not have much of an impact outside of the captive audience of Palestinians, were it not for Western journalists who repackage these accusations as actual news, flooding our information systems with such weaponized fictions. This lethal journalism prolongs and aggravates the conflict, and tears at the very fabric of the civil society in Western countries whose media embraces these narratives.
Dr. Richard Landes is a professor of history at Boston University. Trained as a medievalist, his academic work focuses on millennial movements from the origins of Christianity to global Jihad in the 21st century. In 2005 he launched a media-oversight project called The Second Draft with dossiers on Pallywood and the Muhammad al Durah Affair. He blogs at The Augean Stables.
Dr. Kenneth Levin is a clinical instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and has a PhD in history from Princeton. He has written extensively on the issue of anti-Jewish bias, including in academic settings, and its impact on its victims. He is author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege. Kenneth is on the Board of Directors of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the International Free Speech Society.
Congregation Beth El-Atereth Israel 561 Ward Street, Newton Centre
Demonstrating on rekaB Street: SNJ supports their confrère Charles Enderlin
As noted in an earlier post, the Société nationale de journalistes, France Télévisions (SNJ) sent out an appeal to members to come show solidarity with Charles Enderlin at the trial. Below is the text, with commentary about the deeply superficial nature of the claims. Basically, the observer is left with the following question: are they dishonest or truly (and inexcusably) uninformed, or, to paraphrase Karsenty on Enderlin, they are certainly misleading their readers; but are they misled? In any case, clueless on rekaB Street seems an apt depiction of their existential condition.
Solidarité avec Charles Enderlin ce mercredi 16 à Paris
Le SNJ a toujours été solidaire de Charles Enderlin ( France 2 ) injustement accusé, poursuivi et harcelé pour son reportage sur la mort de Mohammed Al Dura, un jeune Palestinien de 12 ans, tué à Gaza le 30 septembre 2000.
Note that, neither here, nor below, is there any link to some serious arguments in favor of Enderlin. Presumably, when they write “unjustly accused, pursuied, and harrassed…” they have looked at the evidence and found the criticism completely wanting. Or is this just the rhetoric of people who defend their own without examining the evidence? Shades of the pre-modern trope: “my side right or wrong”, or, in the language of the French “du communautarisme journalistique” [partisan journalism].
Pendant plus de 10 ans, quelques acharnés ont tenté de le discréditer, le salir, le faire condamner.
Le SNJ a multiplié les actions de solidarité. Lors de son congrès de Lyon, en 2007, après les journalistes de France 2, ce sont plus de 150 délégués de toutes formes de presse qui ont signé la pétition : “Charles Enderlin, l’honneur d’une rédaction”.
Note again, no session on the case and its evidence, just solidarity with Charles as if, like one of the others mentioned in the same petition, he had been thrown into prison by his government for criticizing it. Actually, one would have thought that the fiasco of the original petition in favor of Enderlin, signed by people who openly admitted they hadn’t seen the evidence, but only signed to show solidarity with a colleague, might have instilled a small measure of embarrassment in his supporters… but, no. Like Enderlin showing footage from France2 that Karsenty had just systematically dismantled as false and unprofessional, apparently support for Enderlin is shameless because clueless.
Son reportage, qui a fait le tour du monde et sert toujours de référence, est cependant encore l’objet d’attaques en justice.
They themselves admit that this report on al Durah went around the world and serves to this day as a [valid] reference. But as to whether it was inaccurate seems of no interest to these alleged journalists, allegedly committed to principles of proper behavior.
C’est le cas ce mercredi 16 janvier où notre confrère doit faire face à un de ses accusateurs permanents.
One could not know from this remark that it’s Charles, their colleague, who is the accuser, using the courts to bully his critics.
M. Karsenty, directeur d’une agence de notation des médias, avait demandé sa destitution en dénonçant la diffusion “d’un faux reportage, une pure fiction comportant, en première partie, une série de scènes jouées”. Il doit être rejugé par la cour d’appel de Paris pour diffamation contre Charles Enderlin.
Nous avons donc la possibilité de témoigner de notre solidarité avec notre confrère et de notre exigence pour une information de qualité, dont il est un des symboles.
Again, the evidence is of no interest. Charles is the symbol of quality information, which they, as journalists, support. Again the question: are they superficial fools? or are they intentionally dishonest?
Venez le 16 janvier à 13h30, 4, boulevard du palais, chambre 7, pole 7 de la cour d’appel de Paris.
As far as I know, none of them showed, and if they did, they “manifested” so quietly only a practiced eye could have noticed.
Paris,
mardi 15 janvier 2013
Karsenty vs. Enderlin: Baker vs. rekaB Street in action
Yesterday was the sixth hearing in the saga of France 2 and Charles Enderlin suing Philippe Karsenty for defamation in the French courts. In some senses it was something of an anti-climax. In others it was an amazing example of the clash between Baker and rekaB Streets. Indeed, the Société des journalistes (SNJ) and SNJ de France Télévisions both called on members to show their support for Enderlin, who was valiantly defending himself against Karsenty’s legal aggression, when in fact it is Enderlin and France2 who are using the courts to bully Karsenty into silence. Shades of Tuvia Grossman: we know who the aggressor must be, so we’re rallying around our wounded David, even when he’s a embarrassingly dim Goliath.
Karsenty went in loaded for bear, with a mock-up reconstruction of the site at Netzarim, and an extensive PPP full of videos. He went through all the evidence, starting with an very nice series of illustrations using the rushes to show how France2/Enderlin consistently use clearly staged footage as “news.” He then went through the entire dossier concerning the actual al Durah footage. At times it seemeda bit too exhaustive, and the judges seemed irritated by the PPP, but the arguments were excellent, and reflected a forensic mind that engages in identifying clues, and deriving conclusions from an analysis of the evidence.
Enderlin, on the other hand, seemed either completely out of his depth, or just supremely unconcerned. He did nothing but repeat things he’s said (and written) a thousand times, and when it was France2’s chance to respond to Karsenty, he sat passively while his lawyer showed five clips, four of which were just unedited replays of France2 news broadcasts on the matter (including totally irrelevant news about the tunnel under Mont Blanc and the Olympics in Sydney). It was as if they believed that in merely restating themselves, they proved themselves right. After Karsenty’s presentation, however, it was a stunning display of rekaB Street: the very scenes he had deconstructed as fakes, they were again playing as real. Even the judges seemed amused. The grand finale was Jamal al Durah showing his wounds just after Karsenty had showed that the wounds were not from the event (later confirmed by the medical forensic expert).
Enderlin seemed completely alone. He and his lawyer, Maitre Amblard, chic and shallow as ever, were alone at the dock (not even Guillaume Clement-Weill), no one from France2, whose new CEO was questioned about the al Durah affair by a senator at the time of his confirmation, and has, apparently decided to let Enderlin carry this one alone. Indeed, when France2’s “side” tried to show the videos, there was a technical fiasco which took 20 minutes to resolve (Karsenty even offered to show the footage they were having trouble with), trying the patience of the judges, before then trying their intelligence with meaningless material. Even Enderlin, in a passing glimmer of intelligence, seemed bored with his own side’s argument.
For those of us familiar with the material, it seemed like a rout. I even had a momentary flash of sympathy for how pathetic Enderlin was. In any serious court of informed and intelligent judgment, this was a romp: Karsenty sliced France2 to pieces, and France2 responded by putting the severed pieces back up on the screen as if they were whole.
But that means nothing in terms of the verdict. For the first time, the “Avocat generale” who speaks for the Parquet was critical of Karsenty, and chided him for his lack of prudence in criticizing Enderlin, emphasizing that the court was not here to decide the historical questions (i.e., what happened), but the question of Karsenty’s good faith (it being uncontested that his criticism of Enderlin was defamation of his honor). Given how – at least in the words of some major figures in the Jewish community – French justice is “politicized,” how much the whole establishment – media, politicians, judges – is locked up (verouillé), it’s perfectly possible that on April 3, the judges will decide in favor of the plaintiff, France2.
But that would just mean that one more court has planted its flag firmly on rekaB Street, and that the victims, in addition to Karsenty, will be the fabric of civil society in France, where citizens cannot criticize a rogue press lest it harm their unearned reputation.
The event was live-blogged by JSS, and discussed in L’Orient le Jour.
Women Journalists in Gaza: A New Niche for the “Third Gender”
An interesting reflection on the new and central role of female Western reporters from Gaza. I’ll add some comments about the role of honor-shame culture in producing (and shaping) this encounter, and conclude with some questions about the implicit role of intimidation.
The unique advantage of female war reporters in Muslim countriesMost of the first correspondents to file reports from Gaza when the latest conflict began last week were women. Emma Barnett discovers what their unique advantage is over their male colleagues in Muslim cities and countries.
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Phoebe Greenwood is currently reporting for The Telegraph from Gaza City – where she has noticed the majority of correspondents are female. Photo: EPA
By Emma Barnett, Women’s Editor
4:04PM GMT 21 Nov 2012
Phoebe Greenwood was frantically filing her latest piece for The Telegraph in Gaza City earlier this week when she noticed something.
Sat in the main lobby of the Al Deira Hotel, which has become effectively become a big newsroom in the war-torn strip of land, Greenwood observed that all of the correspondents of the American, Australian, Spanish and British broadsheets writing around her were women.Jodi Rudoren (New York Times), Ruth Pollard (Sydney Morning Herald), Harriet Sherwood (Guardian), Ana Carbajosa (El Pais), Abeer Ayyoub (freelance Palestinian journalist) and Rolla Scolari (Sky Italia) have all been Greenwood’s comrades during the latest troubles in the Middle East. On the job she has also been accompanied by Heidi Levine, whom she describes as a “ridiculously tough war photographer” and worked alongside Eman Mohammed Darkhalil, an award-winning and heavily pregnant photographer.
Let’s not forget Karen Laub of the AP.
At the start of the latest Israel-Gaza conflict last week, Greenwood, a freelance reporter based in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, said the majority of the correspondents first on the ground were women and what’s even better, it’s no longer remarkable.“I think this high number of female correspondents in a conflict zone is as a result of gender-equality finally filtering down – making it totally normal for women to report from the front line,” she explains.
Interesting formulation. The fact that it occurs in the Arab-Israeli conflict where one can be most secure that Israelis will not target you if you don’t report according to their liking, that, as Stephanie Gutmann put is, Israel is the only place in the world where you can comfortably be a pregnant war correspondent, does not seem to factor in here.
Humiliating Slip in Hamas’ Cannibalistic Cognitive War Strategy: Haniyah and Kandil Kiss Baby Hamas Killed
Humiliating Slip in Hamas’ Cannibalistic Cognitive War Strategy: Haniyah and Kandil Kiss Baby Hamas Killed
Here’s a classic. Let’s start with the ghoulish display of sorrow over the body of a dead boy, allegedly killed by Israeli bombing. It’s aimed right at the heart of a someone like Annie Lennox who, upon seeing bombs falling on Gaza immediately imagines Palestinian babies on the receiving end, rather than Hamas militants targeting Israeli babies. And, of course, the news media snatch up the photo-op.
Haniya and Egyptian PM Kandil mugging for the cameras Remember this from Kafr Qana, Lebanon, July 30, 2006: 
Green Helmet Guy with dusty baby and clean baby toy clip, July 30, 2006. And, of course, the media run with the story. It’s all so obvious. Boy dead from explosion, Israelis bombing Gaza. As the Palestinian “general” in charge of the investigation of Al Durah’s death put it, “there’s no need to investigate when we know who did it.” 
But wait, what about the evidence, asks Elder of Baker Street?
The Dead Baby War: Fisking Max Fisher
The Dead Baby War:
Reflections on Palestinian Thanatography and Western Stupefication
Max Fisher, formerly of the Atlantic Monthly, now the WaPo’s “foreign policy advisor,” just posted a reflection on the war of images in the current Gaza operation. In it he makes every effort to be “even-handed.” And in the end, comes up empty-handed. A remarkable example of how intelligent people can look carefully at evidence and learn nothing. If I didn’t know better (which I don’t), I might think he was doing some “damage control,” if not for Hamas (in which case, presumably it would be unconscious), then for the paradigm that permits him not to acknowledge Hamas’ character.
The Israeli-Palestinian politics of a bloodied child’s photo
Posted by Max Fisher on November 16, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Left, a journalist for BBC Arabic holds his son’s body. Center, an emergency worker carries an Israeli infant from the site of a rocket strike. Right, Egypt’s prime minister and a Hamas official bend over a young boy’s body. (AP, Reuters, Reuters)
Wars are often defined by their images, and the renewed fighting between Israel and Gaza-based Hamas has already produced three such photographs in as many days. In the first, displayed on the front page of Thursday’s Washington Post, BBC journalist Jihad Misharawi carries the body of his 11-month-old son, killed when a munition landed on his Gaza home. An almost parallel image shows an emergency worker carrying an Israeli infant, bloody but alive, from the scene of a rocket attack that had killed three adults. The third, from Friday, captures Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil, in his visit to a Gazan hospital, resting his hand on the head of a boy killed in an airstrike.
Each tells a similar story: a child’s body, struck by a heartless enemy, held by those who must go on. It’s a narrative that speaks to the pain of a grieving people, to the anger at those responsible, and to a determination for the world to bear witness. But the conversations around these photos, and around the stories that they tell, are themselves a microcosm of the distrust and feelings of victimhood that have long plagued the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Studiously even-handed. One of my favorite memes: “both sides…”
The old arguments of the Middle East are so entrenched that the photos, for all their emotional power, were almost immediately pressed into the service of one side or another.
Actually, there’s a huge difference between the sides. Israel has, over the years, shown enormous reluctance to use the photos of their dead and wounded to appeal for public sympathy; whereas Palestinians have actually created victims in order to parade their suffering in front of the public. Indeed, Palestinian TV revels in pictures of the dead (so much so, that when my daughter wanted to help me with some logging of PLO TV footage, I had to decline lest she be brutalized by the material). They systematically use the media to both arouse sympathy from an “empathic” West, and to arouse hatred and a desire for revenge among Arabs and Muslims. Nothing uglier.
Israel, on the other hand, studiously avoids pictures of the dead, and only a shocking incident like Ramallah can break those taboos. They were so reluctant to exploit these images that, even at the height of the suicide campaign (2002-3) they refused to release pictures of the dead victims. The two cultures could not be more different on this score, and yet, Fisher has no problem finding his symmetry.
To obfuscate this fundamental difference with a pleasing even-handedness symbolizes the literal stupefication of our culture that necessarily accompanies the politically correct paradigm (PCP1), founded on a dogmatic cognitive egocentrism. It forces one not to see critical information. It’s as if we were under orders to not notice everything that a good detective should pick up on, as if we were required to assist the clean-up crews that want to frame the story to their advantage. In such a world, the protagonists of the Mentalist, Lie to Me, Elementary, CSI, House, are not merely unwelcome, they are banished.
If you can’t vote for Romney, Don’t vote for Obama: An Open Letter to Americans of all Faiths and Skepticisms
If you can’t vote for Romney, Don’t vote for Obama:
An Open Letter to Americans of all Faiths and Skepticisms
I hesitate to take a public stand on national elections, never have, never thought I would. But exceptional times call for exceptional measures. I write because I think that the choice of Barak Obama could have dangerous consequences, not only for the United States (where I grew up, teach, have family, and which I greatly admire as both a nation and a culture), and for Israel (where I live, have family, write, and which I greatly admire as both a nation and a culture). I think another four years of President Obama would seriously endanger the culture of openness, tolerance and productivity that has made our current age such an astonishing one in world history.
I have become increasingly alarmed, in the course of the first decade of the 21st century, about what seemed to me an inexplicable loss of ground in a critical battle for moral integrity with a politicized religious movement which we loosely refer to as Islamism. Many of those who believe that Islam should exercise political sovereignty wherever it exists, also manifest alarmingly aggressive, regressive traits. Since political Islam clearly violates the idea of the separation of church and state, a pillar of free democracies, it did not occur to me that the products and developers of modern liberal culture would lose such a debate to people whose sharia-imposed utopia involves patriarchy and its attendant misogyny, imperialist politics and its hate-targeting of scapegoats, violence and its threat in order to silence critics.
To my shock and horror, I have felt like a witness to a self-destructive generation, bent on pursuing the mirages that John Lennon invited us to Imagine, no matter what the cost, no matter who we tried to reach by throwing off all our identity boundaries. Damn the regressive icebergs, full speed ahead to making the world “a much better place” by embracing the “Other.” Ignore those violent Islamists and what they’re doing; they’re all part of the great experiment in global consciousness in which we all participate.
Not only that, our critics from within and without insist, but “we” Eurocentric Westerners should take responsibility for any problems that arise. Ask not, “what do they believe to hate us so?” but rather, “what have we done to make them hate us so?” It was one thing for Chomsky to respond to 9-11 by declaring the US the worst terrorist, it was madness for a generation of idealist/activists to take Chomsky as their moral compass. The result: when Islamists accused us of terrible and malevolent crimes, and held us to standards of human rights for them, that they themselves would never grant to us, we responded, “Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. We deserve the hostility we get. Perhaps, if we atone and show respect to you, we can all move on to a better, more equitable world.”
Who but the most perceptive prophet in the 1990s could have imagined this marriage of pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism? And who, upon seeing it take shape, would have imagined the powerful (even hegemonic) voice it commanded in the public sphere in the next decade? Who but a pessimistic William Blake could have dreamed of so perverse an Emperor’s New Clothes dominating public conversation even as a remorseless enemy builds strength?
From the Archives: Boston Globe Ombudsman on “Who is a Terrorist?”
In the days before I knew either what a blog was, or fisking was, at the height of the second intifada (aka. the Oslo War), I fisked a piece by the Boston Globe’s ombudsman, Christine Chinlund. The article came to mind recently because a colleague here at the IKGF in Erlangen mentioned that some “experts” were claiming that the serial murders of immigrants to Germany by a neo-Nazi group should not be labeled “terrorism” because they didn’t seek to publicize their deeds (i.e., to spread the terror) or recruit.
He noted: “such narrow minded discussions must be a slap in the face of the bereaved.” Chinlund alludes to the feelings of the Jewish community in 2002 when she calls their policy of not calling Hamas a “terrorist organization” a policy that “infuriates some.”
This reminded by of Chinlund’s piece, and I realized I had never posted my fisking at my blog. So here it is, as preparation for a posting on the issue of using the term terrorism for the Daily Telegraph. I welcome contributions from anyone who has examples of the problem here delineated (e.g., what happened to the BBC after the terror attacks of 7-7, 2005).
The ombudsperson of the Globe yesterday produced what must be the single clearest statement of what is wrong with our media’s approach to the middle east.
WHO SHOULD WEAR THE `TERRORIST’ LABEL?
Author(s): CHRISTINE CHINLUND Date: September 8, 2003 Page: A15 Section: Op-Ed
THE OMBUDSMANWho should wear the `terrorist’ label?
By Christine Chinlund, 9/8/2003
WITH THIS WEEK’S 9/11 anniversary comes reflection on all that has changed these past two years. Even our language has shifted; the word terrorism itself casts a different shadow. It has always, of course, been a powerfully negative label. But post-9/11 the word’s potency has multiplied. In the current climate, the terrorist tag effectively banishes its holder from the political arena. More than ever, it condemns rather than describes.
Actually, it describes and condemns. Not to use terror in the case of a terrorist group – i.e., one that deliberately targets civilians as a basic tactic – is actually mis-describing. The value judgments are up to the public readership: it is not for the papers to “manage” the public’s perceptions.
Indeed, newspapers must be doubly careful about how they apply the word. Sparing use is the norm. For example, the Palestinian organization Hamas, whose suicide bombers maim and kill Israeli citizens, is routinely described in the Globe and other papers as a “militant,” not terrorist, group.
Given that Hamas has introduced the “suicide bombing” as a religious duty, a practice that specifically targets civilians, including women and children, such a “sparing” norm is actually disinformation.
Such restraint infuriates some Middle East partisans (most often, but not exclusively, supporters of Israel) who say it sugarcoats reality and that any group targeting civilians is terrorist. I receive regular demands to, as a Chelmsford reader put it, “stop misleading readers with terminology that affords terrorists a false degree of legitimacy.”
What possible reason is there for not unflinchingly applying the word terrorist to any organization or person who targets civilians? It may seem like hair-splitting, but there’s a reason to reserve the terrorist label for specific acts of violence, and not apply it broadly to groups.
To tag Hamas, for example, as a terrorist organization is to ignore its far more complex role in the Middle East drama. The word reflects not only a simplification, but a bias that runs counter to good journalism. To label any group in the Middle East as terrorist is to take sides, or at least appear to, and that is not acceptable. The same holds true in covering other far-flung conflicts. One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter; it’s not for journalists to judge.
Such statements reflect, apparently, the author’s belief that she speaks for many (her job), and that those many all share certain self-evident assertions, assertions like, a) to label a group terrorist is to “take sides” and b) even to appear to take sides is “not acceptable.” Both of these assumptions should be examined precisely in the context of terrorism. Is it somehow anti-Palestinian to denounce the presence among them of terrible groups who teach hatred and plot the destruction of another people? Is it working against the Palestinians to point out to the readers that Palestinians have to live with some profoundly violent and fascist forces in their midst? And on what basis do we wish to avoid even “seeming” to “take sides”?
Women, Journalism, and Violence in the Middle East
The Grey Lady reports on the Egyptian demonstrators’ assault on Laura Logan in Tahrir Square last month and the issue of both violence against women and against journalists in the Middle East (except, of course, Israel, which despite being better by far on these issues, is somehow viewed as worse). Logan shows great courage in discussing these matters, even if she reveals an amazing naivete. (HT: NBH)
CBS Reporter Recounts a ‘Merciless’ Assault
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesLara Logan, a CBS News reporter, was sexually assaulted while working in Cairo on Feb. 11.
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: April 28, 2011
Her experience in Cairo underscored the fact that female journalists often face a different kind of violence. While other forms of physical violence affecting journalists are widely covered — the traumatic brain injury ’suffered by the ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff in Iraq in 2006 was a front-page story at that time — sexual threats against women are rarely talked about within journalistic circles or in the news media.
There are huge areas of violence and intimidation against journalists that are not reported. We didn’t hear for months that NYT reporter David Rhode had been kidnapped in Afghanistan; and we don’t have any idea how often reporters are abducted in places like Iraq, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, etc., for a few hours and then released, thoroughly intimidated (including about speaking about what happened) into the mainstream pool to then report back to us about “what’s going on.”
Ten Scariest Abductions/Arrests of American Journalists in Recent Times
An interesting selection of abductions (and executions) of American journalists in war zones. Mistitled (I’ve given my suggestion in the title of this post), it covers mostly cases in the last decade (two exceptions), and raises the crucial and disturbing question about intimidation of journalists covering a-symmetrical warfare especially in Muslim countries (seven of the ten).
HT/Jennifer Lynch
10 Scariest Journalist Arrests in American History
There’s something about the kidnapping or apprehension of journalists that feels tragic in a way separate from the rest of war. It’s because reporters aren’t in foreign lands to fight an enemy or support one side over another; they’re simply there to record what’s happening and tell the world what they see. They haven’t signed up for combat. They’re storytellers, not soldiers. So when a journalist is taken prisoner — or worse, killed — simply for doing their job, it strikes a note of fear back home. These men and women travel the world knowing the risk involved, but that doesn’t make it easier to take when those risks turn into real threats. So many journalists have been taken, arrested, beaten, imprisoned, or detained without reason abroad. This list represents just a fraction of those who were willing to put themselves in danger at the cost of telling the truth.
- Daniel Pearl: Daniel Pearl (pictured above) was one of the earliest and most prominent journalist victims in the war on terror launched after 9/11. The South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, Pearl went to Pakistan in January 2002 to investigate the background of Richard Reid (the infamous “shoe bomber”) and possible ties to Al-Qaeda. On January 23, he was abducted in a town called Karachi by a group that called themselves warriors for Pakistani sovereignty. The group emailed the U.S. government with a list of demands, and they also released images of Pearl holding up a newspaper (to confirm the date) as he sat handcuffed with a gun trained on him. Pearl was beheaded less than two weeks later by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to the crime years later. In May 2002, Pearl’s decapitated body was found in pieces in a shallow grave outside Karachi. His brutal death was a shock to his family back home and to everyone who watched the tragedy unfold, and it also served as a wake-up call for the way Americans might be treated in certain parts of the world. In February of that year, a video was released that showed his dead body, and it also featured him talking. At one point, he said he could begin to understand how detainees at Guantanamo Bay felt. The video’s out there online for those who are curious, but be warned: it’s not easy to watch.
Gleanings, 06.03.11
Mark Steyn: Arid Uka’s Gratitude (MUST READ)
The nations that built the modern world decided to outsource their future. In simple economic terms, the arithmetic is stark: In America, the boomers have condemned their shrunken progeny to the certainty of poorer, meaner lives. In sociocultural terms, the transformation will be even greater. Bismarck, so shrewd and cynical about the backward Balkans, was also the father of the modern welfare state: When he introduced the old-age pension, you had to be 65 to collect and Prussian life expectancy was 45 [that, presumably is from birth; once one had survived childhood, life expectancy for adults was much higher -rl]. Now life expectancy has near doubled, you get your pension a decade earlier, and, in a vain attempt to make that deformed math add up, Bismarck’s successors moved the old East/West faultline from the Balkans to the main street of every German city. Americans sometimes wonder why, two decades after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. Army still lives in Germany. The day is approaching when they will move out — if only to avoid any more “tragic events” “taking place.”
Barry Rubin: Egypt: American Know-Nothings Play With the Lives of Millions of People
I have never seen an issue on which the American political-intellectual elite has been so insanely stupid and inaccurate. Easily ascertainable facts are simply ignored and censored out of the mass media. What is happening now makes the Western misreading of fascism in the 1930s and Communism in the 1940s look like a picnic. Some of us at least—who, as punishment, will essentially be denied access to any major American newspaper or television show to explain reality—remember the past consequences of those mistakes.
Daniel Pipes: Democratic Iraq?
While Middle Easterners from Morocco to Iran are agitating for more say in the governance of their countries, guess where the leadership is acquiring more power? … These developments confirm my expectation that the vast American-led effort to create a “free and prosperous” Iraq will end in failure.
[FB. Note]: Arabs’ natural tendency.
Evelyn Gordon: Egypt’s Renegotiation Threat
And while “renegotiating” the treaty may sound less threatening than scrapping it altogether, it isn’t. For the two items most Egyptians want to renegotiate are precisely those that made the treaty viable for Israel: one essential to its economic security, and one to its physical security … “Renegotiation” is thus a euphemism for gutting the treaty of everything that made it viable for Israel. As such, it’s worse than abrogation, since for that, Egypt would be blamed. But if Israel refused to amend the treaty, a world chronically unsympathetic to its security needs would blame it for failing to support Egypt’s fledgling democracy.
Jonathan Freedland: Antisemitism: the hatred that refuses to go away
John Galliano’s antisemitic diatribes and a glut of recent claims that there is a Jewish conspiracy will be dismissed as eccentric. But they are symptoms of a deeper malaise … All this might prompt the conclusion that antisemitism is making a sudden and unwelcome return. The trouble is, it never really went away. What’s more, it is not confined to the celebrity wackos and eccentrics who have let the mask slip in recent days. It is more widespread than that – contrary to those who like to pretend antisemitism is a historical phenomenon, one that faded away with the Third Reich.
Praveen Swami: Turning a blind eye to the blood-thirsty clerics
Pakistan is being swamped by a rising tide of religious hatred, while its political leaders remain silent, writes Praveen Swami … Pakistan’s blasphemy laws demonstrate to its people that real power lies with the clerics, and their military backers – not the politicians they elect. In 2008, when he was elected to office, Mr Zardari had a real opportunity to lay the foundations for a durable, functional democracy. His failure to act has led Pakistan one step closer to the precipice.
Benny Morris: The West, the Arabs, and the Real Qaddafi
Which reminds me of a story a fine, young journalist once told me about her experiences in Tripoli. It was in the 1980s, I think. She had come to interview Qaddafi. She was ushered into the famous tent. Qaddafi sent his aides away and the two of them shared lunch. And then Qaddafi tried to caress her. Flustered, she got up to leave. He then chased her around the table, bent on rape. She was brave and apparently fit; she outran him, at least long enough for his aides to rush in at the sound of her screams. Rape averted … It is a shame journalists did not usually publish their impressions of and experiences with Qaddafi. This no doubt facilitated Western and Arab acceptance of cooperation with this almost unique, base specimen of humanity (perhaps Saddam Hussein came closest).
Israel Matzav: As America builds mosques, Islamic countries destroy churches
But while mosques continue to be built in America, Christian communities dwindle in the Middle East and elsewhere. It is almost impossible to build churches in Islamic countries (forget synagogues – there are almost no Jews left in most Islamic countries).
Remnick joins the ASHamed Jews
This post is a joint effort by RL and Elisa Vandernoot.
‘So how can they be ashamed? How can you be ashamed of a country that’s not yours?’ Treslove was truly puzzled.
‘It’s because they’re Jewish.’
‘But you said they’re not ashamed of being Jewish.’
‘Exactly. But they’re ashamed as Jews.’
‘Ashamed as Jews of a country of which they are not citizens…?’
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
Last week Ron Radosh wrote an excellent piece entitled: David Remnick Joins the Israeli Haters and the Leftist British Intellectuals . Radosh laments the great writers, the ‘New York Intellectuals’ of the 1940s and 1950s; writers such as Irving Howe, Irving Kritsol, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling and others. These men and women were giants in their day.
Today, what passes for ‘New York Intellectuals’ are writers paid very well associated with big name publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Both publications pay their writers well, and their editors and writers on the staff get high salaries, many perks, and have great influence on the culture at large. Both of them, although the NYRB is more similar in its leftism to The Nation, while The New Yorker makes a pretense of being more independent and gives off a pretentious air of would-be objectivity and nuance, runs pieces by people like the discredited Seymour Hersh with regularity, and is outspoken as the single most pro-Obama magazine in existence.
He criticises current editor David Remnick who is both a journalist and writer and the latest, amongst ‘liberal’ thinking Jews to join the fashionable Israeli haters of British Intellectuals. Remnick recently gave an interview to the Hebrew daily Yediot Ahronot about his forthcoming book on Obama and decided to take a nasty swipe at Israeli policy in the process:
A new generation of Jews is growing up in the US. Their relationship with Israel is becoming less patient and more problematic…How long can you expect that they’ll love unconditionally the place called Israel [sic]? You’ve got a problem. You have the status of an occupier since 1967. It’s been happening for so long that even people like me, who understand that not only one side is responsible for the conflict and that the Palestinians missed an historic opportunity for peace in 2000, can’t take it anymore.
MSNM to Israel: We’re a force of nature, deal with it.
The latest developments from Silwan, and a brilliant spoof on the MSNM by Latma (below) prompt me to report a conversation I had last summer with a journalist who is the Middle East Correspondent for a major Western news outlet. I was speaking to him about my concern that the MSNM had behaved very badly over the previous decade, much to the detriment, not just of Israel but of the West and societies that try and guarantee the freedom of speech and the press. In particular I emphasized the skewed epistemology whereby they treated Palestinian claims as true until proven false, and Israeli claims as false until proven true, and when the evidence eventually favored the Israelis, they tended to fall silent.
His response was that Israeli complaints (whining) about the media being unfair is like a general who complains about rain on the field of battle. I didn’t bother pursuing the point that in no case does the rain only fall on one army alone. What interested me more was the implication of this (repeated) comment, namely that he (and apparently many others) saw the media as a force of nature, an unalterable force, immune to reason or rebuke. They would just do their thing, and let the Israelis deal with it.
I think that some of this comes from an attitude of sympathy towards the underdog. Bob Simon, in treating the Al Durah story, commented that “in the Middle East, one picture can be worth a thousand weapons.” Over time, a number of journalists (off the record) agreed with the formula: “The Israelis have all the weapons, so why not let the Palestinians have the PR victory? It’s a way of leveling the playing field.”
But what about fake stories? Like Muhammad al Durah? In subsequent years, I heard (especially European/French) journalists shrug and say, weapons of the weak, as if somehow that made it alright. In this sense, Enderlin’s response to my observation that most of the action sequences from Talal abu Rahmah were framed — “Oh, they do that all the time, it’s a cultural thing” — represents the journalist’s off-the-record Orientalist indulgence of a culture foreign to everything that Western journalism is supposed to be about.
Now, I can understand some journalists coming to this conclusion, deciding that somehow the underdog status of the Palestinians allowed them to invent what Nidra Poller has aptly called “lethal narratives” but not everyone. And yet, my friend the journalist (who few would consider a particularly nasty anti-Israel writer) tells me that a majority of the journalists stationed in Israel would be far more harsh in their treatment of Israel were it not for their editors at home.
I think I understand why he presents the MSNM as a force of nature, impermeable to change: they’re going to handicap Israel by raining on their troop positions. It’s not only the “moral” thing to do (level the playing field, side with the underdog), but it’s also a show of power. They will be the Lilliputians that tie the giant Gulliver down.
Talking to him, listening to his reasoning, to his explanations for things (like explaining the precipitous drop in Hamas’ suicide bombings in recent years as a response to the disapproval of Muslims worldwide), to his disappointment that Israel is not more in line with his own liberal/progressive thinking (alas, they reacted to suicide attacks by becoming more right-wing), to his selective empathy, I begin to realize how tight the grip of what Charles Jacobs calls the Human Rights Complex is on our journalists, and their party-buddies, the UN workers and “Human Rights” NGOs who hang together in Jerusalem. It produces the “herd of independent minds” that characterizes today’s Middle East journalism.
And of course, if you adopt this point of view, you never have to deal with the problem of what happens if you report stuff that’s not acceptable to the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims. So they can, in all good conscience, look you straight in the eye and say, “There’s no intimidation here.” Try writing some stories on the culture of genocidal hatred that has pride of place in Palestinian pulpits and airways, and see if there isn’t some pushback.
But then, that would be supplying Israel with PR weapons, and we wouldn’t want that.
All of this is a long and rather elaborate introduction to a brilliant satire put out by Latma on precisely this subject. Enjoy. Imnsho, it’s right on.
Dilemmas of a fair journalist: Mackey of the Lede (NYT) uses Al Durah to distract from Silwan Pallywood
Robert Mackey of the Lede blog at the NYT did a piece on the Silwan incident in which he ventured into Al Durah territory and cited my work. I’ve occasionally read his work when it deals with the Middle East (e.g. the Flotilla), and have not been particularly impressed with his acuity. Here at least he exposes his readers to some Pallywood analysis even if he does try and take it back by changing the subject to Charles Enderlin and Al Durah.
[I recommend the FAQs for those unfamiliar with the Al Durah affair and Pallywood.]
October 16, 2010, 12:15 PM
‘Rashomon’ in East Jerusalem
By ROBERT MACKEYAccording to an online preview, an episode of “60 Minutes” that will air on Sunday includes a report on the escalating conflict in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, where 70 Jewish families have settled among about 55,000 Palestinians.
Last month, The Lede looked at how the shooting death of a Palestinian man by an Israeli private security contractor in the same neighborhood three weeks ago, and subsequent rioting, was covered by Israeli bloggers and international activists who oppose to the expansion of Israel’s settlements on the land it has occupied or annexed since 1967.
The “60 Minutes” report on the tension and clashes in Silwan includes images of a confrontation that took place there last week, when an Israeli settler, confronted by stone-throwing Palestinian boys on a street, drove his car into two of them, tossing an 11-year-old into the air.
While the boys reportedly avoided serious injury and were released from a local hospital the next day, graphic video of the incident was broadcast on Al Jazeera as well as Israeli television, and was posted numerous times on YouTube, where it has become the subject of fierce debate. (Be warned: viewers may find the clip distressing.)
This warning is one of the standard elements of the way the media handle Pallywood. Rather than warn that the images may be staged or manipulated, they assume they’re true, that the viewer will also see them as true and, appropriately be distressed. I’m not blaming Mackey for doing this. Within the framework the MSNM now have it makes perfect sense. I don’t know what should be done. Maybe:
“Viewers may find the clip distressing either because it is true, or because it is staged.”
As is the case with many pieces of video evidence in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, this clip has been taken to mean very different things by activists and bloggers on opposite sides of the political dispute over who has the right to live in East Jerusalem.