Augean Stables

This one, for example (read MSNM for staff):

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies.. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

At least the staff figured it out three days later…

UPDATE: as Robert noted, this may be an urban legend. I couldn’t find it in the Darwin Awards, but received it from someone who sent a list of them. Take it as an urban legend; it describes the MSNM rather well, especially the three stooges - MSNM, “Human Rights” NGOs, Goldstone.

Here’s Ben Wedeman in the second week of the war commenting on Israel’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, by supplying Gazans with aid.

This is a particular gem of MSNM moral and intellectual confusion since his overall thrust is that Israel’s aid is a) just PR for show, b) pretty pathetic given that “ironically, their actually bombing the place,” and c) that no one’s impressed in Gaza since Israel’s to blame for the blockade in the first place. In the process of dismissing Israel’s effort, he makes an error which forces him to correct himself in mid-stream, which then leads him in another direction. The result: a revealing piece of euphemistic nonsense well worth savoring.

Well Israel has allowed a steady number of trucks coming with humanitarian goods uh into Gaza. This rather ironically as they’re actually bombing the place they’re sending food in as well. My understanding is 66 trucks went in today, so they do want to be at least seen as, as uh caring or providing or allowing others to provide humanitarian relief to the civilian population. Uh, but that sort of thing doesn’t necessarily go down very well, because it’s only Israel that controls the crossings, uh, into Gaza, with the exception of the one in Egypt and uh so, therefore if Israel were to cut off the supply altogether, uh, they would depend on Egypt and that’s not a good, uh, place to depend on.

Let’s take this piece apart:
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As any serious reader of this blog knows, I don’t have a lot of respect for Talal abu Rahmah, the seeing of whose rushes (see below) for September 30, 2000 inspired the term Pallywood. So what to think when he and another favorite unreliable rogue in my gallery disagree?

The Goldstone Report, at paragraph 481, takes up the subject of whether Hamas deliberately hid among civilians.

¶481. On the basis of the information it gathered, the Mission is unable to form an opinion on the exact nature or the intensity [emphasis added] of their [Hamas’] combat activities in urban residential areas that would have placed the civilian population and civilian objects at risk of attack. While reports reviewed by the Mission credibly indicate that members of Palestinian armed groups were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them from civilians, the Mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack [emphasis added].

Moshe Halbertal in “The Goldstone Illusion,” not an author known for his sarcasm, remarks on Goldstone’s cautious conclusion:

The reader of such a sentence might well wonder what its author means. Did Hamas militants not wear their uniforms because they were inconveniently at the laundry? What other reasons for wearing civilian clothes could they have had, if not for deliberately sheltering themselves among the civilians?

So imagine my surprise when I ran across the following gem from Talal abu Rahmah in a phone interview with a CNN reporter on January 2, 2009:

Hamas, they are under cover, all of them they are civilians now, you don’t see any militants around you, even the cars I don’t know if the car in front of me or in the back of me, if it’s a target or not.

Whom to believe?

Here I think Talal has told us the truth. Why? Partly because he’s showing off. “This is really difficult and scary. I have to do my job, what can I do. Now Hamas…” After presenting himself as a brave journalist who has to do what he must, he jumps on Hamas’ contrasting behavior.

But also, I think he tells us this in part because he thinks the journalist interviewing him is too stupid to notice what a revelation he’s handed her.

And he’s right. Her next question is not: “So Hamas is hiding among civilians and endangering the population? That’s a war crime. How do people feel about that?” Instead it’s the kind of nauseating experiential post-modern journalism that the Gaza war was full of, where the interviewer gives Talal a platform to vaunt his courage, his “in-his-blood” journalism, and the dangers he runs.

Tell us more about how it feels, Talal, send us more pictures, and stay safe. Why without you, we might have to think.

Appendix: Talal’s rushes as presented to the French court (17 of the 21 minutes).

A segment from a long essay on the Goldstone Report to appear in MERIA in January, with embedded video.

In some senses, it might be fair to argue that the news media believe that by emphasizing the humanitarian catastrophe, they contribute to peace. By putting pressure on the Israelis, they reason, they can help to stop the bombing. Christiane Amanpour quite un-self-consciously revealed the calculus in a question to Tony Blair:

Amanpour to Blair: “The civilian casualties in Gaza are obviously going to put a big pressure on Israel. How long can Israel withstand this pressure?”

Note that Amanpour asks the question with great confidence – this, she clearly feels, is a good, even shrewd question – unaware of what she reveals about her own thinking. Indeed, from her point of view, this isn’t even advocacy; it’s such a widespread attitude that it has the status of Realpolitik.

Now when such diplomatic dynamics are so obvious to the media, what’s to prevent them from thinking that the more they emphasize the humanitarian catastrophe, the sooner the violence will end?

Aside from the multiple, highly questionable, assumptions that underlie such apparently “self-evident” reasoning, the question also reveals a fundamental position of advocacy or bias – the “solution” will come from pressure on Israel, not on Hamas.

For a fascinating example of the cognitive dissonance that results from confronting Hamas, a journalist asking an Arab spokesman why Hamas doesn’t just stop the fighting, consider this exchange between “rational” BBC interviewer, Karen Ginoni, and the Arab League Ambassador to the UN, Yahya Mahmassani.

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I have yet to fisk Frank Rich, partly because he rarely deals with an issue in which I have some expertise, partly because, like Daniel Pipes, he so thoroughly links his comments to other literature, that I have not had the time or the energy to look them all up. But Rich is a former classmate (Harvard ‘71), and I’m on a class listserv where I posted David Brooks’ criticism of the psychological school’s approach to Major Hasan’s killing spree, and several classmates answered. So when Rich weighed in on the subject, I decided to call up all his links, read the material, and respond.

The result is long and sometimes circuitous. At times, following his logic is like trying to deal with a bucking bronco: easier to watch than to ride. But in the end, I think what a close look at how Rich dealt with problem reveals, is how bereft of serious thinking even the most intelligent and apparently well-read among the self-styled “liberal left” are on the subject of Islam and its extremist manifestations, and to what lengths they will go to belittle people who try to think clearly on the matter.

Nietzsche once likened serious thinking to diving into an icy river and grasping a stone lying at the bottom. Rich won’t get his feet wet, but he mocks those of us who are soaking from head to toe.

The Missing Link From Killeen to Kabul
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 14, 2009

THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right.

It also became a non-battle cry for the self-proclaimed progressives of the left, who far preferred the psychologization of the event — “pre-proxy-post-traumatic stress syndrome” — to any discussion of the problem with Islam. Will Rich have the courage to address the problem? Or will he just bash the “right”?

Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malikan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone.

“Terrorist,” I think it’s hard to argue against. Did not act alone? That’s another matter. As for “unambiguous,” does Rich mean “unanimous”? I don’t know too many people who thought he acted in concert with anyone.

Indeed, the near-unanimous verdict was that he was a loner. If there’s any support group here, it’s some of the more radical members of his mosque, like Duane. So what does Rich mean here, other than suggesting that the “self-proclaimed patriots of the right” are conspiracy theorists? (Unlike the truthers who have come up with the scenario whereby Hasan’s been framed.)

His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning signs raised by Hasan’s behavior and activities because they are blinded by political correctness toward Muslims, too eager to portray criminals as sympathetic victims of social injustice, and too cowardly to call out evil when it strikes 42 innocents in cold blood.

Oh, now I get it. Rich means that the vast range of responsible figures, hands tied by a political correctness that he, among others, plays a major role in enforcing, are, in the minds of the “right,” collaborators. Is this what, “didn’t act alone,” means? I thought it meant, “had co-conspirators.” Rich takes it to mean “enablers.” Intellectual integrity is not the first word that comes to mind here.

Is this clearly sarcastic summary of the “self-proclaimed patriots of the American right” suggesting that there’s no problem here with political correctness? Does it not matter that our intelligence services can’t talk about “honor-shame” culture because some people — Rich? — think it’s racist as Edward Said so urgently insisted? Does it matter that Hasan’s multiple flags never quite tripped a switch somewhere? Does it matter that all those doctors who heard his alarming presentation were too embarrassed to say, “something’s wrong?”
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One of the remarkable aspects of journalism that I’ve noticed in my decade-long acquaintance with their dealing with criticism comes down to the old saying, “they can dish it out, but they can’t take it.” Remember that journalism’s job in a civil society is to serve as a watchdog of those in power, as a warning bell that, as inevitably will happen among human beings, power gets abused. That’s why news media are specifically given a level of independence and freedom unprecedented for any institution with access to the public sphere in the history of mankind. Their freedom supposedly permits them to flag the violators and arouse the public to defend the principles of a civil polity: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The obvious question arises, “who criticizes the news media?” The normal answer is that with the a wide variety of publications one can expect in any free society, the mainstream news media (MSNM) would police itself. And yet, as anyone who thinks about it for even a few moments will realize, self criticism is a very difficult thing to engage in, especially when public. And what we find forming around journalists (as around any “profession,” like doctors or police), is a corporate sense of solidarity that brings them all too often to circle the wagons around a vulnerable colleague rather than treat him as they would any other member of a powerful group — criticize him when he or she is wrong.

The astonishing level of corporatism (we medievalist’s call it the “guild mentality”), of us-them thinking about Charles Enderlin and the Al Durah case, drew back the veil on this corporatism in France (and by extension the rest of the MSNM in the West and Israel which chose not to discuss these revelations).

Having spoken with many journalists who agree Enderlin’s wrong, but that it’s not worth saying it publicly, I’d venture to say that there’s a double piece of self-interest at work here: On the one hand, protecting a colleague should, in principle, mean that one will be protected in a similar situation. The whole idea behind guild or corporatism is that it’s my side right or wrong, which explains why so many people signed the petition for Charles without even looking at the evidence.

On the other, a blow to someone like Charles Enderlin, major player in much of the coverage of the Middle East for the last two decades (not just, by far, the most senior journalist, but also author of multiple books and documentaries), would be a blow to the credibility of the profession, a blow to the corporate identity of journalists as — above all — reliable sources of relevant information about the subject they cover, here, the Middle East.

Now, it seems, we find a similar problem among the “human rights” NGOs, who for the first two decades of their prominence — and they’ve played a very prominent role, especially among journalists, in the discussion of the Middle East — enjoyed the “halo effect,” of having the public view them as genuinely sincere defenders of human rights, and therefore not subject to the scrutiny that one normally applies to self-interested groups.

But as power abhors a vacuum, the influence — and enormous funding — that organizations like HRW and Amnesty International amassed attracted people with more specific agendas, especially a crew of ideologically-driven post-colonialists who had modern Western societies in the cross-hairs more than the authoritarian patriarchal societies that an organization like HRW was first established to monitor. And their target of choice in this politically-driven agenda, was Israel.

People began to wake up to the problem over the course of the first decade of the 21st century, especially Israelis and and anyone who supported Israel, who began to see, especially in the wake of the demopathic Durban travesty, that the NGOs, with HRW in the lead, were involved in a campaign of assault on Israel that had no precedent among respectable organizations, and violated every principle of HRW’s self-proclaimed mission of defending human rights.

HRW does not like either being criticized, or self-criticizing. Their response has been consistent. Dismiss the criticisms as ad hominem, ignore the substance, and now, cry “right-wing conspiracy.” This last is especially revealing of the mentality. There’s no conspiracy here, it’s a group of loosely associated people, some of whom only know each other because they read each others’ blogs, who have begun to hit back… with substance. One of the groups of bloggers is listed at the about us page of Understanding the Goldstone Report.

This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a concerted effort to make a dent on people who prefer to ignore anything that comes from the mirror other than, “you’re the fairest of them all.” That HRW would consider this a conspiracy is particularly interesting then for two reasons (at least). 1) When they feel they’re being ganged up on it, they cry “no fair,” like a playground bully taken by surprise with a punch to the nose. And 2) they immediately assume it’s unjustified and part of a cabal of secret and nefarious forces. I’ve written extensively about conspiracy theories, how dangerous they are to the social fabric, and how widely they’ve spread on the “left” since 9-11. This ready resort to conspiracy suggests precisely the presence of this kind of self-indulgent thinking.

Chris McGreal has written a piece presenting the complaints of Iain Levine of HRW about the conspiratorial attack on their legitimate criticism of Israel. McGreal is himself a major player in the advocacy journalist’s effort to smear Israel with accusations of apartheid (critiqued for its dishonesty and distortion by CAMERA), and back in 2006, came to the defense of HRW’s military “expert” Mark Garlasco in the Gaza Beach tragedy. HRW eventually had to back down from their Garlasco-framed claims, but McGreal did not see fit to correct his work.

Even the editor of the Guardian found it necessary to apologize for McGreal’s exuberant advocacy. Does McGreal doing a puff piece on HRW constitute a “conspiracy”?

Memo to NGOs on handling criticism: when you get to the bottom of the hole you’re digging, dig deeper.

Israel ‘personally attacking human rights group’ after Gaza war criticism
Human Rights Watch denies having political agenda or seeking funds from Saudi Arabia

Who’s responsible for this sub-headline? HRW does not deny seeking funds from Saudi Arabia, just from the government.

Chris McGreal in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 November 2009 15.53 GMT

The Goldstone report, which HRW supported, accused Israel of a disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population.

America’s leading human rights organisation has accused Israel and its supporters of an “organised campaign” of false allegations and misinformation, including “extremely personal attacks” on its staff, in an attempt to discredit the group over its reports of war crimes in Gaza.

False allegations? Name one about Garlasco, Stork, or Whitson.

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Hezbollah released a video today that they say refutes the IDF aerial footage released two days ago.

Here’s the IDF footage taken shortly after the nighttime explosion:

It’s damning because they are removing the incriminating evidence of their violations of the cease-fire agreement before they let the UNIFIL forces in to inspect.

Here’s the Hizbullah footage.

There are several gaping holes with this argument.

1. The Hizbullah video was shot in broad daylight, whereas the IDF footage was taken at night, shortly after the blast occurred.

2. The position of the truck in the Hizbullah version and the IDF video are not the same. In the Hizbullah version the truck is backed up directly to the loading dock and there are two men shoving the debris into the back of the truck. In the IDF footage, the truck is parked a little bit away and there are at least 5 men carefully carrying the disputed object and loading it onto the truck.

3. In order for the Hizbullah video to disprove the IDF footage, their video has to be of the same event, which is impossible given points 1 and 2.

4. If it is not of the same event, and the Hizbullah video was shot the next day, then that does not disprove anything, since they could have shown up, and started clearing debris while filming themselves. This would also account for the presence of the Lebanese Military and UNIFIL forces since Hezbollah gave them access to the explosion site several hours after the explosion, after they had removed various items.

5. The IDF video shot shortly after the explosion shows Hezbollah cordoning off the area, loading items which could be a missile onto a truck and then driving the trucks 4km away to a known Hizbullah arms depot in another village. After they were done clearing the house, they let UNIFIl and the Lebanese Military enter the area.

The most obvious question that comes to mind is: “Who do they think they’re kidding. Do they take us for imbeciles?”

Here’s the Beeb:

The Hezbollah footage suggests the objects in Israel’s spy-plane video were debris from the blast not weapons.

Pending an investigation, it is impossible to verify either claim.

Reuters is not any better.

Not a word on the glaring discrepancies. It’s just “he said… she said.” So I guess the answer to the question about who Hizbullah takes us for is, “fools.” And the evidence is, they’re right.

Final note: Why did they bother to do this cheap and silly fake as “disproof”? Because they do care what we think, and they want to manipulate us. So if we call them on this stuff, we actually do put the squeeze on them.

So the real question is, “what’s wrong with the Beeb and Reuters?”

I just received this from a visitor to the Second Draft (HT/Frank)

Is it for real/fake? Or is it fake/fake?

Biased BBC discusses the unfortunate news of a legal decision by the UK’s courts to allow the BBC to keep the Balen Report on the bias of BBC’s Middle East coverage secret. The decision’s reasoning seems in line with the “Goldstone Standard” of Kafkaesque legal reasoning. But what the extensive effort of the BBC to keep this report under wraps reveals most, is how afraid they are that, if the public were to see hard evidence of their bias — from their own report — they would lose the confidence of their readers. It would be a weapon in the hands of pro-Israel activists to use against the BBC — a double horror. It reminds me of Charles Enderlin telling Esther Schapira that he would not give Israel the raw footage because he had no intention of allowing them to “whitewash themselves.”

The article is itself incomprehensible to me and I make several appeals for help in understanding. If anyone has more material on this, please post it.

Last Updated: Friday, 27 April 2007, 13:49 GMT 14:49 UK

BBC report to remain confidential

The report looked at the BBC’s news coverage of the Middle East

The BBC has won a legal battle to keep the contents of an internal review of its Middle East reporting confidential. A judge overturned an order that the report should be made public under Freedom of Information laws.

London lawyer Steven Sugar, who had asked to see the document, said he hoped the BBC Trust might reconsider and publish it in the public interest.

The BBC, which had been accused of biased reporting against Israel, has welcomed the High Court ruling.

It had argued the so-called Balen report - named after the senior editor who wrote it - had been produced “for purposes of journalism”, and therefore fell outside the scope of right-to-know laws.

Nice. And do we have any evidence that the BBC has used it in this fashion? Shall we conduct another study on the (invisible) impact of the Balen report on BBC Middle East coverage since its appearance?

The information commissioner agreed, but Mr Sugar took the case to appeal and the Information Tribunal backed him.

‘Technical win’

Mr Justice Davis, sitting in the High Court, accepted the Corporation’s argument that the tribunal had no jurisdiction in a case where a public service broadcaster and the information commissioner agreed documents fell outside the scope of the act.

I need help here. Are they saying that if the public service broadcaster wishes to hide a negative report from the public, and the information minister agrees, then hide it? What about the arguments involved? Is that why it’s a technical win?

The judge described the position as “most odd” and “potentially inconvenient in its consequence”.

There were, said Mr Justice Davis, “powerful reasons in favour of there being a right of appeal to the tribunal in circumstances such as the present”.

I don’t understand. Am I stupid, or is this badly written? Or is it addressed to insiders? Can someone explain?

Commercial solicitor Mr Sugar, from Putney in south London, described the ruling as a “technical win” for the BBC.

He added: “Perhaps the BBC Trust under its new chairman, will take a different view from BBC management and conclude it is in the public interest for Mr Balen’s report to be published.”

Who’s the new chairman and why would he change? Arlette Chabot came in after the al Durah affair and didn’t change anything. I’m not ruling it out, just asking.

Bias allegations

Mr Sugar said the government now needed to look again at the way the act was framed.
“It is clear that the journalism exception was introduced into the Freedom of Information Act principally in order to prevent access to broadcasters’ out-takes,” he said.

Are outtakes the same as rushes? And if so, shouldn’t at least some oversight groups be allowed to examine outtakes of material that looks highly suspicious?

“But unfortunately the exception was drafted in general terms which has allowed its use to prevent the public gaining access to much material which I am sure the government intended should be publicly available”

Critics of the corporation’s Middle East coverage had wanted it made public, suspecting it would show the BBC itself had found evidence of anti-Israel bias in its news coverage of the region.

The BBC had said it was vital for independent journalism that debates among its staff about how it covered stories did not have to be opened up to the public gaze.

This is choice. We journalists are in the job of washing everyone else’s dirty laundry in public, but heaven forbid we engage in the same process. Reminds me of Enderlin’s defenders insisting that the court’s listening to Karsenty was infringing on the freedom of the press. I’d sooner say “unaccountability of the press.” I guess that’s a kind of freedom, but if these guys were real liberals, they’d realize that a freedom that deprives fellow citizens of freedom is oppression, not freedom.

A statement from the corporation said:

The Balen report was always intended as an internal review of programme content, to inform future output. It was never intended for publication… The BBC’s action in this case had nothing to do with the fact that the Balen report was about the Middle East - the same approach would have been taken whatever area of new output was covered.

Members of the public had other ways of joining the debate over impartiality it said.

Wow. This belongs in the annals of how the emperor kept the crowd from acknowledging his nakedness. We really need an update of the story; after all, the original is all about live responses. Now virtually everything is mediated.

I apologize to my readers for not posting (or even commenting) for a long time. On the other hand, I’ve been busy preparing for the issue of the Goldstone Report, which surpasses even the abysmal expectations its early history had aroused, in its arbitrary disregard for the truth, its cut and paste of the media and NGO world, its brutal disregard for the atrocious behavior of Hamas, its shoddy use of evidence and stunning credulity for Palestinian witnesses… all told, it’s a discouraging moral inversion that can only aid and abet those who wish to destroy the state of Israel, and the forces of terror in this world. Whether the authors know it or not, by applying an impossible standard to Israel which no other country can come near to meeting, they are endangering democracies.

(No, Richard, tell us what you really think.)

I am about to open a website, a part of the Second Draft initiative, to examine the Goldstone Report. I welcome all my readers to contribute any and all links to articles about the report — including favorable ones — as well as their own thoughts on the subject. The site will encourage submissions, and I’d be happy to include work from this blog’s extremely sharp and well-informed readership.

In the meantime, I hope to start posting material here again soon.

Here’s Prime Minister’s spokesman Mark Regev responding to an aggressive CNN reporter’s questions (HT/Carl in Jerusalem):

Although overall I’d say this is a good set of responses, there are several aspects of the encounter that deserve further comment.

1) CNN is the one who has fallen into the trap of politicizing this, which, as Regev points out, is precisely why the family didn’t move out: to create street theater, and that’s just what CNN obliged them with. When Isha Sesay asks if these images of the eviction are conducive to peace, Regev could have said, “Don’t you think that CNN’s making a huge story out of a legal dispute between private citizens and turning it into a media circus is what’s not conducive to peace? Your images inflame anger and hatred in a situation that’s completely inappropriate. Don’t you care how you affect public opinion?”

2) When Sesay said, “Isn’t this a policy to kick out Arabs and move in Israelis?” Regev could have answered, “If this is what you believe, if you think that the Israeli Supreme court system is an extension of what you imagine is an evil Israeli government’s policies, whether legal or not, then no wonder you do the kind of stories you do.”

In both cases, such answers alert the viewers to the ways their perceptions are being manipulated by journalists with agendas. The logic behind Sesay’s aggressive questioning and CNN’s inflammatory coverage is: The way to peace is to force Israel to make concessions at any cost, including inciting hatred of her in both the Arab world — what are the Palestinians supposed to do when these images circulate internationally, say, “oh well, it was a court decision” — and in the West.

CNN is not alone in this kind of coverage. Indeed, the virulently anti-Israel slant and the incitement to hatred of Israel is virtually a consensus in the MSNM (BBC, Times of London: “Israeli settlers ‘are wrecking peace process’“) and diplomatic communities, as Melanie Phillips points out:

But once again it is the extreme malice of the British reaction which takes the breath away. The British consulate says it is ‘unacceptable’ that Israel should act in accordance with the law as laid down by its own Supreme Court. The British thus ignore law and justice, history and truth to support instead illegal Arab actions which deny the Jewish ownership of the land in question. And what in heaven’s name has this property dispute between Israel and the Arabs in Jerusalem got to do with the British anyway? As I remarked here the other day, they appear to think they are still administering the Palestine Mandate – where they exhibited similar partisanship in the interests of injustice, illegality and the Arab cause against Jewish rights.

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Discussion of Adi Schwartz: “How did Israel Stop being a Free Country?”
Carlo Strenger, “The Self-Righteous Left’s Simplistic World”

There is a direct link between over-coming the imperatives of honor-shame cultures and freedom of the press. In a culture where it is not only expected, legitimate, even required to shed someone’s blood for the sake of one’s honor, it is incumbent on people in power to shed the blood of any commoner who has the nerve to publicly criticize him (or her). In such cultures, public criticism constitutes an assault on the authority, indeed, the very person, of the one criticized. Not to respond will clearly signal weakness, impotence, or lack of will to power, and hence bring on the jackals.

As James Scott points out repeatedly in Domination and the Arts of Resistance, the vast majority of the time, protests are either private or, if public, anonymous, lest there be necessary retaliation. Scott calls them “private transcripts” which are often diametrically opposed to the deferential public transcripts these same powerful figures demand. “When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows low and silently farts.” Silently. Not on the pages of Ha-aretz, translated into English and pumped around the world via internet.

Of course, everyone feels the desire for honor and the fear of shame (even Gates and Crowley and Obama). Even Western countries have private transcripts, and no press is free; no one can say whatever they want without repercussion. Access journalism will always play a role in pressuring journalists to report what the informant wants. The key, however, is the tripswitch to violence: how rapidly do those whose face has been blackened by public criticism take out hits on imprudent journalists? After all, no one would be stupid enough to think that he can say whatever he wants — even if it’s all true — and not have people retaliate, at least by shunning them. What kind of reporting would we have if it did not take courage to criticize people?

Well, we’d get something resembling the coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not only in its grotesque daily disinformation, it’s stunning expressions of entitlement to a free ride by critics, and its stunning data manipulation that ranks the free-est press in the world as “potentially free.”

I have written extensively about the remarkable, and now more than occasionally pathological, tendency of Jews and Israelis to be self-critical. I will repeat my claim: no national culture is as self-critical as Israel; no country’s own citizens are as pervasively critical in the Mainstream News Media as the Israeli press; and no country tolerates criticism from abroad more than Israel. Ha-aretz may be the New York Times of Israel in terms of its status and its (often justified) intellectual pretensions, but when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict it has writers that would only find publication in the USA on the pages of the Nation, or Counterpunch, or the Guardian. And all this occurs under wartime conditions, when even the nations most dedicated to a free press, curtail those freedoms sharply.

And yet, an NGO that ranks press freedom around the world has recently ranked Israel below the cut-off point as a “free press” and, therefore, a nation with a “partially free press.” The contrast between my “seat of the pants,” honor-shame analysis and this NGO’s carefully callibrated and allegedly rigorous methodology suggests a problem.

Adi Schwartz, now freelance journalist, formerly a senior editor at Ha-aretz, the most virulently self-critical of Israeli newspapers, noticed the bizarrity of it all.

That was odd: if anything, the Israeli press might be blamed for over-aggressiveness, lack of respect for privacy matters and tendency towards sensationalism. Maybe much more so than many other Western media, the Israeli press is robust and boisterous, and far from not being free.

So he inquired how such the Freedom House arrived at such a remarkable conclusion. What he found was an appropriately bizarre, unthinking application of the “methodology” to the anomalous Israeli case. The result, a perfect black heart, a stunning mistake that undermines the whole paradigm that could not only produce this ranking, but not sound anyone’s alarms. As Schwartz puts it as a byline:

Here’s a story about how un-professional a pro-democracy organization becomes when dealing with the State of Israel.”

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There’s been much to-do about Walter Cronkite’s recent decease, and I’m getting emails with articles from a wide range of perspectives, from the adulatory “mainstream” and the disgruntled “right”, people who think he was a wonderful model of what journalism should be like — trusted and trustworthy — and people who think that, behind his verneer of “objectivity,” lay a committed World Federalist eager to put an end to “The American Century” and move on to a UN-run one-world government.

The kudos come from journalists who considered him their model (Mike Wallace, Bob Schieffer, Dan Rather), and from people like President Obama:

He invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down… This country has lost an icon and a dear friend, and he will be truly miss.

Icon indeed, and well worth a bit of criticism, particularly since we now live with the toxic waste of his interventionist, advocacy reporting. I highly recommend the carefully researched posts of Neo-Con on this subject, posts she had put up a couple of years ago, and has now updated to reflect Cronkite’s passing. Below some choice passages:

Cronkite earned his trust the hard way: by reporting the unvarnished news. In this 2002 radio interview (well worth listening to for insight into his thought process at the time) Cronkite describes his orientation towards his job prior to that watershed moment of the Tet offensive broadcast.

Previously the top brass at CBS, as well as the reporters there, had understood their function to be reporting “the facts, just the facts.” Editorializing was kept strictly separate; at CBS, it was a function of Eric Sevareid, and clearly labeled as such.

The president of CBS news, Dick Salant, was a man of almost fanatical devotion to the principles of non-editorializing journalism, according to Cronkite’s interview. Cronkite said that, till Tet, he “almost wouldn’t let us put an adjective in a sentence” when reporting, he’d been such a stickler for “just the facts.”

But, according to Cronkite, as the Vietnamese War had worn on, and because of the confusion of the American people about the war, reflected in letters to the station, Salant sent Cronkite on a trip to Vietnam with the idea of doing a piece of opinion journalism when he came back, in order to help the American people “understand” what was going on by explicitly editorializing and advising them.

One can speculate long and hard about why Salant decided it was time to make such a drastic change. From Cronkite’s interview, it appears that the brass at CBS was part of the turmoil of the 60s with its “question authority” ethos. If you listen to Cronkite (and he expresses not a moment’s ambivalence about his actions), you may hear, as I did, an anger at a military that seemed heedless of the difficulties of the Vietnam endeavor, and too sanguine–similar to the “cakewalk” accusation towards the present Iraq War.

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I’ve posted several pieces on the latest dust-up between HRW and NGO Monitor recently, that raise fundamental questions about both the credibility of the “human rights” NGOs, but also their disturbing relationship to the MSNM, especially in their way of viewing the world (what the Germans call Weltanschauung). Now Nelson (Europundit) has offered an essay that gets at the core of the problem in a way I’ve only hinted at. Below, his essay. My notes — and others who comment here — to follow.

Nobody trusts the government. The politicians are corrupt. The government is always lying to the people. It works against the people’s true interests and only promotes the selfish interests of its own members and their friends. Those in power invent scary threats to distract the public’s attention from their own wrongdoings.

No, I’m not talking about the US. Well, not exclusively at least. Everything I’ve just said has been repeated day in day out, for years and decades, by the papers and the electronic media wherever there’s anything resembling a free press. That’s the MSM’s real message in all democratic nations. Whatever else they talk about is secondary.

Is it true? Often it is. Is it the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Each one of us can judge by him or herself. And, as we have been doing so collectively for some time, the MSM has been losing most reliability it might once have had, to the point that, in countries like the US, it is not only as little trusted as the government and the politicians themselves, but it’s clearly seen as just another partisan political player.

That’s, however, quite a small consolation, because the damage they, the MSM, could do has already been done and, even without being trusted, they can go on doing it. What’s exactly this damage? The corrosion and eventual destruction of public trust. No open society can work without it and, though the government and all state institutions must always be closely watched, it works at its very best when the people’s default attitude towards these is one of conditional trust, not one of perpetual mistrust.

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I’ve dealt with pomo before here, and will again. Meantime, one of the saner observers of the madness that pomo can induce in journalists (and diplomats), Barry Rubin, has an interesting column on the subject.

When journalists say there is no such thing as truth than the world is in big trouble.

He begins with a couple of anecdotes:

A reporter just wrote me a letter that contains a single sentence which I think reflects on why the Western world is in such trouble today. After understandably discussing such real problems of reporting as short deadlines, complex issues, and the duty of the reporter to report what people say, the letter concludes with this sentence:

“And when it comes to the Middle East, one man’s [obscenity deleted] is another man’s truth.”

Woe to us that a journalist thinks this way. Of course, this is very similar to the older version that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Recently, I heard that latter one from the Danish ambassador to the Council of Europe who said that Hamas and Hizballah were like the Danish resistance in World War Two. I replied, among other things, that I don’t remember the Danish or other World War Two European resistance movements bombing German kindergartens and glorying in getting Danish civilians killed as human shields.

I also don’t think that the Danes and other European resistance movements were attempting to commit genocide on the Germans. I do believe it was the other way around.

(PS: More Danes fought in the German army than in the Resistance, and that was true of other countries as well. Forgive me for remembering who was the main victim of terrorism and “freedom fighter” terrorists then and today. But I digress)

That a European country—and one of the more astute ones, to make matters worse–is represented by someone like that says something pretty sad about the state of the world today.

and finishes with a hilarious (to me at least) thought experiment:
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I grew tired of fisking Roger Cohen, whose idiocy so served the forces he now acknowledges had misled him. Now he presents himself as a heart-broken journalist trying to do a job as good as any scholar, hanging in to bear witness in Teheran even after his press card was revoked.

What we really could afford to hear is how Roger Cohen rereads the drivel he aggressively produced before the shingles fell from his eyes.

Times Topics: Iran

“Not everyone realizes,” Weber told students, “that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar. This is particularly true when we recollect that it has to be written on the spot, to order, and that it must create an immediate effect, even though it is produced under completely different conditions from that of scholarly research. It is generally overlooked that a journalist’s actual responsibility is far greater than the scholar’s.”

Oh would journalists take themselves that seriously.

Actually there’s an interesting contrast here. Weber was intensely self-critical (to the point of writer’s block), but what he did produce is still being read with profit. Journalist’s, granted, have to write faster, but that doesn’t mean they have to be less critical… just that, along with the glory of shooting your mouth off to millions of people, we deserve a look when you shoot yourself in the foot.

Yes, journalism is a matter of gravity. It’s more fashionable to denigrate than praise the media these days. In the 24/7 howl of partisan pontification, and the scarcely less-constant death knell din surrounding the press, a basic truth gets lost: that to be a journalist is to bear witness.

The rest is no more than ornamentation.

To bear witness means being there — and that’s not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.

No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.

I confess that, out of Iran, I am bereft. I have been thinking about the responsibility of bearing witness. It can be singular, still. Interconnection is not presence.

A chunk of me is back in Tehran, between Enquelab (Revolution) and Azadi (Freedom), where I saw the Iranian people rise in the millions to reclaim their votes and protest the violation of their Constitution.

We journalists are supposed to move on. Most of the time, like insatiable voyeurs, we do. But once a decade or so, we get undone, as if in love, and our subject has its revenge, turning the tables and refusing to let us be.

The Iranian Constitution says that the president is to be elected “by the direct vote of the people,” not selected through the bogus invocation of God’s will. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Revolution, said in 1978 that: “Our future society will be a free society and all the elements of oppression, cruelty and force will be destroyed.”

The regime has been weakened by the flagrance of its lie, now only sustainable through force. No show trials can make truth of falseness. You cannot carve in rotten wood.

I was one of the last Western journalists to leave the city. Ignoring the revocation of my press pass, I went on as long as I could. Everything in my being rebelled against acquiescence to the coterie around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose power grab has shattered the balances of the revolution’s institutions and whose goal is plain: no eyewitnesses to the crime.

Of course, Iranians have borne witness — with cellphone video images, with photographs, through Twitter and other forms of social networking — and have thereby amassed an ineffaceable global indictment of the usurpers of June 12.

Never again will Ahmadinejad speak of justice without being undone by the Neda Effect — the image of eyes blanking, life abating and blood blotching across the face of Neda Agha-Soltan.

Iran crushes people with its tragedy. It was unbearable to go. It remains so. Images multiply across the Web but the mainstream media, disciplined to distil, is missed.

Still, the world is watching. As we Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence, let’s stand with Iran by recalling the first democratic revolution in Asia. It began in 1905 in Iran, driven by the quest to secure parliamentary government and a Constitution from the Qajar dynasty.

Now, 104 years on, Iranians demand that the Constitution they have be respected through Islamic democracy and a government accountable to the people. They will not be silenced. The regime’s base has narrowed dramatically. Its internal splits are growing with the defection of much of the clerical establishment.

One distinguished Iran scholar, Farideh Farhi, wrote this to me: “So I cry and ask why we have to do this to ourselves over and over again. Yet I do have hope, perhaps for purely selfish reasons — because I don’t want to cry all the time, but also because of the energy you keep describing. We have a saying in Persian, I assume out of historical experience, to the effect that Iran ultimately tames the invaders.”

Alas how many Iranians, along with the mullahs, read this statement as the victory of those very forces whose loss you mourn. Freedom is a rare and hard-won accomplishment, not a gift. Neither you, nor the Western liberals like Roger Cohen and the President he feigned to advise, wanted it enough.

That transported me to Ferdowsi Square, on June 18, and a woman who, with palpable passion, told me: “This land is my land.”

She called Ahmadinejad “the halo without light” — a line from the anthem of the Iran demanding its country back, the Iran still saying “No” by lifting its unbending chorus into the night.

From far away, I hear it, and this distance feels like betrayal — of those brave rooftop voices and of a journalist’s “actual responsibility.”

Excuse me while I visit the vomitorium. All that time you spent practising your purple prose while dragging your feet before leaving, could have been spent on asking yourself publicly, about how you could have been so badly fooled.

A little self-criticism? Or is the difference between a reporter and an editorialist while the former is insatiably voyeuristic, the latter is insatiably exhibitionist?

As I have often mentioned here, Charles Jacobs HRC predicts that if the perps in human rights violations are “people of color,” then the human rights community has nothing to say. Sri Lanka is a QED for the theory.

Michael Totten reports a conversation with Robert Kaplan about, inter alia, Sri Lanka (HT Fat Man):

MJT: So you just got back from Sri Lanka. What did you see there? What did you learn?

Kaplan: … Sri Lanka defeated, more or less completely, a 26 year-long insurgency. They killed the leader and the leader’s son. But there are no takeaway lessons for the West here. The Sri Lankan government did it by silencing the media, which meant capturing the most prominent media critic of the government and killing him painfully. And they made sure all the other journalists knew about it.

MJT: Wow.

Kaplan: There are a thousand disappearances a year in Sri Lanka separate from the war. Journalists are terrified there. The only journalism you read is pro-government. So that’s one thing they did.

The Tamil Tigers had human shields by the tens of thousands, not just by the dozens and hundreds like Al Qaeda. They put people between themselves and the government and say “you have to kill all the people to get to us.” So the government obliged them. The government killed thousands of civilians.

MJT: Tamil civilians?

Kaplan: Yes. They killed thousands of civilians in the course of winning this war. It acted in a way so brutal that there are no lessons for the West.

MJT: Would you say it was as brutal as Russia’s counterinsurgency in Chechnya?

Kaplan: Yes. It was. The U.N. is investigating whether as many as 20,000 civilians have been killed during the last few months.

* * *

MJT: Sri Lanka has been fighting this counterinsurgency for decades. Have they slowly made progress all this time and have now finally finished it off, or was there a tipping point recently where a seemingly endless conflict just ended almost suddenly?

Kaplan: The Sri Lankan government was elected in 2005 to win the war. And it has done that. Extremely brutally. It’s a government that’s very nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist. These are not the Richard Gere’s “peace and love” Buddhists. These are the real blood and soil Buddhists, where Buddhism is like any other religion when it’s threatened and it’s defending a piece of territory. It can be very brutal.

It was elected to win the war, which it interpreted from the voters as a right to silence the media and to fight without any restrictions.

MJT: It does work, though, doesn’t it?

Kaplan: It does work, yeah.

MJT: Not that we should do it, of course.

* * *

MJT: So there are no lessons at all? Nothing for the U.S., Israel, or Pakistan?

Kaplan: No.

MJT: Only moral lessons, perhaps. Yes, this works, but it would take an awful lot to get us to fight that way again.

I think there are many lessons to be learned. Kaplan’s simplistic answer is just intended to say, “we can’t do what they did.” Granted. But we still have to fight vicious enemies who turn their own civilians into human shields, and we have to find solutions.

In the meantime, we can certainly learn about the hypocrisy and viciousness of the alleged “human rights community,” especially the UN. While Israel reels from lawfare because of an operation in which hundreds of civilians were killed going after an equally vicious enemy, Sri Lankan’s celebrate in the street and the MSNM gives them something of a pass.

As for the UNHRC, they fulfill Jacobs’ expectations spectacularly.

The response of the UN?

China, Cuba, Egypt and 26 others on the 47-member council voted in favor of a resolution that described the conflict as a “domestic” matter that did not warrant outside interference. The council also supported the Sri Lankan government’s decision to provide aid groups only with “access as may be appropriate” to refugee camps.

Twelve mostly European countries opposed the resolution after failing to get support for a resolution that criticized both sides.

And with all this lack of interest, it looks like the 200,000 refugees may never go home.

Surely there’s much to be learned from all this, no?

One of the real puzzles I hope to pose in order to motivate my readers to slog through my new book is the bizarre phenomenon of the difference between the IDF’s ethical performance and the way it registers in the MSNM (my new acronym, Mainstream News Media). I first became really aware of this in Jenin, when the Israelis had sacrificed the aerial option in order to avoid civilian casualties, lost over a dozen men in hand-to-hand combat, and finally ended up killing 52 people, 47 of which were combattants, but got accused of massacres and war crimes that drove the international media into a frenzy.

Here, at a JCPA conference on Operation Cast Lead and International Law, British Colonel Richard Kemp describes the extraordinary measures the Israelis went to in order to spare civilian casualties in Gaza (cf. Sri Lanka).

(This article has been published at Pajamas Media.)

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

Let’s unpack Enderlin’s response.
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