Augean Stables

One of the major themes in CNN and BBC early coverage of Operation Cast Lead, is the issue, will this conflict encourage Arab moderation as the Israelis say they hope will happen, or, instead, will it backfire on the Israelis and strengthen Arab solidarities around Hamas. Indeed, one might argue, this is one of the Palestinian talking points that the media has fully embraced (see next article). In order to understand what’s at stake here, I lay out some of the key issues involved in defining “moderation.”

First let’s just sort out the difference between moderation and pragmatism: Moderation means taking a “reasonable” approach that renounces violence as anything but a last resort, a willingness to negotiate, to come to a positive-sum solution. Moderation depends on being able to treat one’s foe with reciprocity, to see their point of view and make compromises to reach a mutually agreeable solution to the hostility. Pragmatism takes “moderate” positions not out of any deep commitment to these principles, but as a response to a situation where zero-sum solutions (like war) do not promise a win.

I have written a good deal about honor-shame culture, its dynamic, its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the prohibition on mentioning it in post-colonial, politically correct discourse, and the contrasts with cultures that pursue the alternative principles of integrity and guilt. Let’s take a look at the difference between honor-shame moderates and integrity-guilt moderates. Moderates are those dedicated to positive-sum solutions and the rejection of zero-sum violence, moderates are concerned with human rights and respect for the “other”.

Such moderation is, most often, found in integrity-guilt cultures. Moderates – at least in principle – are committed to their values regardless of the demands of the group. “Do not follow the majority for evil.” The primary commitment is to principles of justice, not to approval and honor in the eyes of what is potentially a mistaken public.

So when the crunch comes, when “our side” behaves badly, the integrity-guilt moderate responds to being torn between solidarity with the group or keeping his integrity with self-criticism. “I will side with those in the right, even when I am in the wrong; I will not betray my values by rallying around the flag.” As Judah said to those about Tamar, his daughter-in-law whom he was about to kill for his family’s honor: “She was more righteous than I” (Genesis, 38:26).

Of course, such a commitment calls for a high level of capacity to give and receive criticism of the “in group.” And achieving that level of self-criticism can feel like a moral high. Much of the dis-fashion of patriotism is a kind of “permanent” distancing of the “self” from the “in-group.”
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One of the things that struck me when I first viewed the Pallywood footage from September 30, 2000, was the astonishing degree of brutality with which the wounded were evacuated — rarely a stretcher, mostly grab him, yank him, and throw him in the ambulance. Here’s an example from Talal abu Rahme’s rushes from that day.

What struck me in looking at the footage from Gaza starting on December 27, was how brutally they evacuated genuinely injured people. Here’s a man whose leg is clearly and severely injured.

It’s one thing to evacuate a “fake” injured person in such a manner, but quite another thing to do the same to really injured people. I guess the inertia of the style of evacuation overrides any feedback from the person one is supposedly helping. I remember noting the brutality to Enderlin who laughed and said, “Yes, I have a colleague from the Western media who was injured and said the evacuation was more painful than the injury.” Sounds like a metaphor.

In the meantime, here’s an example from my eagle-eyed colleague Yaakov-ben-Moshe at The [Rancid] Breath of the Beast that made it by the less-than-sharp-eyed “journalists” at NPR.

If the lad is injured, surely this must hurt a lot. But here’s a close-up of his face.

What’s his face saying? I think you Western journalists are such fools, that even though I’m smiling at you, I’m going to appear in your MSM as an Israeli-caused casualties and tear the heart strings of some bubble-headed celebrity like Annie Lennox.

And guess what? He’s right!

As we said at the end of our 2005 movie, Pallywood, “The End… is not in sight.”

Here’s a beautiful soul, prime target for demopaths from both her own and Palestinian culture. Annie Lennox participated in a virulently anti-Israel rally and made these remarks to the BBC. The interviewer (I think Mike Embly, but I’m not sure) is pretty tough on her. Under pressure, listen to the answers she gives. Shades of Team America… but this is not puppets, it’s reality TV.

What can you do?

Here’s a second interview in which Ratsila Vassileva of CNN interviews first Tzipi Livni, Israeli Foreign Minister, and then Diana Buttu, an “independent analyst” from Ramalla. The difference in interview style is almost as striking as the difference in quality of remarks from the two interviewees.

After her exchange with Livni, she turned to “independent analyst,” Diana Buttu. Note the language she uses and the complete lack of challenge to this hackneyed politicized rhetoric.

I plan to use this series of exchanges in an essay on the differing nature of “honor-shame” moderation and “integrity-guilt” moderation.

I’ll be posting excerpts from CNN and BBC coverage of Operation Cast Lead. I’ve selected them because I think they reveal some of the twisted dynamics I’ve identified here as demopathy and its dupes, and the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. Most of the posts will deal with moral discussions about Israel’s justifications for its assault on the Gazans.

Here Nisha Pillai challenges Bibi Netanyahu.

Comments and analysis welcome.

An interview with Eve Harrow on an Israeli radio program will give you an idea what I was thinking December 31.

[A version of this essay appears at Pajama’s Media with some interesting comments. It is the first in a series of posts that will examine the (pathetic) way the MSM has covered the Gaza operation based on a 24/7 recording of BBC, CNN International, and Skye. If any other stations have particularly interesting coverage, please send me links.]

At about 1:10 on Sunday December 28, 2000, the BBC anchor Peter Dobbie found out, along with his audience, that there were 40 Egyptian ambulances ready to evacuate wounded, and lorries full of medical goods sent by Qatar to restock Gazan hospitals, waiting at the border crossing in Egypt. (According to another source there were also 50 Egyptian doctors ready to go into the Strip to help.) Since Dobbie and his audience had heard the repeated complaint from the people in Gaza that the hospitals were overwhelmed by the injured and desperately lacking in supplies, one would have expected the border to be full of purposeful activity. Instead, nothing was happening. The Gazan side lay silent.

A real journalist, someone with a smell for revealing anomalies, would have immediately recognized this as an important story to follow up on. After all, Dobbie had not hesitated to interrupt and forcefully challenge Israeli spokesmen on precisely the issues at stake: the disproportion between Israeli caused fatalities and Israeli suffered fatalities, the inevitable suffering of innocent civilians when such a bombing campaign takes place is so densely populated an area. “The arithmetic doesn’t work,” said Dobbie, “Nine Israeli dead versus 1400 Palestinian dead.”

So here was a perfect issue with which to challenge Hamas spokesmen: “The math doesn’t work? If you are so distraught at the loss of life of your own people, why don’t you take care of them? What on earth would possess you not to avail yourselves of what you pleadingly tell us you so desperately need?” As the honest and courageous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey put it, “My head hurts.”

Alas… the BBC did nothing of the sort. The next hours and days saw nothing but canned footage repeating Palestinian complaints, voiced not only by Hamas spokesmen and BBC reporters, but also UN officials like Chris Gunning and Human Rights advocates.

Too bad. Had the BBC behaved like real journalists, they might have taken the “golden” (read excremental) thread that leads out of the labyrinth, and straight to the “real story.” That story, of course, is the classic Palestinian strategy, taken to new heights by Hamas in the early 21st century – play the victim card… at all costs. It was the same one Hizbullah played so effectively in the summer of 2006.
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Whether by Israeli accident or Hamas engineering, expect a spectacular civilian massacre in the coming days, followed by an orgy of Pallywood photography, amplified by a compliant Western media, and even greater fury in the streets of the Muslim and Western world. It’s in the Hamas playbook… and will be until the media gets sober. Here’s the background, and the obscenity that will probably be played.

Barry Rubin has laid out the various endgames open to Hamas, and how, when all else fails, it’s the media reserves you draw on to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. And it’s an old story: Arafat called the Western media, busy drinking at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut under the protection of his mafiosi while his “guerillas” participated in a civil war (1975-82) that killed 100,000 civilians, his best division.

The pattern has long been clear, and most recently carried out with explosive effectiveness in the Lebanon war of 2006… when Israel is winning, get yourself a civilian massacre. Make sure that you have shocking civilian casualties that rally all the key players to your side — the other Arab nations and groups and individuals who are secretly, quietly rooting for your defeat, but who, once the images of dead children appear on the TV screens, watch the Arab street riot, and eventually can’t avoid siding with you, the “victim”… the European leaders and diplomats who piously kept an even-handed approach in the hopes that Israel might swiftly decapitate the snake… and the journalists and talking heads who have been chomping at the bit to jump on Israel for their disproportionate response.

At that point, as in the weeks after Kfar Qana, the Israelis have lost the media war: the pressure to withdraw grows daily; the damage to Israel — and to any Jew who dares defend her — becomes unbearable. For the terrorist organization that targets both its enemy’s and its own civilians, just sit back and watch all your pieces fall into place.

But what if the Israelis don’t make a mistake and kill a significant number of people in one blow, like Gaza Beach or Kfar Qana? Would Hamas actually concoct a massacre of their own people?

To even suggest it is disgusting, even racist. How could anyone imagine that a leadership would deliberately kill their own people in order to win a war? Alas, that’s liberal cognitive egocefntrism. On the contrary, pre-modern elites do not hesitate to use violence against the unarmed populace in order to secure their authority. Machiavelli openly laid out the strategy, what Sheldon Wolin called “the economy of violence.” When the population is restive, as Napoleon put it so eloquently, give them a “whiff of grapeshot” and they’ll calm right down.

And of course, in Arab political culture, this approach is not just the norm, it’s taken to pathological extremes… what Thomas Friedman called Hama rules. In 1982, Hafez al Asad, troubled by the increasing power of the Muslim Brotherhood, surrounded the town of Hama where they were strongest (population 20,000) with tanks, and for one week leveled the town with artilery fire, not letting anyone escape. At least half the town died in the process. And Syria has had no trouble from the Muslim Brotherhood ever since.

In the case of Hamas in the early 21st century, the logic is equally ruthless, but far more hypocritical. They are, of course, capable of playing the economy of violence card, and the world saw if clearly (if only briefly due to the ADD of the newsmedia), back in 2006, when they took over Gaza in a bloodbath that saw 160 people killed, some children and old ladies shot execution style to make the point that no one messes with the new bosses.

The tragic results were amply documented by a courageous Palestinian Human Rights organization, the PCHR:

The first section details the developments in the Palestinian National Authority that followed the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006, including acts of violence between the supporters of Fatah movements and those of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which developed into several rounds of fighting between the two movements from April 2006 to June 2007. The second section highlights the latest round of fighting; how it began, how it developed and its end with Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip. The third section details violations of human rights and international humanitarian law perpetrated or allegedly perpetrated by the parties of the conflict, including extra-judicial and willful killings, abduction and torture; using houses and apartment buildings in the fighting; attacks on civilian property; attacks on hospitals and medical and civil defense crews; endangering the lives of civilians in the streets and houses; attacks on peaceful demonstrations; and seizure, robbery and destruction of public, private and non-governmental institutions.

The whole point of such exercises in the “economy of violence” is to let the population know that you are ruthless, that resistance is worse than useless, it is a ticket to oblivion.

But Hamas is now playing a different game now, one that plays out in the media theater of war where you can’t openly attack your own people. On the contrary, in order to play the victim, you need someone to victimize you.
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Michael Abramowitz has come out with a hands-wringing “policy discussion” that personifies what’s wrong about Western thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Comments interspersed.

Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza Strip Imperil Obama’s Peace Chances

Hamas Likely to Respond to Attacks That Seem to Stun West
Discussion Policy
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page A20

Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza yesterday, in retaliation for a nonstop barrage of rocket attacks from Hamas fighters, raised the prospect of an escalation of violence that could scuttle any hopes the incoming Obama administration harbored of forging an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

We’ll see Abramowitz’s logic in a moment. But before that, let me note that this is actually a golden opportunity for Obama to peel some Arab “moderates” away from Hamas (and by implication Hizbullah and its patron Iran), but making it clear that Israel has every right to defend itself. In particular, this makes the possibility of a peace that stands a remote chance of actually succeeding possible, since anything that included Hamas was, pace Jimmy Carter, a catastrophe in the making.

“If the casualty reports are accurate, Hamas is going to respond. And this isn’t a two- or three-day deal in which the genie is put back in the bottle,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “The Much Too Promised Land.” “This takes the already slim chance of an early, active and successful Obama engagement on Israel-Palestinian peace and lowers it to about zero.”

The idea that a) the casualty reports are accurate, and b) that only if they’re accurate would Hamas respond are both absurd contingencies. You know you’re dealing with someone in the thrall of “liberal cognitive egocentrism” when you see remarks like that. If we pass from PCP1 to PCP2, we have an interesting conflation of the casualty figures with civilian casualty figures. For the Peter Beaumont of the Guardian (who agrees with Abramowitz’s analysis), this attack should be compared with Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatilla.

That’s doubly wrong: the Israelis killed no one at Sabra and Shatilla; and both those examples are massacres of civilians. What’s especially striking about this operation is the extraordinarily high rate of military targets and accordingly low rate of civilian, possiby under 10%. As the NYT reported about the first strikes:

The vast majority of those killed were Hamas police officers and security men, including two senior commanders, but the dead included several construction workers and at least two children in school uniforms.

Overnight, the passage in bold was scrubbed clean.

This kind of toilette of course, works nicely to reinforce people like Beaumont, for whom this operation is something to be ranked with Deir Yassin. With the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Something, at last, that Israel’s foes can say looks like an atrocity.

As for taking the “already slim chance of an early, active and successful Obama engagement… to about zero,” that’s probably wrong on two counts. 1) It gives Obama a new angle with which to engage various key players (as noted above), and 2) the chances of an early Obama engagement’s success were already below zero. If anything this situation, properly handled, could actually increase the odds significantly.
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I just participated in a panel at American Jewish Studies Conference in Washington entitled Rethinking the “Other”: Problems in Post-Modern Jewish Thought, Politics and the Media. The first two talks by Susan Handelman and Jacob Meskin addressed the problem of the “other” in the philosophico-theological works of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-born Jew who became one of France’s most notable philosophers of the 20th century, and a notable influence on Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction and the works of Leon Ashkenazi, known by his scouts name, Manitou, a North-African Jew who first went to France and then after 1967 to Israel.

Their points, boiled down to a crude minimum were that Levinas and/or his followers have taken the manner in which he privileged the “other” to such a point that they have ended up failing to actually interact with the other and particularly in the Arab-Israeli conflict have given a hostile “other” an undeserved, even dangerous, priority. Handelman brought in a less-well-known thinker, Leon Ashkenazi, who, among other things, warned against a particular kind of “other”, namely Cain, the murderous and envious “other” against whom one can and must defend oneself. I was asked to give an example of how the “Cain” type views the other. Not surprisingly, my “text” was the Muhammad al Durah affair, which I post below.

The Media and the Construction of the “Other” in the Arab-Israeli Conflict”

[Note the bland title, done so as not to set off flags among the programming committee and get rejected. For those who already are familiar with the Al Durah affair, you may want to skip below to Analysis.]

My topic today concerns how Palestinians “narrate” the Israeli/Jewish “other.” Let me begin with a discussion of a particular case — that of Muhammad al Durah — and then analyze what it tells us about dysfunctional attitudes towards the “other” in post-modern Jewish and Western intellectual circles.

Let’s begin with our “text,” first broadcast on September 30, 2000 by Charles Enderlin at France2.

Since we are very short of time [I had 20 minutes], let me cut to the chase. I think this is a staged scene, a deliberate lie and libel. In order to understand such a phenomenon, first you need to understand how, as a fake, it is one of many carried out that day. Indeed, I coined the term Pallywood in order to designate the existence of a whole school of film-making in the Palestinian territories designed to present the television news audience both at home and abroad with a constant stream of issues depicting the vicious Israeli Goliath crushing the plucky Palestinian David. Let’s begin with a scene from Netzarim Junction that day.

The picture seems to be a scene of Palestinians under fire, taking cover, running, and presumably looking at the position from which they are being fired at. Except that the Israeli position is behind the building in the upper right, and the Israelis never left their position that day. This whole scene is staged; they are looking at cameramen.

For anyone who wants to examine the nature of Pallywood further, I recommend viewing my movie of that name:

As for the analysis of the Al Durah staging, see my movie, Al Durah: Making of an Icon.

But this is not just a libel, it’s a blood libel, it’s about Israelis intentionally killing an innocent defenseless child, according to the cameraman Talal abu Rahmeh, “in cold blood.” In order to make the case, the Palestinian broadcast authority inserted into the footage taken by abu Rahmeh a scene of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle (rubber bullets) which was taken during the riots caused by the Al Durah footage. This billboard put up by Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon makes the point graphically.

When asked to explain how they could do something that violated every principle of modern journalist, a PA official explained:

These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.

One could not ask for a better illustration of a pre-modern mentality: the (higher) truth is what counts, and any kind of dissembling is permissible to convey that truth, even if — especially if — it’s a blood libel against your enemies.

What’s even more tragic in this tale is not just that it appeared and spread (like wild-fire) in the pre-modern, scapegoating culture of global Islam, but that it jumped from there to spread (again like wild-fire) in the post-modern culture of the West. Sharon, who was not even prime-minister at the time of the incident was a particular target of venom.

Here in the Hartford Courant, the barrel is gone, the Israeli soldier has been replaced by a pistol-toting Sharon who smiles sadistically at his murderous deed.

Blood libels proliferated in the Arab world, and, via Palestinian and Muslim student groups, made it onto American campuses.

San Francisco State University flyer, Spring 2002

Dave Brown cartoon for the Independent, January 2003. The cartoon won the annual award as the best cartoon from the UK Political Cartoonist Association.

Europe was the Western cultural sphere especially in Europe, where it was hailed as a liberating narrative that freed from Holocaust guilt. In particular, the image opened the floodgates to comparing the Israelis to the Nazis.
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Joel Fishman, an American-born and -trained historian living and thinking in Jerusalem and whom I am pleased to call a friend, has an excellent meditation on the 70th anniversary of the “Munich Agreement,” the prime example of the folly of appeasement in Western history. It is a sad tale of liberal cognitive egocentrism, moral arrogance, and, as Fishman puts it, “lack of imagination [for evil]” that drove Chamberlain not only to pursue a(n effectively) suicidal policy, but to silence anyone who disagreed with it and keep “his” public in the dark. The interesting thing is that not only are those who forget history condemned to repeat it, but especially those who refuse to learn from history… And therein lies our curious paradox: why are our leaders – even, here below, George Bush – so intent on denying the lesson Munich offers.

Seventy Years Since the Munich Agreement

By Joel Fishman
FrontPageMagazine.com Friday, September 26, 2008

Photographic stills and newsreels have immortalized the moment when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich and at Heston airport triumphantly waved the signed agreement in the air. The British Prime Minister proclaimed that he had brought “Peace in our Time… Peace with Honor,” and the crowds received him as a hero because he responded to their deepest hopes.

The job of the historian is not merely to look back from a sadder and wiser time – after some 50 million people died in World War II, most of them civilians – and say, “what folly!” The historian needs to recreate that time of “innocence,” before people knew it was folly, and grasp the enthusiasm, the sense of triumph that this folly inspired at the time. Only then can we begin to grasp the conditions under which it can happen again. Note the reference to an “honorable peace” in Chamberlain’s statement

[The following is the wording of a printed statement that Neville Chamberlain waved as he stepped off the plane on 30 September, 1938 after the Munich Conference had ended the day before]:

“We, the German Führer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognizing that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for our two countries and for Europe.

We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again. We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.”

[Chamberlain read the above statement in front of 10 Downing St. and said:]

“My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour… I believe it is peace for our time… Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”.

“Peace in our time… peace with honor!” Something for everyone. Curious that someone who had so little understanding of what “honor” meant in the Nazi context would declare his concessions honorable. And behind it lurks the coming of the worst war in history and the greatest disgrace imaginable for Chamberlain. As for sleeping soundly, it was almost two years to a day that the blitz began and Londoners slept underground.
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Prof. Barry Rubin, writing for Watch on the Middle East, critiques several recent AP articles that betray the media’s devotion to the Politically-Correct Paradigm, the principle that we cannot understand “others” without empathy, and cannot empathize without restraining our tendency to impose our own mentality on others, especially in making value judgments. In the articles that Prof. Rubin has collected and analyzed, we see journalists who instinctively project the civic ideals that they believe in onto the Palestinians, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In so doing, of course, Israel comes out as the aggressor who forces peaceful Palestinians to reluctantly turn to violence as the last resort.

In an article of September 20, Ali Daraghmeh, “Army says troops kill Palestinian with firebomb,” there is a long discussion of the current state of the peace process.

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National Review Online’s The Campaign Spot blog found a fine example of media bias at the Washington Post. It is subtle, but once it is pointed out, the bias is beyond question.

Here is how the Post quoted Barack Obama on September 17:

He chided Sen. John McCain some at both. “Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he’s president, he’ll take on the, quote, old boys’ network in Washington,” Obama said in Elko.

“I am not making this up. This is someone who’s been in Congress for 26 years - who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign - and now he’s the one who will take on the old boy network?” Obama continued. “The old boy network? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.”

Here is the Post quoting Sarah Palin on the same day:

“John? John?” Sarah Palin called to John McCain. “Can I add somethin’?” …
One woman wanted to give her the chance to address those who say Palin can’t be a mother and vice president. “Well, let’s prove ‘em wrong,” Palin said to cheers.

She talked about her role if the ticket is elected: “Let me tell you, I know a little bit about energy. That’s gonna be my baby when I get to Washington, D.C.”

Notice anything?

 Whereas Obama was quoted with correctly spelled language, Palin is quoted as saying “somethin’”, “‘em”, and “gonna”. It a subtle way of reinforcing her image as a boorish hunter from small town Alaska who has no business being on the national stage.

This just in a few days ago: France2 has met with the head of the French-Jewish organization CRIF, Richard Prasquier, who held a news conference a month ago demanding a committee of investigation into the al Durah affair, and has agreed to one. It’s hard to know what’s going on, since such an investigation, pursued impartially will be very harmful to France2, but initial responses from French sources close to the event are cautiously optimistic. Article below with brief commentary.

Sep 19, 2008 17:24 | Updated Sep 20, 2008 18:38
Panel of experts to probe al-Dura video
By JPOST.COM STAFF

The head of the state-owned France 2 television station has agreed to a demand from a Jewish community leader to establish a panel of experts to probe the controversial “Muhammad al-Dura broadcast,” the European Jewish Press reported Friday.

Footage from the controversial Muhammed al-Dura video, aired by France 2.
Photo: AP [file]

As usual, lazy journalists put up the inflammatory picture Enderlin broadcast, not the anomalous one that Enderlin cut:

Take 6, two “takes” after Enderlin has declared the child dead, according to Talal after bleeding to death from a stomach wound for 20 minutes.

In September 2000, a France 2 broadcast showed the “killing” of Muhammad al-Dura,12, during an exchange of gunfire between IDF soldiers and Palestinian gunmen.

The report was based on footage taken by the station’s Gaza-based Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, and accused the troops of killing the boy as he and his father tried to find cover.

The images shocked the world and caused outcry over Israel’s policies in the Gaza Strip. But Philippe Karsenty, head of French media watchdog Media-Ratings, raised questions on the report’s authenticity. Karsenty argued that Dura’s death was staged, and accused France 2’s Jerusalem then-correspondent Charles Enderlin of doctoring the footage. Enderlin was not in Gaza at the time of the incident.

France 2, however, stood by Enderlin and the Palestinian cameraman who submitted the footage in question. The station sued Karsenty for libel.

In May of this year, a Paris appeals court reversed the original decision against Karsenty, saying that the examination of the footage had not resolved the question of the film’s authenticity. Karsenty presented judges with new evidence including a ballistics report and footage from other sources, which he said proved the boy’s death had been staged.

Karsenty’s claims are based on inconsistencies in the footage, including a publicly available video-taped admission by Abu Rahma that there are untold secrets related to the case, the fact that only seven bullet holes are seen behind Dura despite Abu Rahma’s repeated statements that the child survived 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli forces directed at the boy, footage clearly showing pretend gun battles and faked ambulance runs at the junction that day, testimony of the IDF soldiers stationed at the junction who said they did not participate in any firefight that day, and the lack of footage of Dura’s actual shooting.

Abu Rahma’s video shows Dura hiding, and then cuts to footage of him lying, apparently dead, at the junction. It does not show the child being killed.

In addition, the 55 seconds of video footage broadcast by France 2 in the original TV report were only part of some 18 minutes. The full film was shown in court, and detractors of France 2 claim that there is still more footage that has not been released.

The ruling absolving Karsenty of libel said that he had “exercised in good faith his right of criticism against the power of the press. [The watchdog head did not] exceed the limits of freedom of expression recognized by the European Human Rights Convention.”

The Anti-Defamation League has expressed support for the call for an independent investigation into the report. The panel of experts is expected to be established in November, and will be headed by Patrick Gaubert, chairman of Licra, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, who is also an EU Parliament member.

I don’t know much about Gaubert, but the LICRA looks like a good organization, and is certainly on the right side of the UN/human rights debate. That, in and of itself, is extremely encouraging, since Al Durah played such a prominent role in what LICRA justifiably sees as a travesty of human rights, namely Durban I.

Karsenty called the decision to set up a panel “good news” but said he would monitor who was selected as “experts” as well as what material was submitted for the panel’s consideration.

France 2 has appealed against the latest ruling to France’s Supreme Court.

The IDF concluded in its own investigation of the incident that Dura was not killed by soldiers. In 2007, deputy commander of the IDF Spokesman’s Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, wrote to France 2 asking for the entire unedited 27-minute film shot by France 2’s Palestinian cameraman on September 30, 2000, as well as footage the cameraman filmed on October 1, 2000. Am-Shalom stressed that the IDF had ‘ruled out’ the notion that Dura was killed by Israeli fire.

Citing the findings of the IDF’s probe into the incident, ordered by then-OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia, Am-Shalom wrote, “The general has made clear that from an analysis of all the data from the scene, including the location of the IDF position, the trajectory of the bullets, the location of the father and the son behind an obstacle, the cadence of the bullet fire, the angle at which the bullets penetrated the wall behind the father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF soldiers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed position [at the junction].”

Haviv Rettig contributed to this report.

Today at Georgetown University, Profs. Charles King and Charles Kupchan gave a talk entitled “Russia’s War with Georgia: Causes and Consequences“. The details and background they gave were extremely illuminating; their eagerness to give Russia the benefit of the doubt was decidedly less so.

King, a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, spoke first. He introduced the idea of the war quickly becoming a “war of analogies”. Both sides tried to convince the world to view the conflict as analagous to a past one. Was this the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 again (the CSM article linked here is indicative of that sentiment) ? Was South Ossetia modern-day Sudetenland? Was Russia using its citizens (though