Augean Stables

Updated with additional material.

In my initial responses to the Nouvel Obs petition supporting Enderlin, I noted that in the future, PhD theses on the dysfunctions of the media in the late 20th early 21st century will begin by exploring the identity and journalistic record of those who signed. Ivan Rioufol already identified a number of signers as having behaved like Enderlin, guilty of the same journalistic offenses. And John Rosenthal identified a number of people who had not business signing so partisan a petition. I’d like to begin a series here on some of the signers and I welcome anyone who wants to prepare a dossier.

Jon Randal.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, in her devastating discussion of the petition signers, has this to say about Jon Randal of the Washington Post:

There was the noted Paris-based former Washington Post foreign correspondent, 75-year-old Jon Randal, a Middle East expert I’d looked up to for years as a cub reporter, who trenchantly explained that he was seeing in all this a dangerous American trend of “vindictive pressure groups interfering with news organizations,” now unfortunately crossing the Atlantic. (Having lived in Paris for over 40 years, Jon had become alarmingly French.)

“Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they’re persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters.

He’s speaking here of the Zionist zealots who have the nerve to criticize the media for their fast and loose accounts. (See below.)

I can’t imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don’t care if it’s the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn’t make a story up.”

This is a common error that Enderlin supporters make, assuming that Enderlin is the object of the legal attack, intended to suck money from France2. In fact, Enderlin attacked, using France2’s deep pockets to harrass individuals who were far more seriously threatened financially. As for the credulity Randal expresses, one could hardly ask for a better articulation of the guild mentality.

But, I tried to interject, the absence of the boy’s “agony” from the tape?-

“Nonsense! Televisions don’t show extreme violence. You know that. Look, I don’t know what side you’re on in this?”

Another key revelation of the guild mentality. Bring up evidence and you reveal “what side you’re on.”

“I’m trying to make sense of it all.”

“I want you to call my friend at NPR, Loren Jenkins; call David Greenway at the Boston Globe; they’ll tell you about pressure groups.”

What he means by pressure groups are the Zionists who critique the gross inaccuracies of a media that seems incapable of getting a story straight. Actually Chafets has some remarks to make about Loren Jenkins, then a correspondent for the WaPo, that show exceptional continuity from 1982 to 2008:

Jenkins… published an article in Rolling Stone that made several comparisons between the Israelis and the Nazis and elegantly argued the Arab version of history — that Zionism is illegitimate because the Jews stole their land. Jenkins was expecially indignant about the Holocaust: “[The Israelis] think they’re owed something because of what happened [in World War II],” he fumed in an interview with the Aspen Times. (p. 306)

In other words, just as expressed by the indignant Nouvel Obs petition, to allow Zionist zealots to challenge their advocacy journalism was an impediment on the “freedom” [read: license] of the press.

I ran into similar sentiments at a conference in Budapest when I presented the al Durah case as a blood libel that had helped drive Global Jihad from the margins to the center of Muslim culture in the 21st century. One of the conference’s organizers responded:

It’s not blood libel; it’s just simple murder of children, which we know for a fact Israelis are doing every day. And although the Jewish lobby has prevented the American press from reporting these things, we can be thankful that the European press, which is more objective, has remained independent.

So the fact that the European press, unpressured by Israeli advocacy groups with scrupulously acquired documentation — CAMERA is nothing if not extremely careful to document everything it claims — can report “freely” on what goes on in the Middle East on a regular basis… and that’s a preferable situation.

But let’s take a look at some of Randal’s earlier experiences and reporting from the Middle East to have a sense of what’s going on behind the curtain. Recently, in preparing my response to “David,” I took another look at Ze’ev Chafets’ Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America’s View of the Middle East, a fundamental text I recommend to everyone. (It is, by the way, in response to the same distorted coverage of the war in Lebanon that Chafets chronicles, that CAMERA was first formed in 1982, just as, in response to the stunningly inaccurate coverage of the second Intifada, Honest Reporting was founded.)
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This constitutes a longer version of the op-ed piece at the Jerusalem Post where I exercise my “right of reply” to respond to Larry Derfner’s most recent attack on my arguments. The essay contains links (more to be added), three additional documents, and a number of paragraphs dropped from the published piece.

The Self-Destruction of the Al Durah Faithful

When I first began work on the al Durah affair, I knew I was on to a story whose unraveling would reveal a wide range of cultural dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century –

• the dramatic dysfunctions of the Mainstream media’s news reporting,
• the resurgence of various forms of Judeophobia, from the paranoid anti-Semitism of the Muslim world to the joyous moral Schadenfreude of the European “left”,
• the mainstreaming of an active-cataclysmic apocalyptic movement in global Jihad and its weapon of choice, suicide terrorism,
• the cultural vulnerabilities of Western democracies faced with an asymmetrical war so lopsided they cannot take it seriously
• the pathologies of Leftist and Jewish self-criticism,
• the disorientation of liberals prisoner of their cognitive egocentrism, and
• the moral failure of the “progressive left.”

By any standards this offers a fairly good scope of issues to illuminate with a “thick description” of one single incident, even if it strikes many as what one French friend classed as a “human interest story” (faits divers).

Part of what attracted me to the topic was its quality of “public secret.” Everywhere I looked there were public secrets: from the obvious staging of Pallywood and the stunning complacency in private of the Western media (“oh, they do that all the time”), to uncanny refusal of otherwise rational people to reconsider despite the deeply troubling evidence. Karsenty calls it the “so what” defense: No blood… so what; no bullets… so what; 55 seconds not 27 minutes filmed of an alleged 45 minutes of non-stop Israeli firing… so what; no “death agonies” that Enderlin cut to “spare the public”… so what; no ambulance evacuation scenes… so what; the kid moves after he’s supposed to be dead… so what; Talal lies… so what; Enderlin lies…

Indeed quite early on, in addition to seeing this story as having strong parallels to the Dreyfus Affair, I began to see it as a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Here the tailors are Talal and his friends who spin their story; Enderlin is the chamberlain who comes back from examining the evidence and announces that the tale is good and true, the MSM are the courtiers to whom he gave both the evidence and the talking points for announcing the great news in order to prepare the tale’s public exposure, the media launch of the icon of hatred, the martyr Muhammad al Durah. And a string of lonely individuals, from Shahaf, to Juffa, to Huber, to Poller, to Landes, to Karsenty, tried unsuccessfully to say, hey wait a minute, this martyr’s narrative robe is woven of wholesale deception. And each of us were told, as does the father of the child in Andersen’s tale, “Hush child.” Only whereas in the original tale, the “revelation” was that those who couldn’t see the magical cloth were “fools and unworthy to rule”, in this one, those who saw a fake were “far-right-wing Zionist conspiracy freaks.”

Like many such “public secrets,” this tale does not wear well over time. (The French call them secrets de Polichinelle, secrets like pregnancy that will, eventually, out.) What I did not expect, was how often the defenders of al Durah would reveal the nature of these dysfunctions I was trying to chronicle and explain. Now Larry Derfner has added his text to the dossier of self-revelatory texts that explain so much about the al Durah affair. He has, as a result, inspired the formal launching of the Al Durah Affair’s Public Secret Dossier. So in his honor, I propose to go over some of these extraordinarily revealing texts and compare and contrast them.

1) Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000.

2) News analysis of William Orme for the New York Times, October 24, 2000

3) Response of Adam to James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly article June, 2003

4) Nouvel Obs Letter of Support to Charles Enderlin, May 27, 2008

5) Larry Derfner’s Second Column on Al Durah in Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2008

Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000

On October 12 (less than two weeks after the al Durah footage first aired and provoked rioting throughout Israel’s Arab population), two Russian-born reservists took a wrong turn and landed in Ramallah, Arafat’s “Oslo” capital. Palestinian police took them into custody, but the rumor of their presence spread rapidly. A lynch crowd soon stormed the police station, and in a frenzy, Palestinian men beat the soldiers to death with their bare hands, threw their bodies out the window, and a mob below literally tore apart their bodies, beaten to a pulp, dragging the parts through the street, shouting all the while, “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.”
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Ed O’Loughlin writes for the Sydney Morning Herald did a piece on the al Durah controversy shortly before the showing of the rushes in court in November 2007. Although it might appear to the simple reader that this is a balanced piece, it’s worth a close look to see the embedded prejudice (in the etymological sense of the term, judgment before [viewing the evidence]. Note that he has only spoken with the people who support the original story, and that he presents none of the extensive evidence that there’s something terribly wrong with the report as Enderlin first broadcast it. Also note that he considers any question about the evidence, including the question of where the bullets came from, “conspiracy theory,” even though, at the end, he allows that it may have been Palestinian bullets that hit.

Truth is sometimes caught in crossfire

“We were the target” … Jamal al-Dura.
Photo: ED O’Loughlin

October 6, 2007
There are hopes the real story of the death of a boy in Gaza may emerge at a court case, writes Ed O’Loughlin.

Note that at no point does O’Loughlin refer to the case as the “alleged” death, even though that was the issue at contention in the court case. Has the author of the article even looked at the evidence for staging? Will he discuss “take six”? And is his “hopes [that] the real story of the death of a boy in Gaza may emerge” just hoping that the court will confirm the original story? By the end of the article, that seems a fairly likely conjecture.

The death of Mohammed al-Dura is a harrowing piece of footage: a 12-year-old Palestinian boy dying in his father’s arms as the pair seek cover from withering crossfire in Gaza.

The reader is immediately told, without any mention of “alleged,” how harrowing the footage of the death.

It is also, a senior Israeli spokesman declared this week, fake.

Danny Seaman, the director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said the television station France Two “essentially staged” the footage seven years ago this week as a “blood libel” against the Jewish state.

Seaman is the most senior government official to express a view which is increasingly popular among supporters of Israeli policy.

Immediately, the journalist labels the position a political one, rather than a response to the evidence. This is, essentially, Charles Enderlin’s position. But one might actually argue the opposite: that the insistence, despite the evidence, that the footage is real, corresponds primarily to those who favor the Palestinians.

Under this view, the killing of Mohammed al-Dura, like several other incidents which produced television images particularly unfavourable to Israel, was a smear contrived by foreign journalists against the Jewish state.

Significant misrepresentation here. No one is arguing that Enderlin was in on the staging action. No foreign journalists were involved. This was a Pallywood production with Talal as both cameraman and director. To present this as an criticism of “foreign” journalists is to replicate in a new form the error of early journalists who described the scene as “captured by a team of French journalists” when, again, it was Talal without supervision.
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Charles Enderlin has responded to Elie Barnavi’s article in Marianne at his blog. It is vintage Enderlin — no real evidence, just indirect logic. If the Shabak doesn’t think he’s a criminal, then he isn’t; if Israeli journalists visited him in the hospital and the King of Jordan shook his hand, then he’s not a faker… I present below the French, followed by my translation and comment. I recommend visiting Enderlin’s blog, where he has an exchange with one of his critics, a Fracophone Israeli blogger named Victor Perez.

Cher Elie Barnavi

Vous avez toujours su défendre avec talent les positions israéliennes et j’attendais votre intervention dans ce débat avec curiosité, mais, là, vous m’avez étonné. Ancien ambassadeur, vous avez certainement un niveau d’habilitation « sécuritaire » vous permettant l’accès à certains dossiers du Shabak, le service de sécurité intérieur israélien. Un simple coup de fil à Tel Aviv vous aurait évité de publier des inexactitudes. Pour le Shabak, Talal Abou Rahmeh qui a filmé la mort de Mohammed A Dura n’est pas un propagandiste palestinien et n’est soupçonné d’aucune activité subversive anti-israélienne comme vous l’affirmez. La réponse que nous avons reçue de ce service – et d’autres – lorsqu’il a fallu obtenir pour Talal une autorisation d’entrée en territoire israélien était la suivante : « Il est blanc comme neige ». Les accusations que vous portez contre lui sont fausses et inadmissibles.

Vous mettez en doute la crédibilité des rushes tournés par Talal. Là aussi, je dois prouver que l’absurde est faux. Que des images tournées par un cameraman sous le feu ne sont pas l’équivalent d’une caméra de surveillance, comme dans un super marché… Oui, Talal n’a filmé que ce que les circonstances permettaient. Ces scènes d’Intifada ont également été tournées par d’autres cameramen qui se trouvaient sur place, notamment d’Associated Press et de Reuters.. De nombreux confrères y étaient dés le lendemain, le 1er octobre 2000, ainsi que les jours et les semaines suivantes. Plusieurs se sont retrouvés, couchés au sol, entre deux feux. Nous avons présenté à la justice des témoignages qui contredisent l’opinion de vos « experts » parisiens. Pourquoi vous contentez-vous de l’avis de gens qui n’ont jamais mis les pieds à Gaza ou assisté à ce genre d’affrontement ? Pour notre part, lorsque cette campagne de diffamation a débuté, nous avons présenté les images à un médecin légiste qui a conclu que les mouvements de l’enfant étaient consistants avec l’agonie. (Selon le dictionnaire : les instants qui précédent la mort).

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Here is an English translation of the astonishing judgment of the Appeals Court in Paris finding Philippe Karsenty innocent of defaming Charles Enderlin and France2. In a decision that gave a ringing endorsement of freedom of speech at a key moment in French, European and Western history, the judges deem that although the language used by Karsenty in accusing France2 and Charles Enderlin of broadcasting a terribly destructive hoax — the al Durah footage — would constitute defamation if it were unsupported. But given the incoherences of both the footage and of Enderlin’s explanations to the court, Karsenty had every right to denounce him in the liveliest language, and Enderlin had no business thinking he should be free from serious criticism from fellow citizens.

Here is a professional translation of the entire French decision, available in French in PDF and online. I will return to this text and highlight and comment on it in the coming days.

FEES: 500 € CASE NO. 06/08678
JUDGMENT OF 21 MAY 2008

COURT OF APPEALS OF PARIS
11th Chamber, Section A

Delivered publicly on Wednesday, May 21, 2008, by the 11th Chamber of Criminal Appeals, section A.

On appeal from a judgment of the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance, 17th Chamber, of October 19, 2006, (P0433823039).

PARTIES BEFORE THE COURT:

KARSENTY, Philippe

Defendant
Office of the Public Prosecutor
Non-appelant

ENDERLIN, Charles
Civil party, non-appelant
Residing at 206 Jaffa St, Jerusalem (Israel)

National Television Company FRANCE 2
Civil party, non-appelant
Residing at 7 Esplanade Henri de FRANCE, 75907 PARIS Cedex 15

Assisted and represented by Benedicte AMBLARD, advocate at the Paris bar, attorney registration number TQB113 and by Francis SZPINER, attorney registration number R049

JUDICIAL PANEL at the oral hearings and deliberations:
President: Mrs. TREBUCQ
Counselors: Mr. CROISSANT
Mrs. CARBONNIER

COURT CLERK: Mrs. DU PARQUET at the oral hearing and rendering of the judgment

OFFICE OF THE PUBLIC PROSECUTOR: represented at the hearings and the rendering of judgment by Mr. BARTOLI, attorney general.

SUMMARY OF THE PROCEEDINGS

THE CHARGES:

Philippe KARSENTY was summoned before the criminal court by order of the examining magistrate, charged with having, in PARIS and on the national territory:
• On November 22, 2004, by means of an audiovisual communication – in this case, by publishing on the internet website www.M-R.FR an article entitled “FRANCE 2: Arlette Chabot And Charles ENDERLIN Should Be Removed From Their Positions Immediately,” which contained the statements quoted in the body of this judgment – alleged or imputed facts impugning the honor or esteem of the national television company, FRANCE 2 and Charles ENDERLIN.
• On November 26, 2004, by means of an audiovisual communication – in this case, by publishing on the website a press release entitled “FRANCE 2 : Arlette Chabot And Charles ENDERLIN Should Be Removed From Their Positions Immediately,” which contained the statements quoted in the body of this judgment – alleged or imputed facts impugning the honor or reputation of the National Television Company, FRANCE 2 and Charles ENDERLIN,
Acts foreseen and penalized by articles 23, 29 section 1, 32 section 1, 42, 43 of the law of July 29, 1881; 93/3 of the law of July 29, 1982.

THE JUDGMENT

The court, in a judgment rendered after due hearing of the parties,

Rejected the defense plea,

Found Philippe KARSENTY guilty of the charges and sentenced him to pay a 1,000 € fine,

Granted the petition of the National Television Company FRANCE 2 and Charles ENDERLIN as civil parties and ordered Philippe KARSENTY to pay to each the sum of one euro in damages and interest and, together, the sum of 3,000 € under article 475-1 of the code of criminal procedure.

THE APPEALS

The appeal was filed by attorney Pierre-Louis DAUZIER, for Philippe KARSENTY, on October 19, 2006, in opposition to the criminal and civil judgments.

By orders staying the running of prescription, dated January 10, March 28 and June 20, 2007, the court set the case for hearing on September 12, 2007.

At this hearing, after having studied, at the request of the civil parties, several excerpts from FRANCE 2’s televised news, regularly transmitted by the parties, including the report broadcast on the 8:00 p.m. televised news September 30, 2000, and heard the parties on Philippe KARSENTY’s petition to the court to appoint an expert whose task, after having viewed the 27 minutes of rushes filmed on September 30, 2000 at the Netzarim junction by cameraman Talal ABU RAMAH, would be to determine whether there is a link between the scenes preceding the report and the images of the report itself. The defendant having presented his case last, the court joined this matter to the facts of the case.

The president, after having asked the parties (the defendant having addressed the court last) their opinion on the benefit to the court were it to view itself the cameraman’s rushes, decided that the court would deliberate the issue and announced the court’s decision at the public hearing of October 3, 2007.
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I have often been accused of using Pallywood as a way to a) dismiss Palestinian suffering, and b) exculpate Israel. My response to the first is to point out that Palestinian suffering is real, but to a significant — terrifying — extent the product of the behavior of Palestinian elites, and that when people “buy” the Pallywood line — look how Israel makes us suffer! — they empower the very group that exploits Palestinian suffering so that they can blame Israel. My response to the second, is that if a Palestinian “lethal narrative” about dastardly Israelis is not Pallywood, I’ll admit it.

The BBC ran an article using exclusive footage of an attack by four armed youths on a group of Arabs in the West Bank. The footage comes from cameras supplied by the Israeli Human Rights group Btselem to chronicle the ways in which Israeli settlers make life miserable for the Palestinians. I have received a number of queries about whether this might not be Pallywood footage.

B’tselem have previously been caught out helping Palestinians uproot their olive trees, blaming the settlers, and then demanding high price compensation for the trees from Israel…

B’tselem are aiding the Palestinians again… in another Pallywood production… see the film and ask how come the shepherds had their cameras ready for filming the masked men who came over the hill… and then ask why there’s no voices heard, and why the men were masked!

It’s not the first time this sort of Pallywood production has made it into the mainstream, but, here we go again….

Distributed first to the BBC by B’tselem with the flames being fanned by far left, self-hating Ha’aretz and YNet.

Having watched the footage and spoken with someone who lives in Susia, I have come to the conclusion that this footage is genuine, and that the masked attackers are, indeed, Israelis. The response to the questions challenging the film are good, but have answers for either scenario. The attackers could just as easily disguise themselves (one is wearing a Palestinian scarf) and not speak to hide the disguise as vice-versa.

At one level, such violence is hardly as vicious as suicide terror attacks, and could well make sense within the context of a territorial struggle between various gangs. On the other, among those attacked was an elderly woman who is now in the hospital. Such attacks are heinous and inexcusable, and hopefully the violators will be arrested.

I note, in concluding, several points:

1) Is the anonymous emailer who suspected Pallywood right in noting that Btselem has helped in the creation of Pallywood-style grievances in the past over uprooted olive trees? I don’t have the data on this claim.

2) My source from the West Bank tells me that Palestinians regularly try and provoke things for the camera, making the presence of the camera a reason for violence.

3) Btselem’s policy of handing out these cameras is an invitation to Pallywood staging. If the Israelis are smart, they will prepare a team of experts to go over these scenes on a regular basis.

UPDATE:
Video: Police go undercover to identify attackers of Palestinians (Hattip MHB)

Two suspects arrested

Suspects sent to three day house arrest by Beer Sheva judge:

Published: 06.17.08, 16:59 / Israel News
The Beer Sheba Magistrate’s Court sent the two settlers suspected of assaulting Palestinians in the West Bank a week ago to a three-day house arrest.

The court rejected the police’s request to extend their remand by eight days. (Efrat Weiss)

Apparently for lack of evidence.

[NDLR: Il y a presque deux ans que j’ai écrit une analyse sur la façon dont Le monde a parlé du scandale “fauxtographie” dans la guerre du Liban, été 2006. A la suite de la decision étonnante de la cour au sujet de la plainte de Charles Enderlin contre Philippe Karsenty, et la pétition révélatirice au Novel Obs je mets une traduction française en ligne pour mieux permettre au lecteur francophone de déceler l’attitude des “journalistes” des grands médias, et de mieux evaluer les renseignements qui lui parviennent de leurs parts au sujets des “faux” issus du proche orient.]

Stuart, l’un des participants de ce site, nous a fait parvenir une traduction d’un article du Monde sur le scandale fauxtographique. Cet article illustre bien à quel point les médias français sont mal informés de ce qui se passe dans leurs coulisses, et comme ils sont mal outillés pour simplement comprendre les défis de la blogosphère, et encore moins s’en accommoder.

L’auteur, Claire Guillot, ne parait pas mal intentionnée ; au contraire, elle semble vouloir s’essayer à l’impartialité. Cependant, le résultat est révélateur.

[NDLR : les citations de l’article du Monde sont en gras, les citations autres sont en italiques ; la fin de ce texte reprend, en la développant, une publication précédente sur ce site]

Guerre du Liban et “fauxtographies”

Le conflit a suscité une polémique sur le Net, des bloggeurs conservateurs soupçonnant les images d’être manipulées. C’est par Little Green Footballs que le scandale est arrivé : début août, ce blog américain conservateur accuse Adnan Hajj, photographe pigiste de l’agence Reuters, d’avoir manipulé par informatique une photo de Beyrouth pour épaissir la fumée après un bombardement israélien. Effectivement, la retouche est grossière. L’agence présente ses excuses et retire la photo incriminée. Mais le blog met ensuite en évidence une autre photo de M. Hajj, où il a dupliqué une fusée tirée par un avion israélien. Le photographe, qui ne maîtrise apparemment pas bien le logiciel de retouche Photoshop, est renvoyé, toutes ses archives effacées. « Il y a eu un enchaînement d’erreurs humaines, plaide Tom Szlukovenyi, directeur de la photographie chez Reuters. Cette histoire est contraire à tous nos principes et ne s’est jamais produite auparavant. »

Là, bien sûr, un journaliste futé pourrait se demander « comment Tom Szlukovenyi peut-il le savoir, surtout s’il a été abusé par le travail, pourtant si maladroit, de son pigiste… et comment vérifier cette affirmation, puisqu’il a retiré des archives la collection des photos de ce pigiste manifestement indélicat, empêchant ainsi un examen approfondi de son œuvre ? » Et, dernière minute, Tom Glocer, le patron de Reuters, est d’un avis strictement contraire, et pense que ces pratiques sont largement répandues.

Mais vous ne trouverez dans l’article du Monde aucune de ces remarques. On enchaîne sur le complot réactionnaire :

Le “reutergate” devient le point de départ d’une cabale sur Internet : des dizaines de bloggeurs, pour la plupart américains ou israéliens, de droite ou d’extrême droite, se proclament “citoyens journalistes” et se mettent à enquêter depuis leur salon. A les croire, les cas de “fauxtographie”, selon un néologisme typique d’Internet, éclaboussent l’ensemble de la profession au Liban : les photographes, manipulés ou manipulateurs, se livreraient à des retouches voire à des mises en scène pour donner une vision tronquée, pro-Hezbollah, voire antisémite, du conflit.

Diantre ! Il faut bien expliquer à vos lecteurs à qui ils ont affaire. On dirait Charles Enderlin muselant ses critiques en les qualifiant de “groupuscules d’extrême droite”. Et, comme pour Enderlin et le reste de la gauche bien-pensante, pure et dure, ce recours tout prêt à l’anathème de l’ensemble des critiques tombe en fait totalement à côté de la plaque. Beaucoup de ces gens actuellement étiquetés “de droite” sont en réalité des exilés, des réfugiés d’une “gauche” qui vit dans un univers imaginaire de déni. L’agence Menapress n’est pas de droite. Elle revendique des objectifs explicitement progressistes. Mais ses journalistes ne sont pas vos compagnons de route. Il en va de même pour les bloggeurs américains Charles Johnson, Roger Simon, et Neo-Neo-con et de nombreux acteurs de la blogosphère. Ils se sont réveillés du sommeil dogmatique.

Ces attaques sont reprises sans précaution par des milliers d’internautes, parfois même relayées par les médias traditionnels (la chaîne américaine Fox News, le tabloïd allemand Bild, le site du Wall Street Journal), voire par les politiques : le ministre des affaires étrangères australien, Alexander Downer, qualifie de “canular” une attaque israélienne visant deux ambulances de la Croix-Rouge, le 23 juillet, en se basant sur les allégations du site Zombieguide, qui trouve les impacts “suspects”.

Que voila un exemple judicieusement choisi ! Peu d’accusations de falsification sont aussi fondées. Claire Guillot a-t-elle seulement lu ce document ? Impacts suspects ? Dîtes plutôt que toute l’affaire est une supercherie grossière.
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May 29, 2008 17:59 | Updated May 30, 2008 2:47
Myth & Muhammad al-Dura

Last week, a surprising decision handed down by the French Court of Appeals shed rare light on how both news and myths are made in this part of the world.

On September 30, 2000, two days after prime minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, was filmed cowering with his father, Jalal, at the Gaza Strip’s Netzarim junction during an apparent gun battle between Palestinians and IDF troops.

The video, taken by Palestinian cameraman and France 2 stringer Talal Abu Rahma, shows al-Dura hiding, and then cuts to footage of him lying, apparently dead, in the arms of his distraught father. Although he was not in Gaza that day, France 2’s correspondent Charles Enderlin (a French Jew who became an Israeli citizen some 20 years ago) added a voice-over narration, ascribing the boy’s death to “gunfire from the direction of the Israeli positions,” and released his report to the world.

Actually it was worse: Enderlin claimed that the father and son were “the target of gunfire coming from the Israeli position.” This is the core of the blood-libel (intentional killing “in cold blood”). Talal made these claims under oath, the PA doctored the footage to make them stick, and then defended their work as a “higher truth.”

The effect of the image of wounded father and murdered son, a kind of modern pieta taken as a potent symbol of Israeli brutality, was electrifying. Al-Dura’s death, a cause celebre of the second intifada, provoked worldwide outrage. Streets, public squares, and schools in Muslim cities bore his name. He was featured on a Tunisian stamp, a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, and an al-Qaida recruitment video. “In killing this boy the Israelis killed every child in the world,” Osama bin Laden said. In June 2005, Wafa Samir al-Bis, an aspiring 21-year-old “martyr,” after being apprehended by Israeli guards at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza with 20 pounds of explosives in her underwear, said that she intended to carry out a suicide attack to retaliate for al-Dura’s death.

And that was the tail end of the vengeance attacks. All the earliest ones in 2001 invoked Al Durah.

BUT THE video report - 55 seconds of footage out of some 18 minutes that were shown in court - also aroused doubts. It does not show the boy being killed. No bullets are seen hitting the alleged victims. No blood is visible on their clothes, on the wall, or on the ground. It never shows Israeli soldiers aiming at the al-Duras. More than a dozen cameramen filmed the junction that day. Reuters, AP, and France-2 outtakes show apparently staged scenes and faked ambulance runs.

The IDF, which initially apologized for the death of al-Dura, concluded that the boy could not have been hit by Israeli bullets. Citing the findings of the army’s probe into the incident, ordered by then-OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia, the deputy commander of the IDF Spokesman’s Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom wrote, “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.”

France 2 stuck to its story. On October 3, 2000, testifying under oath before the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Talal Abu Rahmeh alleged that Israeli soldiers had intentionally murdered the boy. The station also initiated libel suits against several writers and Web sites who challenged the veracity of its story.

One of the defendants was Philippe Karsenty, director of the Media-Ratings watchdog site, who had called the report “a hoax.” France 2 won three out of four judgments, including against Karsenty, who was convicted of libel in 2006. Last week, to bring matters around full circle, the appellate court overturned that decision.

THE RECENT verdict, besides usefully underscoring the right to criticize the press and its sometimes dangerously hasty product, also calls much-needed attention to the ways in which world opinion is shaped by perceptions that are themselves shaped by a not infallible media. The al-Dura affair, like the myth of a massacre in Jenin in April 2002, has been so fervently seized by those who seek confirmation for their belief in Israeli culpability, that it is likely never to be erased from international consciousness. It by now stands well beyond the reach of refutation.

Even among alleged Zionists like Larry Derfner who seem immutably attached to the myth of Israeli culpability.

That fact ought to give pause to Israeli officials, like Israeli ambassador to Paris Danny Sheck, who criticized Karsenty for so doggedly pursuing the matter. As for the rest of us, the sordid affair teaches a valuable lesson about the dangerous enthusiasms, especially in Muslim societies, and especially among those who claim to speak for an awakened conscience, for modern myths of Jewish evil.

Thank you, Jerusalem Post, the best MSM publication during this long, painful affair… which is not yet over. Indeed, if we want to understand what really went on, the tale is just beginning.

Larry Derfner has an op-ed at the Jerusalem Post on the Al Durah Affair which lays out in a quite striking fashion the aggressive aspect of the mentality of the Masochistic Omnipotence crowd (MOS) crowd. In the Dreyfus Affair the term “intellectual” was coined to describe someone who was capable of looking at the empirical evidence and changing his or her mind. Derfner’s rant suggests that the term could not, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, be applied to him. On the contrary, one has to wonder what could drive him to such heights of irrationality as to assault people who call into question so base a story as that of al Durah.

I have already discussed some of Larry Derfner’s writings, whose liberal cognitive egocentrism stands out even in a crowd of his friends, so I guess this piece didn’t come as a complete surprise to me. But I must confess, the vehemence and adolescent quality of the rhetoric and the lack of any substance in the argument (the best he gets is quoting Fallows which is now five years old), did surprise me.

But sometimes surprises are good because they make you think about things in new ways. I have long meditated on the peculiar attachment of the Israeli left to the al Durah story, and now, Larry Derfner’s rant sheds new light on a puzzling phenomenon.

Rattling the Cage: Al-Dura and the conspiracy freaks

Larry Derfner , THE JERUSALEM POST May. 28, 2008

No doubt about it - Phillippe Karsenty and his allies have a lot of evidence that the killing of Mohammed al-Dura was a hoax, that it was staged by France 2 TV in cahoots with the Palestinians.

In fact, Karsenty, Richard Landes and the rest of the conspiracy theorists have so much evidence that it may even add up to .001% of the evidence that the Mafia, or Castro, or the Pentagon killed JFK. They may have the merest, slightest fraction of the evidence there is that Shimon Peres masterminded the Rabin assassination, or that the Mossad was behind 9/11.

I assume this was written without looking at any of the evidence. Surely anyone who has, could not use such ludicrously exaggerated language… unless, of course, the evidence didn’t matter. But just for the sake of a decency Derfner apparently doesn’t feel he owes those who disagree with him on this, let us ask how him how he explains why there’s no blood where the boy bled to death from a gaping stomach wound for twenty minutes, no bullets supplied by the Palestinians from 11 wounds and what should have been thousands of bullets fired during forty minutes of “bullets like rain,” no evidence supporting any of Talal’s claims, no ambulance evacuation scene of the father and son despite the presence of over a dozen cameramen who were there at the junction and who value such scenes so much that they film cheap fakes…?

If he has satisfactory answers, fine: let’s hear his explanations. If he’s unaware of these problems, then why is he shooting his pen off in ignornance? Does he just assume that anyone who would disagree with him on such matters must be an idiot? What does that tell us about Larry Derfner?

In other words, it’s a bunch of crap, all these theories that say journalist Charles Enderlin, his Palestinian cameraman, al-Dura’s father, a hospital in Gaza, a hospital in Amman, the Jordanian ambassador to Israel, the UN, the Palestinian people and/or any number of other anti-Semites conspired to stage the killing of that 11-year-old boy.

A good friend, upon reading this article, said almost immediately, “he’s a friend of Charles.” I didn’t want to reduce this tirade (as crude and childish as it is), to such venal behavior, but this is literally taken from the proceedings at the court, which Mr. Derfner did not attend, so I suspect he’s picking this up from somewhere, and the “friends of Charles” is not a bad place to start sniffing around. All that he’s missing in his list of conspirators mentioned in court is King Abdullah.
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Here is a rough and rapid translation of the court’s decision (available in PDF in the original French: here.

Generally speaking, I think this is a devastating decision. The judges go out of their way to criticize everyone involved on the side of France2 (including some backhanded swipes at the lower court), but especially to point out the pervasive “incohérences” not only in Enderlin’s initial broadcast, but his subsequent explanations and actions. In particular, after emphasizing the sharpness of both Karsenty’s language and his accusations — which indeed are defamatory and strike at Enderlin’s and France2’s honor and reputation — the judges assert that, given the evidence he had every right to make these statements, in particular given the importance of the case, the damage it did worldwide, and the fact that Enderlin, as a professional of information with a high public profile has to expect to be subjected to this kind of criticism from co-citizens and colleagues.

Enderlin’s initial response to the court’s decision is an illustration of how he presents reality in a partial way. The analogies between this and the case of Oscar Wilde a century ago are haunting, including, I can imagine, France2’s lawyers saying to Enderlin, “is there any truth to the charges that you put up staged footage, and Enderlin responding, “absolutely not.”

I will make any appropriate corrections to the text that people send in, as well as add my own (and others’) comments in the coming days.

For those who have struggled for years with this case, given the cold shoulder by the MSM, and discouraged by Israel advocates both in Israel and outside, who experienced the stunning let-down of the first decision, this comes as something of a spectacular vindication of our intuition that the emperor was indeed naked. I must confess personally that to see a legal decision that is so “right on”, that so ringingly defends the principles of justice, critical analysis, and the freedom to rebuke public figures, is balm to a troubled soul.

Maybe Europe is not lost. At the moment, French justice just lit a beacon to show the way. Will the public notice?

Considering that from all these claims that Philippe KARSENTY, director of the “agence de notation” MEDIA-RATINGS, which he himself created to evaluate the trustworthiness of information disseminated in the news media, questions the work of FRANCE 2 and its Jerusalem correspondent, with the help of the methodological criteria for analyzing the media that he established;

That in his article dated 22 November, 2004, Philippe KARSENTY characterizes the reporting of Charles Enderlin as a disgraceful masquerade for public television and a deception that lay at the source of much violence the world over, and invoking the language of the polemic that he sustained for several years between FRANCE2 and the Israeli press agency MENA (“Metula News Agency”), which has accused the French station of broadcasting a fake;

That in terms of the elements which he had at his disposal, the accused affirms that the Paris correspondent in Jerusalem [Enderlin] gave a false report, which he takes apart in focusing on two different issues: on the one hand, the first fifty minutes of the report which consisted in a series of staged scenes that are pure fiction, on the other, the principal scene, of only a few minutes in length, which has major inconsistencies (incohérences) in terms of the commentary of FRANCE2;

That he questions as a result why Charles ENDERLIN who, in this matter, “fools himself and, as a result, fools us,” seeks to “conceal his imposture”;

That the accused author, in his letter of 26 November 2004, imputes to Charles ENDERLIN the act of disseminating a fake news report, by narrating the inconsistent document (i.e., footage of his cameraman, and imputes to the public television station the act of committing a media imposture in diffusing this report on the 30 of September 2000;

Considering the defamatory character of these accusations, which the tribunal (i.e. the first court) justifiably considered that the deed of knowingly fooling and disseminating and/or causing to disseminate a false report containing images that do not reflect reality, in representing a “false death”, even if the author took care to accompany his accusation with a certain number of explanations, unquestionably such an accusation strikes at the honor and reputation of information professionals, and that all the more when the defamatory deed is accentuated by the use of terms like “masquerade,” “imposture,” “deception,” to qualify the attitude of FRANCE2 and “staged scenes,” “pure fiction” to qualify the initial reporting;

Considering, that the accused gave fourteen pieces of evidence as proof of the truth of these defamatory claims, and requested the hearing of 3 witnesses capable, according to him, of proving that FRANCE2 put on the screen a dubious montage, widely contested at the time of its first broadcast, which permitted him to conclude that a manipulation of the report on these conditions of filming and on the reality of the scenes filmed by his cameraman, in particular concerning the death of Mohamed AL DURA;

But considering that, as the first judges recalled, to produce a exculpating effect provided for by article 35 of the law of 29 July 1881, the proof of the truth of the defamatory claims must be perfect, complete, and corresponding to the defamatory accusations in their materiality and their weight;

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Phyllis Chesler has posted a note from a colleague in Israel with some eyewitness recollections of media staging news in Lebanon in 1982, which is when we have dated the origins of Pallywood.

Hi Phyllis :

In the first Lebanon War, just before I left for that feminist conference in Montreal, we saw two news reports on Israel TV. In one, the Israel news team followed a French film crew. The French media put several young children in a burnt out car and lit a fire on the far side of the car and then filmed the children in the “burning car” screaming and crying with the smoke and flames billowing in the background. Two days latter I saw this clip broadcast in Montreal. If I hadn’t seen them staging it, I would have believed these were kids who were directly attacked (by Israelis) and left to burn to death.

The other clip - was of the Israeli air force attacking a “hospital” with a big red cross on the roof. We could see that the “hospital” was actually a base of the PLO who were (engaged in) shooting from it. That, too, appeared on the news. Interestingly, the Lebanese Government took out a big paid ad stating that the (so-called) Hospital was PLO Headquarters and was headed by Arafat’s brother.

(The Montreal feminist ) conference was the one that the PLO tried to take over to pass anti- Israeli Resolutions - and that I more or less single handidly fought to prevent - successfully - I might add .

One of the commenters at Chesler’s site suggests collecting an anthology of these kinds of staging. (The first Intifada is full of them.) I think that’s an excellent suggestion. Time to detoxify the Western media.

A look at the way France2 handles the evidence, an insight into how Pallywood can fool the Western media… it’s apparently full of fools.

Pallywood Strikes Again2

For a better view, see the version up at Second Draft, and if it’s also poor quality, download it. It’s worth watching a quality version.