Here’s a classic. Let’s start with the ghoulish display of sorrow over the body of a dead boy, allegedly killed by Israeli bombing. It’s aimed right at the heart of a someone like Annie Lennox who, upon seeing bombs falling on Gaza immediately imagines Palestinian babies on the receiving end, rather than Hamas militants targeting Israeli babies. And, of course, the news media snatch up the photo-op.

Haniya and Egyptian PM Kandil mugging for the cameras Remember this from Kafr Qana, Lebanon, July 30, 2006: Green Helmet Guy with dusty baby and clean baby toy clip, July 30, 2006. And, of course, the media run with the story. It’s all so obvious. Boy dead from explosion, Israelis bombing Gaza. As the Palestinian “general” in charge of the investigation of Al Durah’s death put it, “there’s no need to investigate when we know who did it.” But wait, what about the evidence, asks Elder of Baker Street? Jodi Rudoren, who for all her flakey early noises when she was assigned the Middle East beat by the NYT, shows some signs of independent journalism writes:

It is unclear who was responsible for the strike on Annazla: the damage was nowhere near severe enough to have come from an Israeli F-16, raising the possibility that an errant missile fired by Palestinian militants was responsible for the deaths.

And Karin Laub, the AP reporter, adds significant detail:

Israel vehemently denied involvement, saying it had not carried out any attacks in the area at the time. Gaza’s two leading human rights groups, which routinely investigate civilian deaths, withheld judgment, saying they were unable to reach the area because of continued danger. Mahmoud’s family said the boy was in an alley close to his home when he was killed, along with a man of about 20, but no one appeared to have witnessed the strike. The area showed signs that a projectile might have exploded there, with shrapnel marks in the walls of surrounding homes and a shattered kitchen window. But neighbors said local security officials quickly took what remained of the projectile, making it impossible to verify who fired it.

We’ve seen this scenario before. In the summer of 2006, most of the Ghalia family were killed in an explosion on the Gaza Beach. The Palestinians, with the help of dramatic but dubious footage of their young daughter, meandering in wild grief among the wreckage, sold the western news media, who immediately broadcast their claim that the family, while relaxing on the beach, was shelled by Israeli naval ships. Classic Pallywood. Evidence piled up that the Israelis had not been firing there, that the hole caused by the ordnance did not accord with an Israeli shell, that despite claims to the contrary, Palestinian sources and their unofficial spokesman, Mark Garlasco of HRW had no ballistic evidence of what caused the explosion. When it came time to send two of the youngest victims to Israeli hospitals, and at risk to their lives, the doctors hastily removed the shrapnel from their bodies.

In this case, however, journalists begin to show some signs of forensic acuity. To be fair, them to us, and we to them, both the NYT’s Jodi Rudoren and AP’s Karen Laub actually mention the anomalous evidence: the explosion was too small to have been fired from a plane; the clean up crew visited the site before the journalists. Indeed, the Algemeiner contacted a ballistics expert who confirmed Rudoren’s suspicions:

After reviewing CNN’s footage of the scene of the blast, Yiftah Shapir, a ballistics expert who is the Director of the Middle East Military Balance Project at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel confirmed to The Algemeiner, “It is reasonable to say that this damage is from a relatively small explosion at close range.”

“You see a lot of small holes,” he added, “If it was a very heavy bomb the damage would be worse, and at long range the shrapnel would be spread much more widely because of the long distance.”

This is obviously a huge step forward over the Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg’s, appraisal on October 1, 2000, of the wall behind barrel that Muhammad al Durah and his father had hidden behind, the previous day. From Nahum Shahaf’s archive.

Told that the Israelis had fired for 40 minutes of “bullets like rain” until they killed the boy, Goldenberg looked at the dozen or so bullet holes that looked suspiciously like they were shot from “head on,” rather than the 30% angle of an Israeli bullet would have to travel to leave marks on the wall, and pronounced the cluster “proof that the Israelis had targeted the boy.”

Apparently, now, almost thirteen years later, some journalists have at least problematized the Israeli-Goliath/Palestinian-David framing story: maybe that doesn’t cover all the cases. It is after all, a journalistic task to give us the relevant evidence. Obviously more investigation is called for, but thanks for the allusive scraps. Those who argued that Israel should have let journalists into Gaza for OCL in 2008/9, because they would have provided quality control over the kind of footage that would come out of Gaza from unsupervised Palestinian “journalists,”have evidence for their claim in this kind of reporting. Similarly, watchdog groups like NGO Monitor have read the riot act even to Palestinian NGOs, notorious for their anti-Israel advocacy brand of “human rights” defense. Notes Elder of Baker Street:

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights , which is keeping track of everyone killed in Gaza (and which admits that most of the dead have been “militants,”) did not list Mahmoud Sadallah or Aiman Aby Wardah in their list of victims of Israeli airstrikes, although they even include one person who died of a heart attack.

So far so good. Now I don’t want to grade elementary school students by too high a standard, but, an alert journalist’s antennae should quiver at the comment, “no one appeared to have  witnessed the strike.” In one of the most densely neighborhoods of “one of the most densely populated areas in the world”? No one noticed? Omerta? Possibly. Probably, if it were a Hamas explosive.

How many journalists or readers even think on the role of intimidation in shaping the news they get?

And yet, another datum corroborates this hypothesis: Laub informs us, “local security officials quickly took what remained of the projectile.” Two questions:

1) Are we sure it was all “projectile”? What if part of it was the mangled body of a rocket launcher that blew up on the launchers, killing the neighbors, including the four-year-old boy?

2) Does one imagine all these cleaners did was run in, remove the item(s) in question, and leave without also informing those watching them not to speak about the event? Indeed, I wonder who was the brave person who reported about the clean-up crew?

Implications for the Cognitive War

Meditate on this picture:

Here is the head of Hamas, whose boys systematically fire from the midst of civilians, in order create civilian casualties they can then blame on Israeli counter-strikes, exploiting a death directly caused by his men, in order to appeal to western sympathy. It would be hard to imagine a more stunning portrait of the most depraved hypocrisy (and contempt for viewers who believe this display of compassion). If hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue, then this brazen hypocrisy is the contempt vice shows for the pathetic stupidity of the supposedly virtuous.

After all, it is hard to imagine a more grotesque expression of a mutual corruption: trying to demonize your enemy before an outside audience whom you expect to side with you in the name of empathy for the very children you victimize. How disordered must the emotional and moral world of someone subject to this kind of manipulation?

Not only that, but Haniyah dragged into this humiliating display, the prime minister of Egypt’s new “Muslim Brotherhood” government, trying to show support for her Palestinian branch, Hamas. Prime Minister Hesham Kandil jumped right in, kissing the baby, and subsequently testifying (in what BBC Correspondent Wyre Davies found to be a “powerful statement”: “his blood is still on our clothing.” Kandil’s a fool eagerly trying to join in the morbid circus Haniyah and Hamas so frequently stage. Haniyah, thinking he could get away with it, has dragged Kandil into this shameless pornography of death.

One last reflection. Hamas’s strategy has long been to attack from behind civilians to provoke Israeli retaliation and then use the collateral damage of those victims as a way to blame Israel. This is in fact a key element of their asymmetrical war with Israel. As one Gazan explained to an Italian reporter towards the end of Operation Cast Lead (OCL):

The Hamas militants looked for good places to provoke the Israelis. They were usually youths, 16 or 17 years old, armed with submachine guns. They couldn’t do anything against a tank or jet. They knew they were much weaker. But they wanted the [Israelis] to shoot at the [the civilians’] houses so they could accuse them of more war crimes.

In other words, Hamas engages in the exceptionally rare wartime act of actively victimizing one’s own civilian population – specifically a war crime – in  order to win a victory in cognitive war. And they can only do so, if a corrupt media on the scene (including NGOs and UN agencies), rather than expose their criminal strategies, play along and present the images of dead babies in the framework of the Palestinian narrative of Israeli victimization.

The fact that Hamas thought they could clean up the scene and pull off a Gaza Beach, successfully blaming the Israelis for the tragedy, speaks eloquently of their exceptionally low appraisal of the forensic acumen of the Western press (or their power to indimidate). And they have good reason to so believe. After all, Goldstone, in his investigation into the abuses of the Palestinian people during OCL, never once looked into this kind of human shielding. Imagine if he had!

Similarly, when so acute a journalist and commentator as Max Fisher puts his mind to analyzing this data and these issues, he ends up coming out with the empty-handed meme about “both sides…” It’s hard to know whether he is just incapable of siding with Israel on so simple and fundamental an issue, or he’s actively trying to do damage control for Hamas. In either case his readership is hardly served by his moral obfuscations in the name of even-handedness.

Alas. It’s hard to believe that if the press had learned the lessons of al Durah they’d still be suckered by this grotesaque display.

Now meditate on this picture, provided by Electronic Intifada to weaponize the tragedy against Israel.

Are you prepared to say, “so what if Hamas killed the boy, this picture symbolizes Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israelis anyway”?

An earlier version of this essay, one that includes all the pictures, appeared at Pajamas Media, and the evolving version is at the Augean Stables.

Richard Landes, Boston University

ASMEA Conference, Washington DC, November 4, 2011

I’d like to make two arguments. First, that the image of the IDF as child-killers is the product of a constant campaign of Arab/Palestinian cognitive warfare in which the Western mainstream news media has played a critical role in conveying this disinformation as news; second, that such a state of affairs has had a devastating impact on our ability to understand the conflict and leading to serious errors in judgment.

Let’s take what I would argue is at once a paradigmatic case, and, at the same time, the most terrible case, that of Muhammad al Durah, the 12-year old Palestinian boy who became the icon of the second intifadah, even as he should be an icon of the destructive incompetence of the MSNM.

On September 30, 2000, Charles Enderlin of France2 received the following footage from his long-time cameraman in Gaza, Talal abu Rahmah.

It was accompanied by the following narrative from Talal:

• The boy and the father took cover during an exchange of fire.
• The Israelis fired for 40 minutes at the boy who was hit and lay bleeding for 20 minutes while the Israelis fired – bullets like rain – at any ambulance that tried to take him away.

• They targeted and killed the boy deliberately.

Let me present what I think Charles Enderlin should have done were he a serious journalist merely on the basis of what he had before him. There are at least three issues that should have aroused his doubts.

1)    The wandering red spot and the lack of blood[2]

2) The behavior of the boy, from when he was “shot” in the stomach to take five – stretched out, raising elbow to look out[1]

 Still from “take 4.” This is the first take in which the boy has been allegedly shot. There is red visible on his right leg (which was one of the wounds reported by the hospital). Enderlin’s voice-over declares the boy dead.

Still from “take 5″ after Enderlin has declared the boy dead. Why would someone allegedly hit in the stomach be holding his hands over his eyes and stretched out rather than balled up and clutching his stomach? Note that there is no longer any red on his injured leg (by now the blood from a bullet wound should have spread, and the red is around his stomach, does not spill onto the ground in front of him.

Still from “take 6.” This take was cut by Enderlin in his broadcast and drew audible gasps from those in court when it was shown. Again, why would a boy who has been bleeding out from his stomach according to Talal be holding his hand over his eyes, again stretched out, and apparently looking out from under his arm?

3)  the angle of the bullets[3]

From “take 1.” This is one of the two bullets that one can identify hitting the wall during the footage shot by Talal (hardly bullets like rain). The round dust cloud kicked up indicates that it came from head-on, not from the -30 degree angle from which a shot from the Israeli position would have come. Later ballistic tests confirmed that both bullets came from the Palestinian side.

4) No shot of the ambulance evacuation

Given how high a premium cameramen place on shots of ambulance evacuations, and how important the evacuation of the “dead” boy and his “wounded” father would have been, it seems most bizarre that Talal did not have any footage of the dramatic event. The driver late claimed to Esther Schapira that he had to scoop up the guts of the dead boy from the pavement. Talal’s claim that his camera was running out of batteries does not explain why he has footage of a distant, later ambulance evacuation, far less dramatic than one of bleeding father and dead boy.

Given the potential violence and hatred such footage might – and did – arouse, Enderlin (known to his colleagues as “Scoop” had to choose between breaking the sensational “news” or showing some professional restraint. According to his own testimony, he didn’t hesitate.

In doing so, Enderlin cut the final footage of al Durah.

He remarked in his 2010 book: “j’ai coupé quelques secondes de la séquence du petit Mohammed afin d’éviter toute dramatisation inutile.” Earlier he had referred to it as “the unbearable ‘death throes’ of the child” which he wanted to spare the viewer.

However uncertain he might have been the first day, had he waited until he got “all” of Abu Rahmah’s footage the next day, his doubts would have been confirmed: from the pervasive “staging” evident in abu Rahmah’s other footage, to the lack of blood behind the barrel, to the lack of bullets (and bullet holes in the wall) from the alleged “rain of fire from the Israeli position.” If I were a professor of film, critiquing a student’s work, I’d give this an F for realism. At least give the kid a bag of blood to burst when he’s allegedly hit.

This was a photo taken the next day. Note that the blood that we see is bright red, even though, had it been exposed to oxygen and sunlight for 15-20 hours would no longer be bright red. Furthermore, the blood is where the father was, but where the boy allegedly bled out from his stomach for 20 minutes (circled area), there is no blood.

Subsequently considerably more evidence has arisen, including the fact that the boy photographed in the hospital is not al Durah, and that the injuries the father allegedly suffered from Israeli bullets were scars from an operation an Israeli doctor carried out after Jamal had suffered a knife attack from fellow Palestinians.

And yet, this accusation of faking strikes most people as so implausible as to sound like a conspiracy theory. When I began working on this in late 2003, I’d tell people, there are five possibilities: Israelis on purpose, by accident, Palestinians by accident, on purpose, and… The vast majority couldn’t imagine staged – the father? The red cross? The assumption that the boy had been killed so dominated perceptions that there was no imaginative room for a fake.

But in examining the raw footage, both Talal’s (with Enderlin) and two hours from another cameraman there working for a major Western news agency, I was struck not merely by how many scenes were faked, but their pervasiveness: there were directors, sets, and bystanders for whom it was a public secret that this is how it’s done.

Here’s my favorite example, from another Palestinian photographer present at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000.

[4]
Enderlin describes this and other scenes as “For many minutes he filmed classic scenes of the Intifada: young people throw rocks and Molotov cocktails as the Israeli position, they shoot back from their bunker with rubber bullets and tear gas pellets. The wounded are evacuated by other youth towards ambulances ready to take off. These scenes are identical to those that I shot in Ramallah.
Everyone remembers the faked funeral scene from Jenin recorded by an Israeli drone.

Many of these fake scenes, in order to mimic the urgency they want to convey, brutalize the alleged injured.

The best example I saw from Talal, a comic scene of a fat man who fakes a leg injury and when only kids come around – who cdn’t possibly lift him up and carry him past the cameras to the ambulance – he shoos them and walks away without a limp, I can’t show you because Enderlin cut it from the edited version he presented to the court.

But I can tell you that when I first viewed it with Enderlin, I commented that a lot of this was staged, he responded, “oh yes, they do it all the time; it’s a cultural thing.”[5]

With this piece of unreconstructed Orientalism, the second shoe dropped: it was not only that the Palestinians produced these largely shoddy fakes, but that the Western media found no problem with such “journalism” – they just scanned through them and took out the most believable sight bytes. As several French journalists explained to me, “c’est les armes des faibles” weapons of the weak. This has translated into the following epistemological approach: Believe what the Palestinians say until proven wrong; doubt what the Israelis say until proven right; and when that happens, fall silent and move onto the next Palestinian lethal narrative.

Not only was this approach taken by news agencies openly hostile to Israel like the Guardian and Le Monde, but by Israeli journalists at outlets like Ha-Aretz, and even among professors of journalism who tried to be even handed. Here Gadi Wolfsfeld discusses the Al Durah footage and compares it with the footage of the “lynching” at Ramallah twelve days later:

Perhaps the most macabre is the ongoing contest for visual supremacy in the presentation and promotion of pain and suffering. The early stages of the Second Intifada produced two very powerful images in this realm. The first was the dramatic pictures of Mohammed el-Dura being shot and killed [sic] as he and his father attempted to shield themselves from the crossfire. The second were the scenes of Israeli reserve soldiers being lynched by an angry Palestinian mob in the city of Ramallah. Each of these scenes became powerful icons for the two societies; leaders from both sides attempted to exploit these images in an effort to demonstrate the enemy’s brutality.

How could an outsider expect to understand the fearful asymmetry of these to images from this Israeli professor dedicated above all to the meme “both sides” (with admitted variants). Indeed, when presented with the evidence of staging, Wolfsfeld responded:

“So what? According to reliable statistics, the Israeli army has killed over 800 Palestinian children since the second Intifada. So what difference does it make if this case is staged or not?”

Well, for one thing, Al Durah was deliberately staged in order to arouse hatred and incite violence, while Israelis accepted guilt for the event. And for another, after al Durah, the media and the NGOs (including Btselem which he is citing here as reliable) believed virtually anything they were told by Palestinians. In addition to the figures being inflated, once one removes the large majority of “children” aged 16-19, and ask how many children like al Durah (12 and under, not combatants), the figure drops dramatically. The point of al Durah is to declare the IDF child-killers.

And Israeli journalists and academics are only too happy to accept the guilt. As one Israeli journalist remarked to me: “Meah huz hayisraelim hargu oto.” [100% the Israelis killed him]. Gideon Levy, when presented the evidence for a fake did Wolfsfeld one better with the same statistic: “We’ve killed 800 Muhammad al Durah’s.”

On the other hand, in the Ramallah lynching, the crowd that savagely dismembered the reservists yelled “revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah,” and the Palestinians, both police and crowd, used violence to destroy any footage of the actual violence. No Palestinian (or Arab) journalist reported on what happened at Ramallah. This is hardly a world of “both sides” don’t listen to the other’s narrative. On the contrary, it’s a perfect illustration of the marriage between pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism.

Bob Simon, referring to al Durah, remarked, “In the Middle East, a picture can be worth a thousand weapons.” And a number of journalists agreed with me when I said I thought their attitude was, “the Israelis have all the weapons, we can level the playing field by giving Palestinians victories in the media war.” Gadi Wolfsfeld, professor of journalism at Hebrew U. presented this situation thusly:

One of the most powerful roles the news media can play in such conflicts is when they become “equalizers” by allowing the weaker party to enlist the support of third parties. This was certainly what happened in the first Intifada in which the Palestinians were extremely successful at placing their plight on the international agenda.

It’s probably worth noting that one of the first Western journalists to give Palestinians cameras to film footage during the first intifada was Charles Enderlin, and that his collaboration with abu Rahmah goes back to this time (1988). Indeed, I would date the first “heyday” of Pallywood to this period.

This Israeli effort to be even-handed at once masks and illustrates a radical difference between Israeli journalism and Palestinian. While Israelis like Wolfsfeld try, in some cases bend over backward, not to be too patriotic, to give the “other side” its due, Palestinians engage in cognitive warfare. Take, for example, the way the PA doctored the footage of Al Durah in the days after the event.

When asked to explain this obvious breach of journalistic ethics, one PATV official explained:

This is, by Western standards, not journalism but malevolent propaganda. (Hitler and many others used and use the same argument about a “higher truth” to validate the Protocols.) For Palestinian “journalists” news production is part of the “people’s struggle” and concern for “objectivity” or impartiality is at best an afterthought. As Talal said while accepting an award in Dubai: “I will continue to fight with my camera.”

Anyone, therefore, who treats the products of Palestinian journalism as “true until proven otherwise” (which is the standard operating procedure for most journalists in the area) out of some misguided political correctness, betrays their journalistic standards. They also end up, like Enderlin, admitting off record that “Talal and the rest always stage things,” while publicly exclaiming how Talal “is never unprofessional, one of the most credible sources.” Those who ignore the public secret end up accepting lethal narratives as true stories: As one Israeli journalist remarked to me: “Meah huz hayisraelim hargu oto.” [100% the Israelis killed him.]

The impact of the al Durah footage was spectacular. It went viral before people knew what that term meant. It triggered violent Arab riots inside Israel, it fueled a hatred among Palestinians that astonished sympathizers. Describing the Ramallah lynchings where the crowd shouted “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah, one very pro-Palestinian photographer wrote:

It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places. In Kosovo, I saw Serbs beating an Albanian but it wasn’t like this. There was such hatred, such unbelievable hatred and anger distorting their faces. I thought that I’d got to know the Palestinians well. I’ve made six trips this year and had been going to Ramallah every day for the past 16 days. I thought they were kind, hospitable people. I know they are not all like this and I’m a very forgiving person but I’ll never forget this. It was murder of the most barbaric kind. When I think about it, I see that man’s head, all smashed. I know that I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life. I love this country, I’d love nothing more than to see Israelis and Palestinians sharing an argalah or waterpipe but, after the hatred that I’ve seen in the past few days, I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime. Look how many years that they’ve been talking peace – since 1993. Then, within just a couple of weeks, they are at each other’s throats. It seems that it’s easier to hate than to forgive.

After he published the piece, he was told by “friends” that he should leave the Palestinian territories as it was no longer safe for him.

Al Durah became the icon of the intifada, both in Palestine and in the Arab world where Al Jazeera was first becoming a household name with its constant coverage of the intifada.

Al-Jazeera ran repeatedly the clip of the boy being shot, and for several days the picture of his dying became the network’s emblem of the Intifada. This had a deeply galvanizing effect on the wider Arab public. Arabs everywhere became desperate for bulletins from the Occupied Territories, but state-run Arab news providers were slow to give good coverage … from the very start Al-Jazeera’s live coverage from the front line far outstripped any other network’s coverage.[9]

The PA made al Durah into an icon of martyrdom and used the footage in every way possible: one of the most popular Palestinian singers made a video with Muhammad beckoning other youth to join him in martyrdom.

As one Israeli official noted ruefully, if you want to predict the levels of violence the next day, just calculate MDPH, Muhammad al Durah images per hour, on PA TV.  Within months of the event, Osama Bin Laden came out with a lengthy recruiting video for his global Jihad, in which Palestine, and Muhammad al Durah, played a central role in appealing to a desire for revenge, and – note the allusions in the text of the poetry he plays – the impotence of current, corrupt Arab regimes to do their duty.

Two years later, al Qaeda-linked Pakistani Islamists executed Daniel Pearl in front of a video camera with an image of al Durah behind him, right after he admitted that he was a Jew, and that Jews killed children for pleasure.

Perhaps even more disturbing, European Muslims broke out in a widespread low-level assault on Jews, literally the day after the footage showed. “The very next day, on his way to synagogue, our rabbi was attacked in the street by Muslim immigrants,” noted Joel Rubinfeld, a resident of Brussels, “The anger was palpable, and immediate.”[10] The resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe began in October 2000 – Black October – and most of the violence was done by European Muslims.  Indeed, Chirac publicly humiliated Barak on a visit to Paris four days later (in an effort to calm the violence) with the public statement, “ce n’est pas une politique de tuer les enfants.” Two days later, on October 6, 2000, exactly a week after the incident hit the news, a large rally in Paris filled the Place de la République. Crowds of angry Muslims shouted: “Death to the Jews! Kill the Jews!”

Place de la République, Paris, October 6, 2000. The al Durahs are to the right with the legend “Ils tue les enfants aussi” [They also kill children].

This became a major trope of the “left” both radical and (allegedly) non-radical. It became so central to the image purveyed by the “human rights” NGOs that one could fairly describe Al Durah as the “patron saint of Durban”, a gathering which constituted the most grotesque hijacking of the laudible cause of anti-racism into paroxysm of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism.

Durban, South Africa, August 2001; UN Conference against Racism. In the foreground, below the poster with Al Durah, the youth in the Keffiya holds the bier on which an effigy of Al Durah is paraded through the streets. Given what we now know, the sign should have read “PALESTINE’S IMAGES OF HATE.”

The wave of hostility surprised many observers. Every register of anti-Judaism shows a sharp rise in both verbal violence (e.g., calling Jews Nazis), and physical (attacks on property and people).[12]  Taguieff reported from France:

From October 1 2000 to the beginning of November 2001, about 2000 attacks on Jews were declared [cf. 9 in 1999].  From the autumn of 2000, the power of images plays against the Israelis once the unbearable footage of the death, filmed live, of the young Mohammad plays and replays on all the television stations.[13]

This hostility to Jews became a primary feature of both Islamic teaching from pulpit, street, café and school talk.[14] One can date the emergence of the New Anti-Semitism[15] from this specific moment – September 30/October 1.[16] Five years later, defending a speech in Paris that invoked the genocidal hadith about killing Jews, a local Muslim leader showed the picture of al Durah on his phone to a crowd of Muslims, drawing their instant approval.

Nor was this virulence limited to the Muslim world. Present at the rally in Place de la Republique were all the major leftist groups, allegedly committed to fighting racism. And the opprobrium went mainstream, especially the identification of Israel with the Nazis, which had, until then been a trope of extremists. In a remark that is staggering for its moral imbecility, and uncharacteristic of an otherwise highly respected journalist, news anchor Catherine Nay opined on Europe 1, “with the symbolic power of this image, the death of Muhammad annuls, erases that of the Jewish child, hands in the air in front of the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

The image is taken from the website of Ramsey Clark’s International ANSWER, a major “anti-war, anti-racism” movement of the early 21st century. It symbolizes the close alliance between the “progressive” left and anti-Zionism. Apparently this image struck home on two fronts: it aroused a global Muslim furor at the same time as it offered Europeans a “get-out-of-holocaust-guilt-free” card. Why it would enthrall American progressives is still an open question.

I think that historians, looking back at the first years of the 21^st century will wonder, as did some contemporaries, at the deraison morale that characterized especially the European intellectual scene. This moral disorientation was on full display at Durban where the “human rights” NGOs allowed the greatest global haters to hijack a UN gathering allegedly convened to fight racism. Arafat brought Jamal al Durah, and one could fairly describe Muhammad his son as the “patron saint of Durban.

In conclusion let me quote from Taguieff’s extended study of the al Dura affair

The icon “Al Dura”, the image of the Palestinian child supposedly “killed by the Zionists” imposed itself as one of the principle vectors of the new anti-Jewish propaganda that developed in the course of the 21st century… It is not just a simple image. The icon al Dura only exercises its fascination because it incorporates an explanatory commentary which, giving it its polemical sense, incorporated it in a series of mythic events, linked to the theme of cruelty and bloody desires attributed to Jews, and especially to Zionists. Behind the media icon, there’s a recurrent anti-Jewish stereotype which inscribes itself in what must be called an archetype, a structural or organizing form that one should understand less as a “primordial image” or “theme” which repeats, than as a dynamic cognitive scheme containing a affective charge which one notably encounters in myths and legends. The archetype is that of the homicidal Jew, the image of diabolic evil… which draws its inspiration from Christian anti-Judaism and which, via this icon, spread globally, taking its place in the “global culture.

In the cognitive war, whose main theater is the public sphere, Al Durah was a Palestinian nuclear bomb; and the news media, with its unremitting if possibly unconscious collusion, was the detonator. We are all – Israelis, Palestinians, the Arab and Muslim world, and the global community – the poorer for this.

March 2, 2011by Yishai Goldflam, Tamar Sternthal UPDATED: B’Tselem Photographer Stages Scene

March 2 Update: Translation of Arabic Proves the Scene is Staged

March 1 — Once upon a time, journalists would report the news. Today, some prefer manufactured news. When journalists collaborate with organizations driven by a one-sided agenda aimed at influencing public opinion, the distinction between a newspaper and a propaganda mouthpiece is dangerously blurred.

Of course, this only goes one way. Let some settlers (or even the IDF) try and give the MSNM some footage putting Palestinians in a bad light and see with what a fine-tooth comb it gets worked over. The basic epistemological principle is: If it’s a Palestinian claim, believe it until proven false; if it’s an Israeli claim, doubt it until proven true. (And if that happens, move quickly on to another topic.)

Take, for example, B’Tselem, which noticed that some lazy journalists prefer to receive pre-packaged video clips over actually doing their jobs. These edited and ready-to-view clips then appear next to bombastic headlines, and the journalist congratulates himself for getting a scoop.

Such was the case early this week (Feb. 27) at the Israeli site Ynet, which appears in English and in Hebrew. Sunday’s Hebrew article by Elior Levi and the corresponding English version (“Video: 11-year-old Palestinian stone-thrower arrested”) are based on a video that B’Tselem apparently supplied to Levi.

One wonders if the intrepid Ynet journalists, including both Levi, his editors, and English translators, even bothered to view the pre-packaged B’Tselem video before passing it off as journalism. The article states:

In the video the officers can be seen putting the boy, Karim al-Tamimi, in a police vehicle after chasing him down. The boy’s mother pleaded with the officers to allow her to accompany him to the Sha’ar Binyamin police station, but her request was denied. . . .
The boy’s father, Salah al-Tamimit [sic] told Ynet, “They took him without a chaperone, and by the time we arrived at the police station he was already being interrogated.”

Yet, a careful viewing of the clip (with Hebrew and Arabic dialogue) reveals that the exact opposite was the case; the policemen invited the mother to accompany her child. At 2:07 minutes into the video, one of the policemen says to the mother, “Come, come, get in.” The cop then asks one of the people standing nearby, “Is that his mother?” When the bystander answers in the affirmative, the policeman repeats, “Get in with him” (the boy). The door is opened for her and she is about to get into the vehicle, as the policemen are saying “get into the car,” but then (2:27) the mother is pulled away from the car by the Palestinian man wearing a black jacket. After the policemen closes the van’s door, a woman wearing a pink shirt pushes the mother towards the vehicle, and then the mother bangs on the door, a heartrending scene directed to the end. Here’s the clip:

What possible explanation is there for the discrepancy between the article and the video? Perhaps Elior Levi received the video together with a B’Tselem press release which falsely claimed that the mother was denied permission to board the van with her son. Levi then copied the press release, without carefully reviewing the video, nevermind undertaking any field work.

B’Tselem’s Video Project

In January 2007, B’Tselem launched its video project, distributing more than 100 video cameras to Palestinians in order to document whatever material they can to incriminate Israeli soldiers, policemen and settlers. As B’Tselem put it, “Citizen journalism – a phenomenon that has garnered much attention of late – is particularly relevant in the context of the Israeli occupation. . . .”

I commented on this strategy and its strong likelihood of encouraging both Pallywood and that film school’s attendant violence back in September of 2008.

But the so-called “citizen journalists” are apparently branching out into staged productions. For example, in the video in question, Nariman al-Tamimi begins the clip by filming an intersection of Nabi Salah where a number of police vehicles are passing through. Suddenly, one of the vehicles stops and as if out of nowhere a frightened Palestinian boy runs towards the camera, with two policemen chasing after him. A careful review of the video shows that the boy had been hidden behind a sign, blocking him from viewers’ site as he threw stones at the moving vehicles. In addition, despite the fact that he had a number of options, the boy knew exactly where to run — in the direction of the camera. And thus we have the perfectly dramatic shot of a skinny and frightened child running away from the big and scary police.

When the boy is placed in the vehicle, a number of people who were in the vicinity of the camera surround the cops and try, apparently, to reach the boy. One of the women is his mother. Thus, she was at the scene the whole time, watching her son throw stones at the police and then run towards the camera.

An analysis of the film clip, including the heartrending ending, raises a red flag concerning staging directions. The vehicles were moving away from the photographer (who repeatedly shouted “I am B’Tselem!”), when they by chance stopped near the photographer and the dramatic scene unfolded. This case is reminiscent of the October 2010 incident in Silwan in which two boys were hit by a car and “by chance” seven or eight photographers were on the scene.

It is abundantly clear that the youth’s arrest and the policemen’s actions, for better or for worse, were not staged. It is also clear that not all of the neighbors that came out to see what was happening and then surrounded the cops received staging instructions. However, one does wonder whether the whole arrest scenario would have happened at all without the B’Tselem photographer. As Avshalom Peled, an IDF commander of the Hebron region remarked about the organization Breaking the Silence, which conducts tours in Hebron: “They are smooth operators. Their activists provoke the settlers and then wait for them to attack.”

If this is the case as well with B’Tselem in Nabi Salah, then this video was created not simply to document authentic circumstances, but rather entails the cynical exploitation of an innocent child, and possibly also his mother.

This is similar to the techniques used in the Al Durah affair, where the boy was placed behind the father (putting him in greater danger if the Israelis were firing), even as the imagery appealed to the pathos of the Western viewer, as pointed out by Tamar Liebes Plesner.

Did Ynet not see what we saw? Maybe Levi and his colleagues saw, but did not care? Do they think that posting videos from an organization with a blatant agenda without fact-checking constitutes journalistic work?

Here’s an idea for a journalistic investigation for Ynet: an analysis of all B’Tselem’s videos in which adult Palestinians are filming Palestinian children who are undertaking criminal and dangerous acts, and an expose of the criminal exploitation of these children who are not kept safe at home.

Now, that’s an investigation which requires actual journalistic work. Is Ynet up to the challenge?

March 2 Update: Arabic Translation Proves Scene Was Staged
CAMERA translated the Arabic which is heard in the video, and the translation provides additional evidence that Levi’s report is entirely erroneous and that the B’Tselem photographer, Nariman al-Tamimi, staged the scene.

When Karim’s mother is about to enter the police van after the police tell her to board, one of the Palestinians clearly says to her in Arabic, “Don’t get in,” and then the Palestinian man in a black jacket pulls her away from the vehicle. This sentence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is the Palestinians themselves who prevented her from joining her son in the van, while the Israeli police repeatedly urged her to get in.

It is also noteworthy that in the beginning of the clip videographer Nariman al-Tamimi shouts to the boy, “hurry, hurry, hurry” as he runs in her direction, yet another indication that the entire scene was planned in advance.

It appears that B’Tselem has some explaining to do regarding its “citizen journalists,” the recipients of B’Tselem cameras, who fabricate news as opposed to document it.

For the Hebrew version of this article, visit Presspectiva, CAMERA’s Israeli site.

His response was that Israeli complaints (whining) about the media being unfair is like a general who complains about rain on the field of battle. I didn’t bother pursuing the point that in no case does the rain only fall on one army alone. What interested me more was the implication of this (repeated) comment, namely that he (and apparently many others) saw the media as a force of nature, an unalterable force, immune to reason or rebuke. They would just do their thing, and let the Israelis deal with it.

I think that some of this comes from an attitude of sympathy towards the underdog. Bob Simon, in treating the Al Durah story, commented that “in the Middle East, one picture can be worth a thousand weapons.” Over time, a number of journalists (off the record) agreed with the formula: “The Israelis have all the weapons, so why not let the Palestinians have the PR victory? It’s a way of leveling the playing field.”

But what about fake stories? Like Muhammad al Durah? In subsequent years, I heard (especially European/French) journalists shrug and say, weapons of the weak, as if somehow that made it alright. In this sense, Enderlin’s response to my observation that most of the action sequences from Talal abu Rahmah were framed — “Oh, they do that all the time, it’s a cultural thing” — represents the journalist’s off-the-record Orientalist indulgence of a culture foreign to everything that Western journalism is supposed to be about.

Now, I can understand some journalists coming to this conclusion, deciding that somehow the underdog status of the Palestinians allowed them to invent what Nidra Poller has aptly called “lethal narratives” but not everyone.  And yet, my friend the journalist (who few would consider a particularly nasty anti-Israel writer) tells me that a majority of the journalists stationed in Israel would be far more harsh in their treatment of Israel were it not for their editors at home.

I think I understand why he presents the MSNM as a force of nature, impermeable to change: they’re going to handicap Israel by raining on their troop positions. It’s not only the “moral” thing to do (level the playing field, side with the underdog), but it’s also a show of power. They will be the Lilliputians that tie the giant Gulliver down.

Talking to him, listening to his reasoning, to his explanations for things (like explaining the precipitous drop in Hamas’ suicide bombings in recent years as a response to the disapproval of Muslims worldwide), to his disappointment that Israel is not more in line with his own liberal/progressive thinking (alas, they reacted to suicide attacks by becoming more right-wing), to his selective empathy, I begin to realize how tight the grip of what Charles Jacobs calls the Human Rights Complex is on our journalists, and their party-buddies, the UN workers and “Human Rights” NGOs who hang together in Jerusalem. It produces the “herd of independent minds” that characterizes today’s Middle East journalism.

And of course, if you adopt this point of view, you never have to deal with the problem of what happens if you report stuff that’s not acceptable to the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims. So they can, in all good conscience, look you straight in the eye and say, “There’s no intimidation here.” Try writing some stories on the culture of genocidal hatred that has pride of place in Palestinian pulpits and airways, and see if there isn’t some pushback.

But then, that would be supplying Israel with PR weapons, and we wouldn’t want that.

All of this is a long and rather elaborate introduction to a brilliant satire put out by Latma on precisely this subject. Enjoy. Imnsho, it’s right on.

[I recommend the FAQs for those unfamiliar with the Al Durah affair and Pallywood.]

October 16, 2010, 12:15 PM
‘Rashomon’ in East Jerusalem
By ROBERT MACKEY

According to an online preview, an episode of “60 Minutes” that will air on Sunday includes a report on the escalating conflict in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, where 70 Jewish families have settled among about 55,000 Palestinians.

Last month, The Lede looked at how the shooting death of a Palestinian man by an Israeli private security contractor in the same neighborhood three weeks ago, and subsequent rioting, was covered by Israeli bloggers and international activists who oppose to the expansion of Israel’s settlements on the land it has occupied or annexed since 1967.

The “60 Minutes” report on the tension and clashes in Silwan includes images of a confrontation that took place there last week, when an Israeli settler, confronted by stone-throwing Palestinian boys on a street, drove his car into two of them, tossing an 11-year-old into the air.

While the boys reportedly avoided serious injury and were released from a local hospital the next day, graphic video of the incident was broadcast on Al Jazeera as well as Israeli television, and was posted numerous times on YouTube, where it has become the subject of fierce debate. (Be warned: viewers may find the clip distressing.)

This warning is one of the standard elements of the way the media handle Pallywood. Rather than warn that the images may be staged or manipulated, they assume they’re true, that the viewer will also see them as true and, appropriately be distressed. I’m not blaming Mackey for doing this. Within the framework the MSNM now have it makes perfect sense. I don’t know what should be done. Maybe:
“Viewers may find the clip distressing either because it is true, or because it is staged.”

As is the case with many pieces of video evidence in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, this clip has been taken to mean very different things by activists and bloggers on opposite sides of the political dispute over who has the right to live in East Jerusalem.

The driver of the car, a leader of the settlers in the neighborhood named David Be’eri, claimed that he hit the children accidentally as he was fleeing in fear of being killed. A spokesman for Elad, the pro-settlement group Mr. Be’eri leads, told The Jerusalem Post, “His car was surrounded with tens of people with rocks.” The spokesman added, “It seems that they were lying in wait and the ambush was planned with rocks, it may have even been a lynch situation. He felt his life was in danger.”

Mr. Be’eri, who drove away from the scene with his rear window smashed, was later released on bail after being questioned by Israeli police officers. As the BBC reported, “His supporters in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, said the incident highlighted what they said was the Palestinian tactic of using children to terrorize local communities.”

Israelis who blame the religious settlers who have moved into the Arab neighborhood, just below the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, for provoking conflict, took a different view of the confrontation.

In a post titled “Silwan: The Blasting Cap,” Bernard Avishai, an Israeli-Canadian author, accused Mr. Be’eri of provoking trouble by “planting a vanguard of extremist families” in East Jerusalem. He added, “When the city descends into Bosnia-style civil violence, this is how it will start.”

You can always count on an Israeli to blame Israel, and a journalist to record his self-accusation. Even Avishai’s fans found his post “disingenuous” to say the least. I especially liked Avishai’s comment that

The kids were probably the same kids who had joined our peaceful demonstration last June.

Could be… but in that case my guess is that their presence at his “peaceful” demonstration doesn’t mean what he thinks it does. Might he not be a dupe of demopaths?

But imagine some balance here. Imagine Mackey looking for a Palestinian mother with the courage to say, “My boys are being used by the shabab (the punks of the Arab street) and the journalists into putting their lives in danger. This is all designed to inflame hatreds among our youth against Israel and start another intifada in which we civilians are the sacrifices of our leaders who victimize us so the cameras can bring images of Israeli aggression to the outside world and create more hatred. Help!”

Of course, she wouldn’t have a blog (for very long), would she?

Yet Lenny Ben-David, an Israeli blogger who was a lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [NB: He was not a lobbyist, did not register as one, but was head of research, which, for the uninformed, is the primary source of AIPAC's influence), suggested on his blog that whoever photographed and videotaped the incident were to blame for encouraging or even possibly staging the confrontation:

The film clip showing an Israeli car hitting two Arab children in Silwan on Friday was horrifying. No one can sit quietly and indifferently while children — any children — are hurt before your eyes. Thank God the children survived and were not seriously injured.

Then came the subtext: The children were part of a gang attacking the driver with rocks, and rocks can most definitely kill. The boys, emboldened by some militant organizer, covered their faces to avoid identification and arrest. There’s no doubt of their intention and premeditation…. I’ve now watched the clip scene-by-scene and in some parts frame-by-frame, and there’s a deeper, even sinister, subtext….

Reviewing the clip, it’s evident that there were as many photographers as there were rock-throwers. Who invited them and coordinated the time and place? Who recruited the boys? Did they plan to ambush dafka David Be’eri’s car? Was it an attempt to reenact the iconic death of Muhammad al-Dura, the boy allegedly killed by Israeli soldiers in 2000 in what we now know was a fake propaganda stage show?

People who follow the conflict in the Middle East on television or through video clips  like this one posted on YouTube know that it is not unusual for several photographers and journalists as well as activists with video cameras to attend even small Palestinian protests. But Mr. Ben-David’s skepticism was echoed by an Israeli video blogger who posted the clip YouTube with the following commentary:

From what I can tell, there are more cameramen than kids throwing rocks, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say the cameramen were encouraging the kids to do some action.

The man in the car did stop, but quickly took off, as the other kids didn’t seem to care about their wounded friends, and kept on throwing rocks at the car.

In the end, I think the kid was more traumatized by the people trying to help him (shoving him into a car) than by getting ran over. I think, that every bystander that didn’t try to stop the rock throwers, should be jailed.

Let me add that the most interesting parts of the video from the perspective of Pallywood were:
1) the presence of photographers and older kids (throwing stones) whose presence we only find out after we see the incident. One of the exercises in detecting Pallywood is realizing the "scene" at which the specific incident is being filmed. Note that the driver could see the older kids with stones, even if we, viewing the young kid get upended don't.
2) the "evacuation." The kid is clearly resisting being put in the car, which suggests his injuries are far less serious than one might expect. The people "helping" display all of the characteristic brutality of Pallywood evacuations, where the actors seem to think that throwing wounded kids in ambulances shows how urgent the situation and how concerned they are for the victims.

I think it's quite fair of Mackey to give so much space to Pallywood analysis. Normally this would be dismissed as "accusing the victim," and Western audiences would be sheltered from its nasty accusations. It would have been interested in getting Mackey's further thoughts on this footage. Instead, he veers my way.

Mr. Ben-David’s point of reference for the allegation that such video might be staged was the long debate over footage of the death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy named Muhammad al-Dura during clashes in Gaza in 2000. The boy’s horrifying last moments were captured on tape and broadcast around the world, sparking a fierce debate about the authenticity of the footage and detailed Israeli investigations into the unresolved question of whether he had been killed by shots fired by Israelis or Palestinians.

France 2/Agence France-Presse
A frame from video shot in Gaza in September, 2000, showed Jamal al-Dura attempting to shield his son Muhammad, 12, during a gun battle between Israelis and Palestinians.

A blogger named Richard Landes even developed an elaborate theory that the whole thing might have been fake. According to Mr. Landes, the video of Muhammad al-Dura’s death, which was shot by a Palestinian cameraman working for French television, was a symptom of a wider phenomenon. He told The International Herald Tribune in 2005, “Palestinian cameramen, especially when there are no Westerners around, engage in the systematic staging of action scenes,” to create the type of dramatic news footage he calls “Pallywood cinema.”

Mackey's either playing catch-up here and knows little, or is just abbreviating the story for the space in his blog. I was certainly not the first to claim this was a fake - that honor goes to the physicist who secured the additional tapes from that day, Nachum Shahaf. And our explanation is hardly an elaborate conspiracy theory. We argue that it's a straightforward scam, no big conspiracy which, like 9-11, would involve (tens of) thousands of people in very high and low places. This scam just calls for a "street" in cahoots with Palestinian cameramen working for sloppy (or worse) Western journalists.

Mostly it's just hard for Westerners to even conceive of such a scam. I remember when I first discovered this story in 2003, I'd give people five alternative scenarios:

• 1. Israelis killed the boy on purpose (Abu Rahmah and Enderlin's version),
• 2. Israelis by accident (what most people who something about the Israeli army believed),
• 3. Palestinians by accident (what those who knew minimal details about angle of fire thought),
• 4. Palestinians on purpose (what Doriel got fired for telling Bob Simon), and
• 5... Staged, something the vast majority of people I talked to couldn't even imagine. It was almost more unthinkable than Palestinians on purpose - an accusation which was, by all public standards, considered hate-mongering racism (hence Doriel's firing). For an example of this attitude still at work, see remarks about Lisa Goldman below.

But at least Mackey doesn't call it a conspiracy theory (I assume "elaborate" is a stand-in), which is Goldman's way of dismissing (below) and Larry Derfner's.

Mr. Ben-David’s suggestion that the video shot in Silwan last week was perhaps staged or set up to make a leading Israeli settler look bad might have been prompted by the fact that the distressing images of Muhammad al-Dura’s death were filmed and broadcast almost exactly 10 years ago.

As Lisa Goldman, a Tel Aviv-based journalist and blogger, noted in a post, the French-Israeli journalist at the center of the controversy over that report, Charles Enderlin, just published on the 10th anniversary of the incident, titled “A Child Is Dead.” Ms. Goldman points her readers to this video of a recent interview with Mr. Enderlin in which he discusses his book on the report and the controversy that followed (note: the ad is in French but the interview is in English):

Ms. Goldman’s post also includes a link to this Web version of the original report (in French), from September 2000, on the young boy’s death, narrated by Mr. Enderlin (again, viewers should be warned that the images in this video are graphic):

[See original article or blogpost, or go here for breakdown into "takes" and analysis]

I will fisk Enderlin’s interview (and if I ever have time, his book) in the near future. Let me just make several final observations here:

1) Mackey’s article is at least notable for mentioning the opposing perspective, which has not been the case in most journalism of the last decade, at least on the Middle East. The article he cites in the International Herald Tribune was the exception, and the journalist who wrote it was discouraged from following up. No one in the MSNM did follow up that I know of. On the contrary, when Karsenty lost in the first trial, the media ran headlines like “France2 blanchi pour l’image choc de l’intifada.” (Neat allusion to honor-shame culture: when you’re honor is in question, your face is blackened, when exonerated, you are whitened.”) When Karsenty won, they fell silent. Curiously, one of the few exceptions to that generalization is Mackey himself, who, for reasons unclear, doesn’t bother to mention Karsenty’s case in this column.

2) Despite it’s openness to letting the reader know about both sides, the framing favors those, like Goldman and Avishai, whose comments fit in so much better with the frame of Palestinian David / Israeli Goliath, which this particular incident is designed to illustrate. Is it mere coincidence that, Mackey ends his discussion with a fairly elaborate nod to Goldman, who adopts Charles Enderlin’s dismissal of the evidence as conspiracy, without looking at the evidence. This was certainly true for a number of foolish “friends of Charles” who signed his petition of support after his loss to Karsenty in appeals court, who just assumed they could trust him.

3) Goldman seems firmly in this camp that in her words “eschews conspiracy theory” (and includes Jim Fallows):

In the grand clash of narratives, the fact that Muhammad al-Durrah had been killed came to seem less important than determining the provenance of the bullet that killed him.

Goldman doesn’t elaborate on the meaning of this remark – did determining his killers detract from the fact that he was killed? – but I suspect the sentence is there just to reaffirm the fact that the boy was killed that day. Which is precisely what she can’t affirm except as an act of faith.

4) This raises the fundamental question of journalistic “epistemology” in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the Muhammad al Durah episode, the MSNM journalists adhered to an approach that runs as follows: What Palestinians claim is believed until proven false; what Israeli’s claim is disbelieved until proven true. And when convincing evidence appears, the MSNM falls silent. I would suggest that, with obvious variants in some cases, this remains the dominant approach to this day. In the case of the Turkish flotilla, this may have shown a shift of some significance, but I don’t think very likely to shift dramatically in the immediate future. One journalist I spoke with told me that complaining about how journalists cover this conflict is like a general complaining about the rain on a battlefield, an astonishing admission of shoddy moralism at work. For a brilliant spoof on this attitude, see the latest Latma video.

5) Enderlin is at the heart of this enterprise in more ways than one. The term Pallywood occurred to me after a stunning afternoon, watching Abu Rahmah’s raw footage with Enderlin (perhaps the first non-screened person to view them), and being surprised at how much of the footage, when not boring, was staged, in some cases ludicrously so. When I noted this pervasive staging to Enderlin, he replied, “Oh yes, they do it all the time; it’s a cultural thing.” That’s when it hit me: I had seen plenty of evidence that they staged scenes (some of which is in Pallywood), but I never imagined that Western journalists had no problem with it, no problem with running it. Imagine a news desk in the USA where a photographer regularly produces staged scenes to be used in the evening news. How long before he was fired. And yet, Enderlin had worked for over a decade with Abu Rahmah at the time of the Al Durah episode, and continues to honor him, as does Jim Clancy of CNN. Since that day, I have been grappling with the likely possibility that our journalists, either not understanding, or not caring, or actively siding with the Palestinians, have been systematically poisoning our information systems for the last decade with lethal narratives concocted by Palestinians to sow hatred and violence. Al Durah is an icon of hatred.
6) So let me, as the grader at Second Draft, give Mackey’s blogpost at the Lede a grade. On a curve, it’s an A-. No one in the NYT has come close to a serious examination of these issues in this last decade. In terms of the standard of journalism that we will need to meet if we are to survive as a free society, it’s falls short by a great deal. But it is, after all, just a blogpost.

I’d hope that either Mackey, or someone else at the NYT take the next steps. They are, of course, not, like so many journalists before, to raise the topic, frame it in a way to caution most people away from further investigation, and drop it. The next steps are to examine the evidence and either agree with our analysis, or actually respond to the key findings, offer more convincing explanations or interpretations of the following evidence:

a) all the bullets whose provenance we can identify came from the Palestinians side – from the pattern of dust they kick up on the wall at impact.

b) the blood that we see (red area around stomach in the footage, red blood under the father the next day) does not correspond in any way to the gaping wound of the boy in the hospital identified as Al Durah, or the ambulance driver’s claim that he scooped up Al Durah’s guts from the sidewalk.





c) The last time we see the boy on Abu Rahmah’s tape, he’s alive and, arguably, well. Indeed, the last “take” of 10 seconds, which Enderlin cut from his report (he had declared the boy dead in “take 4″ shows the boy not clutching his stomach wound (from which he allegedly died) but rather, stretched out, holding his hand over his eye, deliberately raising his arm up, looking out, and slowly lowering it, even as his feet rise behind in counter-balance.

d) the boy that hospital authorities and journalists identified as Muhammad al Durah, was not Muhammad al Durah.

e) We do not have any evidence that Israeli bullets were shot, despite, allegedly, 40 minutes of firing “like rain,” and eleven bullet wounds in the father and son. Indeed, Talal abu Rahmah is on video lying about the bullets.

These are only some of the many anomalies I’d invite you to explore before you weigh in again on this matter. And of course, I sincerely hope you do choose to weigh in again. This may just be the story of the last and next decade.

The refusal would be comic, given that they’ve already published 37 articles on the topic, 76% of which are anti-Israel, and 11% (4) pro-Israel (one a surprise they couldn’t avoid because it was one of their own columnists). Nor is this an isolated incident. When Antony Lerman, one of the “alter-juifs” of England, savaged Robin Shepherd’s A State Beyond the Paleindictment of the Western media’s coverage of the conflict, the Guardian refused the author the right of rebuttal.

But it illustrates one of the fundamental aspects of Western media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict: when the slanders are out, the MSNM runs the story; when they prove false, the press falls silent. Raphael Israeli already pointed this out in a close study of the Jenin “poisoning” scandal of 1983, one of the early episodes in the history of Pallywood.

MacEoin turned to CIFWatch, one of the most exemplary “shadow sites” of a major MSNM production (Comment is Free), which documents and refutes the systematic channeling of anti-Semitic themes via the socially acceptable avatar of anti-Zionism. Here is MacEoin’s piece via the internet, just the kind of thing that could not happen in the 20th century.

What the Guardian Doesn’t Publish: How many Seas…? by Denis MacEoin
June 14, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Guardian, Brian Whitaker, Denis MacEoin, Flotilla, Distortion | by Hawkeye

This is a guest post by Denis MacEoin.

Those of you who take an interest – and, in most cases, that’s going to be a malign interest – in matters relating to Israel, Palestine, and the strangely lovable terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah – will have been greatly stirred by the troubling episode of the boat that tried to break a blockade imposed by a state acting within its legal rights, but which ended up with nine of its activists dead. What a rush to judgement this has been. Within hours of the event, half the world had decided it knew all the facts and wasn’t going to back down, regardless of any new facts that may come to light. I have some of those for you, but wait a little. What you need first is context, something in short supply in discussions of these matters.

If, like myself, you have a serious interest in Middle East affairs, you can’t be unaware of an accusation that has infected the Arab world and beyond. It’s very simple: take a war (any war will do), a revolution (ditto), a tragedy, and, lo and behold, the Jews are behind it. Here’s a string of such claims from a bog-standard white supremacist website [Warning hate site]. And here’s a representative (and much shortened) statement from Egyptian general Hasan Sweilem:

‘The Jews stood behind wars and internal strife, and that caused European rulers to expel them and kill them. For example, the Crusader armies, passing through the Rhine basin on their way east, massacred them and burned their houses as an act of repentance to their God. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, they collected the Jews in a synagogue and burned them live. Their kin in Russia suffered a similar fate….They were expelled from France, England, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Austria, Holland, and finally from Spain, after they underwent the Inquisition trials for their conspiracy to penetrate Christian society like a Trojan horse….The Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe generated civil revolutions, wars, and internal strife….The Cromwell Revolution failed in 1649 in England, following the Jewish conspiracy to drag England into several wars in Europe….Then the French Revolution broke out, which the Jews had planned, based on the first conference of their rabbis and interest-loaners that had been convened by the first Rothschild in 1773 in order to take over all the world resources….That conference adopted twenty-four protocols, including the uprooting of the belief in God from the hearts of the Gentiles, distracting people by distributing among them literature of heresy and impurity, destruction of the family and eradication of all morality….’

The Jews went on, he says, to start the First and Second world wars and to lay the foundations of both communism and Nazism.

The thing about these claims is that everything bad that has ever happened to Jews has been legitimate defence by those whom the Jews have harmed. The Holocaust, for example, was the deserved punishment for a people mired in every sort of treachery and hatred for mankind.

A lot of this is rooted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a plagiarized fake that is still a bestseller in the Muslim world. And just as European anti-Semitism joined forces with existing Islamic tropes of evil Jews, taken from the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad, it has mutated and found expression in anti-Israel speech. Why otherwise did protesters on the streets of European cities following the 2008-09 war on Gaza chant ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’? And why did activists on board the Mavi Marmara sing ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud, Jaysh Muhammad Sa-ya‘ud’? ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews: the army of Muhammad will return.’ Khaybar was the last of several Jewish settlements attacked by Muhammad and his forces, after which the Jewish inhabitants were either massacred or sold into slavery or deported. Just what sort of ‘humanitarian activists’ issued this threat on board a ship carrying ‘aid’?

The Mavi Marmara is just the latest in a string of allegations that take for granted Jewish or Israeli malignity. The fabled ‘massacre’ of Deir Yassin in 1948 has remained in anti-Israeli propaganda, despite the fact that a host of Arabs, many eye-witnesses, have admitted that a wartime battle was exaggerated out of all proportion both to embolden and to frighten the native population. The other famous ‘massacre’ was at Jenin refugee camp in 2002 still lives in memory as a butchery of hundreds or even thousands of innocent Palestinian. According to one Palestinian source, it was the ‘massacre of the 21st century’. In fact, a UN enquiry established that 52 Palestinian fighters died, along with Israeli soldiers. According to the Weekly Standard, ‘That same day, you could hear breathless reports of the supposed Israeli atrocities in Jenin being spread by Palestinian sources on NPR, CNN, and elsewhere.’ The old adage holds true: ‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’

That’s exactly what happened last Monday. There was a rush to judgement that took the world by storm. The UN Security Council was in session almost before the boats reached Ashdod. There had been no time to hold an enquiry, to question the commandos, or to question the activists. The Jews, as usual, were responsible for everything, even the vicious attacks on their own troops. But now that a few days have gone by, the picture is changing. On Tuesday, the IDF found a cache of ceramic bulletproof vests, night-vision goggles and gas masks on board the Mavi Marmara. As well as these, the ship contained large quantities of metal and wooden batons, powerful catapults (with marbles to use as stones), many of which were used to attack Israeli soldiers. A group of fifty passengers have actually or possible terror connections, others are linked to extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and possibly al-Qaeda. Many were carrying very large (and identical) sums of money on their persons. And some have admitted that they had been organized into cells throughout the ship and had gone in, prepared to fight and die as martyrs.

Read the rest.

The Reutersgate 2.0 showed how the MSNM will routinely crop the evidence so it can fit into the “Palestinian David vs. Israeli Goliath” frame. Cropping happens all the time, and, like this rejection by the Guardian, it does so in ways that preserve the narrative frame.

[Correction below]

The first time Reuters photo department got into trouble, in Lebanon in 2006, they ran photoshopped pictures from an Arab photographer (Adnan Hajj) which emphasized the violence.

This time, they cropped photos provided by Turkish media (the high-circulation weekly Hürriet), to remove traces of violence. See Elder of Zion and CAMERA for analyses (LGF seems to be down).

That doesn’t seem consistent, until you consider the context.

In the case of Adnan, the photocopying emphasized Israeli violence against Arab victims. That kind of image raised no red flags in a MSNM office (Reuters Photography) that framed the conflict as Israeli Goliath vs. Palestinian David. They were receiving a flood of such photos and passing on the best, of which Hajj’s photo of the Beirut skyline covered in plumes of smoke was a good one among many.

On the other hand, here, we have something else. The Turkish journal published these photos because they, and their Turkish audience, are proud of the damage they inflicted: from their point of view, this photo is embarrassing to the Israelis. Just like the Egyptians have a museum to their (brief moment of) victory in 1973 (October 6), so too the Turks now have a moment where they had the upper hand on Israeli soldiers. In a tribal warrior honor-shame culture, these photos are the equivalent of counting coup.

Of course, oops, that was supposed to be a peace-activist flotilla, with nothing but love for the whole world. As the NYT (Isabel Kershner) reported:

“Our volunteers were not trained military personnel,” said Yavuz Dede, deputy director of the organization. “They were civilians trying to get aid to Gaza. There were artists, intellectuals and journalists among them. Such an offensive cannot be explained by any terms.”

(Note: It’s one thing to quote Mr. Dede, it’s another thing not to probe the validity of his statement.)

And indeed, the worldwide indignation over Israel’s killing the nine on board depends on this story. If they were a bunch of bloodthirsty, street-fighting Jihadis, armed for close quarter combat, then the story doesn’t quite work.

So what does Reuters do with a picture like this?

It crops out the blood and the knife in the right margin, so it sends out this:

And here’s what it cropped from the right margin:

Note that nothing is cropped from the left side of the picture. Elder of Ziyon notes that the cropped out knife is actually evidence of a) the presence not of kitchen knives but of combat knives on board, which don’t appear among the knives recovered by the IDF, hence b) the probability that the Jihadis threw some of their weapons overboard.

It certainly seems to the pro-Israel crowd that this launders the pictures for a Western liberal audience who still need to believe their (the MSNM’s) narrative about “humanitarian” “human rights” NGOs going to save a desperate people.

As Adam Holland notes (quoting LGF):

That’s a very interesting way to crop the photo. Most people would consider that knife an important part of the context. There was a huge controversy over whether the activists were armed. Cropping out a knife, in a picture showing a soldier who’s apparently been stabbed, seems like a very odd editorial decision.

Reuter’s response to those who inquired about the problem?

The images in question were made available in Istanbul, and following normal editorial practice were prepared for dissemination which included cropping at the edges [sic]. When we realized that a dagger was inadvertently cropped from the images, Reuters immediately moved the original set as well.

So it’s purely an innocent oversight. As soon as it was pointed out, Reuters fixed the problem. Nothing going on here.

But Charles Johnson worked with the second photo and found still more manipulation:

And it gets worse. I took the photo into Photoshop and increased the exposure to lighten the dark areas, and discovered that they didn’t just crop out the knife and blood — they also cropped out another badly injured Israeli soldier lying on the floor.

Honest Reporting has posted on this and asked David Katz to comment. After not wanting to jump to conclusions, and examining the evidence, including Johnson’s analysis, he concludes:

It is crystal clear that someone at Reuters has deliberately hidden key parts of the original images. What we do not know at this stage is, who at Reuters did this and more importantly why?

The use of imagery in the media war is becoming more and more widespread. There has to be a responsibility from the bloggers, website hosts and especially from the international news wire services in the way they use the images.

This appears to be a deliberate attempt to change images for a specific reason. Reuters needs to investigate this and act in an appropriate manner

Shades of Jeremy Bowen explaining his expression of pleasure at the Israelis problems with the USA as just “glitch in [his] editing process.”

We need a site dedicated to such lame excuses.

Do we also need a category offense like RWUII: Reporting while under the influence of an ideology?

Correction about the opening paragraph: Apparently, Elder of Ziyon’s guest blogger, Suzanne seems to have first noticed the problem. While this may create a certain amount of friction in the blogosphere, which Elder handles impeccably.]

Following conflicting and incomplete reports about the violence aboard the “Gaza flotilla” boats, NGO Monitor called on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and journalists who quote them, to carefully scrutinize allegations of “human rights violations” before repeating false claims and propaganda.

“In many instances in the past, NGOs have been responsible for repeating and amplifying false claims of Israeli ‘crimes,’ without credible evidence,” said NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg. “In 2002, an Amnesty International representative gave credence to the ‘Jenin massacre’ lie, and in 2006, Human Rights Watch did the same in the tragic Gaza Beach incident. The baseless NGO claims were publicized in the media, and then embraced as true by anti-Israel activists.”

NGOs were similarly responsible for promulgating false claims regarding Muhammad al-Dura (2000) and the Reuters cameraman (2008), and during the Lebanon and Gaza wars.

“Information provided by the flotilla organizers, who include International Solidarity Movement radicals, is particularly suspect. As videos on CNN and BBC demonstrate, the activists were armed and violent,” said Steinberg. “The videos disprove the version put forth by the Free Gaza Movement.”

NGO Monitor also noted that the flotilla was endorsed by EU-funded Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), EU- and European-funded Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), NIF-funded Coalition of Women for Peace, European-funded Alternative Information Center (AIC), and Israeli groups New Profile, Bat Shalom, Yesh Gvul, and Zochrot. Jeff Halper, executive director of ICAHD, is on the board of advisors.

For the linked version, visit NGO Monitor

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).

Now we have two key pieces of evidence of how this works.

Exhibit A: Exaggerate Israeli-inflicted damage by an order of ten.

Palestinians constantly make wild statistical claims, as in when Mahmoud al Zahar of Hamas accuses Israel of killing 8000 in the first, “peaceful” intifada, when the Israelis and the Palestinians killed about 1000 each.

Or when al Zahar accuses Israel of imprisoning one quarter of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian “human rights” NGO, Adalah gives a number to the fraction: 700-750,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons since 1967. This figure, absurd by any careful statistical analysis – was cited by an Adalah representative who testitifed before the Goldstone Commission. Again the figure is off by an order approaching ten.

But the Goldstone Report took the figures and rounded them down by a mere 50,000 (making the real number of prisoners since 1967 a statistical error):

¶1444. It is estimated that during the past 43 years of occupation, approximately 700,000 Palestinian men, women and children have been detained under Israeli military orders. Israel argues that these detentions are necessary on grounds of security

And now, Martin Kramer noticed that in the Goldstone report, the number of factories knocked out by Israel resulted in 40,000 jobs lost, when the original report only stated 4,000.

One can see the “factoid” given birth before our very eyes. In his testimony, Amr Hamad, speaking for the Palestinian Federation of Industries declared:

The industrial sector that was destroyed, for example, the 324 factories that were destroyed, that we[re] destroyed used to employ four-hundred thous-, uh, 40,000 workers. And these have lost their uh, jobs, uh, forever.

Apparently 4,000 seemed too small a number, and perhaps the Mission members had already shown themselves so gullible (this was the same session where Colonel Travers asked psychiatrist el Sarraj why the Israelis kill kids in front of their parents), that they’d swallow anything. So Amr Hassan corrected in mid-flight and switched to 40,000, when he knew full well the report upon which his testimony was based read 4000. And he read the panel right: they didn’t check the report and bought his invented number.

In this they followed in the footsteps of such sterling journalists as the NYT’s Ethan Bronner, who, recycling Hamas casualty statistics which had taken an in-flight adjustment of claiming 2/3 civilian casualties as opposed to 1/3, ended up having more civilians die between January 6 and 10, than all the casualties for that period.

So classic Pallywood pattern: Palestinians make it up on the go; Western “specialists” recycle it uncritically.

Exhibit B: Underreporting others’ casualty figures by a factor of ten.

(HT Chaim Sonnenfeld, who is now working on a major study of this issue, and whose material he has generously shared with me.)

It may come as a surprise to some of the less informed that Marc Garlasco, recently accurately smeared as an avid Nazi memorablia collector, long known for his harsh condemnations of Israeli targeted killings, and strong proponent of outside, independent investigations where the Israelis are concerned, was a) the decisive player in over 50 targeted assassinations carried out by the US military in Iraq in 2003, and b) wrote the report for Human Rights Watch on his own work. There he summarizes the impact of 50 failed aerial attacks targeting Iraqi figures:

All of the fifty acknowledged attacks targeting Iraqi leadership failed. While they did not kill a single targeted individual, the strikes killed and injured dozens of civilians. Iraqis who spoke to Human Rights Watch about the attacks it investigated repeatedly stated that they believed the intended targets were not even present at the time of the strikes.

This may well be an underestimate of an order of 10, possibly 100. It’s altogether possible that these 50 strikes, in one case on a restaurant with four one-ton bombs that destroyed over a block in a residential area, killed dozens each, in some cases, hundreds. Garlasco himself admitted as much in an interview on 60 Minutes:

“Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets — Iraqi officials. But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, “a couple of hundred civilians at least” were killed.”

Still probably off by a factor of 5-10. Garlasco apparently illustrates the classic pattern of defensive admission and aggressive accusation: he admits to the minimum and accuses to the max.

Indeed, the whole history of other Western armies’ targeted killings is under-reported, even though it is roughly close to 10-50 civilians for every target acquired, in comparison with 2:1 for the IDF in the last decade. (Garlasco, in illustrating how much the US cares about not harming civilians, mentions proudly that if there will be more than 30 civilian casualties, you need to get permission from the president or the secretary of Defense: NPR interview at 14:30) And in the meantime, the NGOs and news media like the Guardian, demonize Israel for its criminal record in targeted killing.

As a result, Israeli generals avoid certain European capitals like London, for fear of arrest for war crimes whose numbers don’t even approach those of other European countries like England. The press and the NGOs hound Israel for her war crimes, and the NATO powers, like the USA, blow off light criticism with comments about how “it’s the only game in town.”

And so, product of this distorted universe, Goldstone, at his inimitable credulous best, thinks oh-so well of the Americans, even as he accuses the Israelis of deliberately targeting civilians.

Why not? After all, he’s just following closely in the steps of auto-apologist Garlasco.

Of course, it’s important to remember that both the US and Israel, no matter what their flaws, are on one side of a continuum that has, at the far end, the “weak” and vicious asymmetric armies of Jihadis who deliberately target not only their enemies’ civilians, but also their own.

UPDATE: Tzipi Livni cancels trip to England for fear of arrest by Scotland Yard.

UPDATE: Good post at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion