Al-Dura and the “Public Secret” of Middle East Journalism
In the summer of 2006, Reuters News Agency, humiliated when bloggers caught them duped by obvious photographic manipulation, fired both the photographer and the chief of their photographic bureau. They then removed all the photographer’s photos from their news archive. In so doing, they acted decisively in punishing two of the cardinal sins of modern journalism: “creating evidence” and getting duped by created evidence.
These principles – i.e., the ethics of a free press – go so deep, that Westerners apparently have difficulty imagining that others might not share our commitments. Thus few people believe claims that footage of Muhammad al Dura, the twelve year old boy allegedly gunned down by Israelis at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000, was staged. Charles Enderlin, the correspondent for France2 who presented the tale to the world, derisively and successfully dismisses such claims as a conspiracy theory as ludicrous as those about 9-11. How absurd: Palestinian journalists would not do such a thing; and if they did, the Western media would catch it. To this day, most journalists still ask, “Who killed al Dura?” not, “Was he killed in the footage we see?”
The last time we see al Dura on Talal’s camera: He holds his hand over his eyes not his allegedly deadly stomach wound. He lifts his up his arm and looks around. Enderlin had already declared him dead in an earlier scene, and (therefore?) cut this scene from his broadcast.
And yet, one of the major differences between Western journalism and self-styled “Islamic media men” emerges on just this issue of the permissibility of staging the news and attitudes towards what constitutes honest information. According to the Islamic Mass Media Charter (Jakarta, 1980), the sacred task of Muslim media men [sic], is on the one hand to protect the Umma from “imminent dangers,” indeed to “censor all materials,” towards that end, and on the other, “To combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.”
So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded:
These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.
When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, “I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.”
These remarks serve as an important prelude to considering the France2 rushes that will be shown in court in Paris on November 14 in the Enderlin France2 vs. Philippe Karsenty defamation case. These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes. Indeed there seems to be a kind of “public secret” at work on the Arab “street”: people fake injury, others evacuate them hurriedly (and without stretchers) past Palestinian cameramen like Talal, who use Western video equipment to record these improvised scenes. Pallywood: the Palestinian movie industry.
Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the “truth” is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years – Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes – continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?
Here the evidence provided by the Al Dura affair suggests that, in some sense, journalists are “in” on the public secret. When representatives of France2 were confronted with the pervasive evidence of staging in Talal’s footage, they both responded the same way. “Oh, they always do that, it’s a cultural thing,” said Enderlin to me in Jerusalem. “Yes Monsieur, but, you know, it’s always like that,” said Didier Eppelbaum to Denis Jeambar, Daniel Leconte, and Luc Rosenzweig in Paris.
As an echo of this astonishing private complacency, Cl√©ment Weill-Raynal of France3 made a comment to a journalist that he meant as a criticism of Karsenty: “Karsenty is so shocked that fake images were used and edited in Gaza, but this happens all the time everywhere on television and no TV journalist in the field or a film editor would be shocked.”
The implications of this remark undermine its very use in his argument: How can Karsenty defame Enderlin by accusing him of using staged footage when, as Cl√©ment Weill-Raynal here admits, everybody does it? Is it wrong to do this? And if so, why does Weill-Raynal criticize Karsenty for blowing the whistle? If not, where’s the defamation?
We may have stumbled here onto the very nature of public secrets and the value of a good reputation: everyone can cheat so long as no one is caught. It’s okay for the insiders to know, but the effectiveness of the (mis)information depends on the public not knowing. As Daniel Leconte reproached Eppelbaum: “the media may know [about this staging], but the public doesn’t.” Indeed, the public must not know. CNN advertises itself as “The Most Trusted Name in News,” not because it struggles against the influences, like access journalism, that destroy trustworthiness, but because it knows how important trust is to their audience public consumers of news. Thus, even if Western journalists use staged footage regularly, they cannot admit it. And, if denial doesn’t work, then, apparently, the next move is to say, “it’s nothing; everyone does it.”
An incident at Ramallah, however, suggests that Western journalists have systematically submitted to Palestinian demands that they practice Palestinian journalism. On October 12, 2000, to cries of “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Dura,” Palestinian men tore to pieces the bodies of two Israeli reservists. Aware of the potential damage, Palestinians attacked any journalist taking pictures. And yet, one Italian crew working for a private news station, at great risk to their lives, smuggled out the footage. Eager to avoid being blamed, the representative of Italy’s “official television station RAI” wrote to the PA that his station would never do such a thing,
…because we always respect (will continue to respect) the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for (journalistic) work in Palestine…
Just what are these “journalistic procedures”? Do they resemble the rules of the Jakarta charter, including the censorship of anything damaging to the Palestinian cause (no matter how true), and publication of anything damaging to the Israeli cause (no matter how inauthentic)? The PA, apparently unaware that this is not how journalism should be done in the West, published the letter.
But on the side where modern journalism allegedly reigns, such revelations were profoundly embarrassing: even the normally timid Israeli government “temporarily suspended” the press card of Roberto Cristiano, and no one in the normally aggressive Western media objected. Cristiano had violated the basic rule of Western journalism’s omerta, and openly admitted shameful practices. The public consumer of Mainstream Media (MSM) “news” needs to ask, “How many journalists adhere to these Palestinian rules, and how much does that adherence distort, even invert, our understanding of what goes on in this interminable conflict? Can we afford this “public secret”?
Nor can we expect the MSM to discuss this willingly. On the contrary, awareness of the importance of trust often enough leads journalists to hide their mistakes rather than admit and learn from them. As a French friend put it to me: “No one admits publicly to mistakes in France. It’s a sign of weakness.” While these are the rules of honor-shame culture, civil society depends on having people prefer honesty to saving face, no matter how painful that may be. And while we cannot expect people to volunteer for public humiliation, we can and must insist that there are limits to both individual and corporate efforts to resist correction.
This is Charles Enderlin’s problem with the al Dura case. He has, with his eagerness to get the scoop, foisted upon an unsuspecting world, a nuclear bomb in the world of information warfare. As Bob Simon put it (wmv file), to the background of a medley of Pallywood images: “In modern warfare, one picture is worth a thousand weapons.” And no image has done more to inspire the desire for violent revenge and global Jihad than this “icon of hatred” (wmv file) To admit his mistakes, to release the public from this image’s thrall and alert us to the possibility that such colossal errors not only occur, but go years without correction, would destroy Enderlin’s career.
Moreover, Enderlin’s failure, at this point, seven years later, implicates the larger MSM who, with their refusal to even allow the critique to air, protect him. This dilemma may partly explain why the MSM in France has scarcely mentioned this case; why they had nothing to say about the initial trial until Karsenty lost, at which point they leapt into print to reassure the public that the image choc of the Intifada “was not staged.” Enderlin, after all, is not some Palestinian hack, even if he trusts and therefore regularly channels the work of such “journalists.” He is perhaps the best known and most widely trusted European correspondent in the Middle East. Surely, as a Jew and an Israeli, he would not report false stories that blackened his own country’s name. They must be true.
More ominously, just as Al Dura represents a “higher truth” for Muslims — a justification for hatred, a call to revenge — so does it carry symbolic freight with Europeans. Catherine Nay, a respected news anchor for Europe1, welcomed the image:
The Death of Muhammad cancels out, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air from the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto.
From Ramsey Clark’s International Action website.
How ironic! The Europeans use an image produced by those who admire the Nazis and dream of genocidal victory over the Jews, to erase their own guilt over the Holocaust. In so doing, Europe has “atoned” for its sins against the Jews by empowering its Muslim extremists.
So not to admit such mistakes, destroys the very fabric of the civil society that allows a free press. In the long history of blood libels, no people have benefited from embracing the twisted hatreds they evoked.
At what point does self-protection become self-destruction, not only for the journalists who deny their errors no matter how costly, but for the public that believes them? As an Israeli journalist remarked: “Every day I have to walk the fine line between loyalty to my sources and loyalty to my audience.” How grievously have our journalists betrayed us, their audience, for the sake of finding favor in the eyes of their sources?
Palestinian journalists, in their own ethical declarations, argue that their role is to defend their cause and weaken its enemies. Journalism for them is war by other means; the media, a theater of war. Honesty and fairness do not intrude on this ethical prescription, but merely present a requirement for versimilitude designed to deceive susceptible Western audiences and incite Muslim rage.
In this clash of journalistic cultures, how often has the Western media played the “useful idiots” to Palestinian demands. How often have they presented Palestinian “truths” to us as “news”? And if they have done so as often and as destructively as Pallywood and its greatest success, the Al Dura Affair, suggests, how much longer will they persist?
“And yet, one of the major differences between Western journalism and self-styled “Islamic media men” emerges on just this issue of the permissibility of staging the news and attitudes towards what constitutes honest information.”
Richard Landes needs to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee. The Al Dura scandal could not have been perpetuated without the active support of the MSM! Differences between the media of the Middle East and their Western counterparts are not as great as they should be. Both employ journalists who believe they “went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.” CBS or The New York Times is merely a little more discrete and subtle when it deceives the American public. This is why we are obligated to spend the extra time during our busy day to get as close to the truth as possible. The rational approach to today’s MSM journalists, educated within a cultural milieu of moral relativism and deconstructionism, is to assume they are lying until proven otherwise. They have not earned the right to take our trust for granted.
Richard Landes has demonstrated that Palestinian “journalism” is deliberate dishonest propaganda.
The western MSM is deeply infected by the same rot.
Yes, it a public secret. That’s why as a media studies teacher in the 70s I required my students to use a video editor to create fake footage – to inoculate them against TV as anything other than carefully crafted drama. What has happened here is that another culture has weaponized TV and that weapon has entered our own media along the vector of the public secret – the insatiable commercial appetite for dramatic footage. Thats the secret – news camera operators and their editors are a team that creates dramatically satisfying footage. Action news. You want real documentary? Watch surveillance camera footage unedited. I’m NOT being cynical. TV is a descendant of the Greek theater. It is the nature of the medium. Even Fox shows ‘jinking insurgent with AK’ footage from Iraqi stringers. al Durrah reveals a repugnant additional market for any material that appears to cancel out moral responsibility for the holocaust. That goes well beyond corruption into a desperate moral inversion.
It occurred to me also that much of the western MSM sees journalism as a means to “…carry on the fight for my people.”
(“my people” in this case translating to those people who share my own personal political views)
How many editors willingly use their publications to further their agendas ?(recent examples, The New Republic and Scott Beauchamp’s writing or The Lancet reproducing a bogus statistical analysis of Iraqi deaths)
How many of Pallywood’s staged scenes in Gaza or doctored pictures from summer 2006 in south Lebanon…get reproduced in “western” media as a function of…
a journalist’s own philosophical predilections and political leanings ?
Also, inflammatory pictures (al Dura) are a means to journalistic recognition and notoriety.
To many “non news” phenomena are influencing journalism these days.
France2 and Charles Enderlin are going to regret suing Karsenty. If it weren’t for this, the issue would probably have died out. Instead, whatever the result of the Karsenty trial, the issue has surged to the forefront and enhanced discussion of media reliability in previously uninterested circles.
Also, I expect France2 are in for a few lawsuits, for it is now clear that at the very least they had no proof for the original libel, and that after a while they knew the unproven libel was being used for incitement to murder. I suppose a few lawyers are already looking into the legal implications.
David Thomson suggests The rational approach to today’s MSM journalists, educated within a cultural milieu of moral relativism and deconstructionism, is to assume they are lying until proven otherwise.
Maybe, but what proof could the MSM offer that might not fall into the “fake but accurate” category? The MSM has told us for decades that we could trust them, that they’re non-partisan unbiased purveyors of the truth. Sure, it might not be the entire truth but nothing important is left out of the narrative. They’ve demonstrated that they can’t be trusted (how many lives were needlessly lost because of their Katrina narrative?) and that they’re both biased and partisan. They’d be better off saying “we’re shills for every left-wing cause on the planet, including those we don’t know about”. Their business is trust and their business is failing because they can’t be trusted.
Landes certainly realizes the extent and depth of media deceit. Here he has focused sharply to expose a particularly horrid example. The alert reader will note the connections to large international news outlets. Too, there is no dearth of information on AP, Al Reuters, BBC, CBS, and many other literal newscrafters.
Al Dura is unique, seminal and iconic. Once this hoax is exposed and unraveled on the internet –Landes has stood virtually alone for years, doing exactly that–the importance of this travesty will be obvious, and that will have a domino effect.
A similar awareness of deceit is growing in US politics, as the major media are increasingly realized to have used literal censorship to advance the agenda of Pelosi and Reid. Now there are indications the gatekeepers are losing their power to keep the public ignorant.
In sum, the ideologically uniform media elite that deals in lies and censorship is in trouble. The internet is informing millions and raising questions; it will grow more powerful in months to come. This is a battle we can win: we can have accurate reporting and journalistic integrity. If we insist and persist.
Landes, whose work I have followed, is a principled defender of true freedom of the press. He is also imaginative and incredibly tenacious, which is why the gatekeepers must consider him extremely dangerous. I’m glad to see him on PJ Media.
Ah, does this apply to the Iraq coverage by the MSM? Just asking.
…even the normally timid Israeli government “temporarily suspended” the press card of Roberto Cristiano…
It was not clear who Cristiano was (you might have identified him as the aforementioned representative of RAI). Except he’s Riccardo Cristiano, not Roberto.
Yes, that’s in the linked document, but I’m usually too lazy to hit them. I’m glad I did in this case, because Cristiano’s groveling is even more shocking than your excerpt suggests. (My dear friends in Palestine. We congratulate you… — for butchering the two Israelis, one presumes. Unless that’s a translation error.)
“….These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth…”
Artistic expression? Our Troops are being put in harms way and killed in the name of artistic expression????? Granted, I did attend College (Photojournalism) in the 70′s, but, when did Journalism become an art form? Nothing like a twisted logic explaination for fraudulent reporting! How creative!
Why not define it in a realistic manner….PROPAGANDA?
Color me cynical, but…
We also have to remember what happens “when” Karsenty is formally vindicated and what that means for the people who have perpetuated the imagery that has indeed has been cited for the rational for volumes of violence and murder throughout the world (the al Dura meme has metastasized that far).
To find Karsenty “innocent” of libel is to find Enderlin, France 2, and a bulk of the “MSM” who have bought into the meme guilty of something far far worse than sullying a faux journalist hack’s reputation. Do we really believe that this, in an “honor-shame culture,” would be allowed to stand especially when the state courts have already ruled once in favor of the big lie (and I must admit to still being gobsmacked when this new judge asked for the raw footage)? Even if the court would rule in Karsenty’s favor, would it retain legs among the people whose life-blood need for access to the region relies on them ignoring it? People still, afterall, believe that MS Word had a beta version floating around in a Vietnam War era National Guard office, and that one little old lady lost so many of her only home(s) during the Hezbollah-Israel war.
People expecting a major victory from this, I’m sorry to say, are practicing some serious wishful thinking.
This big lying dog will more than likely be left sleeping for the “greater good.” Al Dura is “dead.” The people who have been murdered in retaliation for it are certainly dead. The people yet to die in further acts of revenge for something that likely never happened… are on their own. Plus, the “Fake but accurate” rule may also win out the day. We “know” that the Israelis are blood thirsty people who kill kids for treats. We certainly know that the Palestinians are indispensible victims (and thus unpromotable victims – never to be given reprieve from their “benefactors”). Too many people are in this victim market to let the bottom fall out. The “higher truth” founded on politically correct prejudice and backed up by outrageous lies will prevail. To do anything else would be too much effort.
Bill,
If it were now 1899, you could write an identical assessment of public and private interests concerning the Dreyfuss scandal. And yet justice was eventually to prevail, with significant consequences.
It is always so concerning such struggles. Pessimistic assessments have maybe 90% chance of proving right, but it is the remaining 10% that matter and are worth the struggle.
Richard, I look for forward to your incisive commentary on the deaths of James Miller and Tom Hurndall…
Thank you, Mr Landes. The MSM in Europe is surprisingly quiet on this. The BBC, for example, has used its own licence-payers money (we don’t have a choice but to pay this “tax”) to fight a Freedom-of-Information suit to suppress a report (the Balen Report) on its own bias in Palestine reporting. As Mr Thomson says, there would seem to be collusion here on an unknown scale. As Melanie Phillips has noted, this is a modern Drefuss affair, but it may involve more than just France.
I’ll bet they try to doctor the footage, so the testimony of those who have seen all of it will be vital. Keep the pressure up.
Adrian,
No problem. Both Miller and Hurndall were killed by IDF soldiers. Nobody is denying this. The bone of contention is whether journalists operating in a combat zone (not to mention volunteer human shields, in the case of Hurndall) take a known risk, and if when hit in the confusion of military operations may be considered murdered according to civilian law. When British courts rule in such matters consistently for other battle zones as they do for Israel, only then I’ll take notice.
In any case, Israel does not target civilians, and does not initiate military operations aimed against civilians. There is, however, one side in this conflict that certainly targets civilians, on a large scale, including children, and continuously for decades. It is the Arab side that does that. The whole purpose of the al-Durah libel is to justify such murders by reversing this well-known fact. This is why it is so evil.
This article is not only on the money, but it is much worse than the innocent Professor Landes can even imagine. I was hundreds of times in Gaza and the West Bank (1972-2005) and saw many times how Palestinian journalists stage news photo ops there and in Hebron for example. I attended and heard, during critical moments of the so called uprise how accredited journalists of A.P/Reuters were passing real time operative information, including transporting and supplying terrorist elements from a local hospital-used as a neutral command and control office (later one of them was captured and is doing time in Israel for his murderous activities). I cannot imagine a single journalist who can operate in these territories unless he is affiliated, working for and helpful to one of the murderous group. How could Ahmad Jadlalah, a Rueters snapper and a Hamas Royalty from Gaza know when and where to be moments after an Israeli Colonel was wasted in an ambush on a specific road in the early 90′s?
(brother was killed by IDF Sp’l Forces for kidnapping Nachson Waxman IDF (RIP), in the West Bank the early 90′s)
How do they know where to be in order not to get caught in the cross fire? Shooting Qassam Rockets from the local school should give the readers a clue how diabolical it gets. Red Cross ambulance, U.N vehicles, diplomatic passport, foreign media, NGO’s all serve the terrorists’ agenda and it is only the naive West playing shocked at these sudden revelations. The BBC fella who was kidnapped was also one of those very sympathetic voices to the cause. You cannot find in his reporting so much as mild words of criticism of the mindless killing by the Hamas characters compared to his daily onslaught on Israel, where he conviniently go to get his rotten teeth fixed. Even the Ivy League NYTimes bureau chief in jerusalem, a man who could seldom separate his rear from a comfortable chair in the office wrote soft takes in Gaza or reported on the War in lebaonon without once leaving to the North. The collusion is accross the board and it is pointless to single out the poor and uneducated Palestinian photographers who are encourgaed by the so called cultured foreign media to get them the hot takes while at the same time helping their “cause”. The same characters Landes speaks of later went to Iraq and trained many of the locals in faking images and staging great moments, after all they have more experience.
There certainly is a large element of wishful thinking in my optimism. The major media do not hold all the aces, however. We have some facts on our side, and we also have a powerful weapon big journalism cannot counter.
Note, please, that it has been seven years since al Dura was “killed.” Seven years! France2 never in its wildest nightmares expected this affair would have such longevity, and be so dangerous. They must be desperate to see it forgotten.
(Whatever happened to the trusty coverup? Why is stonewalling so ineffective these days? The internet!)
Of course other news outlets refuse to report on the al Dura scandal. The folks at BBC realize that this fracas in France could become an international avalanche, damaging the credibility of all the major news organizations, so they support France2 by keeping BBC’s audiences ignorant. Rational and predictable as that is, this unprincipled media solidarity cannot last, in my view. The longer the al Dura hoax remains under attack on the internet, the harder it will be for the journalistic elites to crush it with censorship.
Scandals can and do grow if good men refuse to stand down. The sheer persistence of internet-based reformers is becoming a serious problem for the media gatekeepers.
True, “…reform consists in taking a bone from a dog.” (J. J. Chapman) Some folks are brave enough and angry enough to try it…and now they have a novel means of going about it.
Yesterday’s comprehensive censorship is routinely breached today, as internet reporting on Iraq demonstrates (Yon, Totten, et. al). We CAN have freedom of the press if we turn up the pressure. Insist and persist!
very interesting discussion. let me just say, i’m not as naive or innocent as some readers suspect. i don’t know how bad it is, but i know it’s really bad.
the training ground of this cy-ops has been the arab israeli conflict for a long time (at least 25 years since the first lebanon war). the western MSM, part intimidated, part complicit — has played a devastating role in allowing this to happen, and the eagerness of western audiences for “dirt” on israel has provided the soil for these practices to “take.”
it’s now spread — both the practices (Pallywood) and the results (Jihad) — the world over. iraq, for sure.
the real problem is that we’ll never know how much until we have honest people in the MSM admitting to the situation. as benson suggests the blogosphere will play a major role in this for many reasons.
and until it happens, we will be a blind giant dinosaur getting shredded by velociraptors.
so while i share benson’s “optimism” it’s only because i think things will get much worse before they get better… and as a friend of mine says, “when does pharaoh listen? when it hurts.”
How do we get this info into the hands of the people? Send the article on to friends and media outlets and post it on your own websites!
Eason Jordan, pre-2003 Iraq, and the stories that CNN could not tell.
Please Google that article, and read it.
My best bet, as I posted (more or less) at RL’s place, is that this is how the media will spin it – if they bother to take any notice:
———–
Anger, sadness greet ‘smear’ of Palestinian boy martyr
GAZA CITY, 15 Nov., 2007. Palestinians reacted yesterday with a mixture of sadness and anger at allegations in a French court that the death of Mohammed al-Durah, killed by IDF gunfire at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip in 2000, had been ‘faked’
The allegations, which have not been supported by the Israeli or French governments, arose from a little-known libel case in France, which involved a so-called ‘independent’ analysis of the seven-year old killing by pro-Israeli activists in France and the US, some of whom have been described by world-renowned US journalist James Hallows as fanatics.
The dead boy’s father, Jamal, reacted bitterly to news of the allegations. ‘My son was a martyr slaughtered at their hands’, he said angrily, ‘and now they smear and slander him in his death and dishonour his memory, and the memory of all the Palestinians children they have destroyed’.
Veteran Ha’aretz journalist Gideon Levy – regarded as one of the finest and most fiercely independent of Israeli journalists – agreed, though more cautiously. ‘Undoubtedly the allegations are designed to deflect attention from the IDF’s appalling human rights record in the Occupied Territories,’ Mr Levy said, ‘especially its proven history of killing innocent children.’
Mr Levy also questioned the timing of the allegations, just days before the crucial summit in Annapolis, where the hopes of moderate Israelis and Palestinians for a negotiated peaceful settlement will rely heavily on the goodwill of both sides. Mr Levy considered that the sudden appearance of these allegations might derail the peace conference by destroying the atmosphere of trust. ‘Is this what Olmert wants?’, Mr Levy speculated. He declined to answer his own question when asked, but he is on record as profoundly distrustful of the Israeli Prime Minister’s motivations, character and truthfulness.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the site of the boy’s death, Hamas spokesmen were playing down the possibility of violence in response to the charges. In Gaza, Mohammed al-Durah remains an icon of the Intifada, and an adored role model for thousands of Gazan children. Allegations that his death was ‘faked’ could be expected to be controversial, to say the least.
However, Government spokesman Hamid Ismail said the mood in the Strip was sad rather than angry. ‘We understand,’, he said, ‘why Israel has to do this, why they will stop at nothing to tear down the shrine of this martyr. Even in death and silence he condemns them’.
However, he added, ‘There remains the chance that some will be so outraged that it will be difficult to prevent them shouting out loud in the streets, and possibly firing weapons into the air.’ But he was confident restraint would prevail.
The charges in the French court were sparked by claims that examination of the footage of the shooting broadcast by France2 showed some scenes might have been staged. No one, including the veteran journalist and cameraman who broadcast the story, has admitted any wrong-doing and no-one has ever been charged with any breach of professional ethics. These claims have not been taken seriously by any court or tribunal in seven years. As for the case before the French court, it is actually an appeal by one of the pro-Israel activists, Philippe Karsenty, against his conviction in a lower court on a charge of libelling France2 and its Jerusalem editor, Charles Enderlin, who is both Jewish and a loyal Israeli citizen.
———–
There are about seventeen conscious and identifiable spins in that ‘article’. If it were a real one, and I were writing it, I would be careful to say nothing that was factually inaccurate. Spin’s easy. Everything can be spun. That’s why journalists do it.
CBS Sixty Minutes ran an expos√© on the al-Dura affair years ago. I saw it on TV. And they’re as MSM as it gets.
I stopped paying attention to the Mainstream Media 10 years ago. I thought everybody had.
OF COURSE American news companies KNOW that they are using fake video and reporting fake stories. Back during the cold war (U.S. vs.Soviet Union) the news industry would print/broadcast EVERY LIE THE SOVIETS WANTED. This is done FOR A REASON!!! Hollywood, and the other news companies are “BUYING THEIR SAFETY” from terrorists and foriegn nations, in exchange for reporting lies and propaganda. I personally have seen major television newsmen in the USA, who on many occassions committed treason by using their job as a reporter to “MAKE DEALS WITH FORIEGN NATIONS”. Currently, that is the scam that Actor SEAN PENN is DOING. He took over for the newsman that used to do this in the past, as that newsman lost his job for REPORTING LIES BASED ON FAKE DOCUMENTS!!!
I remember seeing a Palestinian funeral (killed by Israeis) being broadcasted from above (I think it was C-Span) (I presume from a helicopter), and the guy fell out of the coffin. He quickly got up and jumped back in it. Does anyone remember that one?
The western public have grown entirely too complacent of the idea of “read with a critical eye.” This is all the more important when presented with images as “truth” that could easily be taken wholly out of context (Michael Moore).
Accordingly, they are easy targets for a weaponized medium.
A very good article, and a very troubling situation, but marred by an irrelevant and gratuitous connection with the Nazis at the end.
Jews… Nazis.. yes, we get it! Does every reference to the Jews require a reminder of the Nazis? Can’t we be trusted to remember by ourselves…?
Richard Landes couldn’t be more exact (he deserves admiration for his courage and decency), the propaganda war that infects Arab media as virus of Gobblsian qualities is an insult to History as well as to human decency to “doctored” news, plagiarism or similar acts of dishonesty. History will be eventually researched and discredit those liars and forgerers and all those that keep repeating “blood libels” as if nothing else matters.