Revisiting ‘Al Durah’ in Time of Iranian Media Control
This man thinks he won’t be challenged by anyone who counts. He doesn’t have to give a serious answer, because the people who count — his bosses at France2, his fellow journalists — support him fully.
The following video is my favorite, in part because it’s based on my testimony (both in court and to Esther Schapira), and also because it makes it clear what the problem is with the MSM’s handling of the Middle Eastern conflict — the inability to handle the culture of deception that they face with the Palestinians, and their willingness to ignore the problem as their form of a “solution” to what otherwise would be a very sticky problem.
Can you imagine what would happen if Western journalists actually demanded real footage and rejected the staged stuff?
Here are my remarks describing my first viewing of Talal’s rushes in October 2003.
Presumably having asked Charles a question related to my remarks, he responds as follows. Note that this answer goes to the heart of “Pallywood.” This is the thinking of one of the most prominent Middle East correspondents on the problem of staging evidence.
Recall the New York Times comment on Rathergate: “fake but accurate“?
For those who can’t believe their eyes and ears, here’s a transcript of Enderlin’s remarks with some added fisking.
This is not staging, it’s playing for the camera. When they threw stones and Molotov cocktails, it was in part for the camera. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. They wanted to be filmed throwing stones and being hit by rubber bullets. All of us — the ARD too — did reports on kids confronting the Israeli army, in order to be filmed in Ramallah, in Gaza. That’s not staging, that’s reality.
First, note that this is the Palestinian frame of the story: boy vs. tank, David vs. Goliath. This is the “reality” that Enderlin and his colleagues purvey to their Western audiences. Lots of pictures of little kids up against tanks. Very few of the men with weapons standing behind, firing in the hopes of getting Israel to kill one of their own kids for the camera. And none of the hate industry that urges genocide and produces dancing in the street at any news of dead Israeli (or American) civilians.
Second, what we have here is a man who’s so deeply immersed in Pallywood that he can’t tell the difference between “reality” and staging. Take away the cameras and what have you got? Virtually every journalist I’ve spoken to — including ones sympathetic to Enderlin — admit that without the cameras there’s no action, that the “street” waits for the cameras. As a scientist attentive to the impact of the observer on the observed, Enderlin gets an “F.” He doesn’t seem to care.
Why? Because he can point the finger at everyone, since the whole MSM is complicit — ARD too! So don’t get high and mighty with me!
That’s not staging, that’s reality.
The words of a man who’s been on camera so long, and had people believe him for so long, that he can no longer tell the difference between celluloid reality and the real thing. Enderlin is a poster boy for the noxious role of the MSM in blinding Westerners to the troubles they face both in the Middle East and at home.
In the following segment, Enderlin tries to turn the tables on Schapira by challenging her and what he contemptuously refers to as the “conspiracy theory.” The argumentation is classic Enderlin. Note how at the end, in response to her answer, he shoots himself in the foot:
Enderlin: “Do your really believe … you really believe that the father and the son would be playing a comedy? Right in front of an Israeli post? In front of dozens of Israeli soldiers? Live bullets are being fired and they’re acting. You believe that?”
Schapira: “I wasn’t there.”
Enderlin: “You weren’t there. Then I’m telling you I wasn’t.
Precisely Charles — you weren’t there, and therefore should have exercised much more caution in reporting this story, as the French court admonished you:
Considering that it is determined that Charles ENDERLIN did not witness the events that he commented on in “off-screen narration” — a procedure that is in no way contrary to the journalistic code of ethics, as long as that is understood by the viewers to be the case; that in this instance, FRANCE 2 pointed out on October 1, 2000, that the death of the child had been “filmed by Talal Abu Ramah, [his] correspondent in Gaza” and on October 2, that the cameraman “had filmed the unacceptable,” which did not necessarily lead one to deduce that the commentator was not at the scene; that this fact led Philippe KARSENTY — without being thus able to deduce that the events reported were false — to question the concordance between the images chosen by the Palestinian cameraman (“It’s I who decides what is important,” we hear him say in one of the interviews), and Charles ENDERLIN’s commentary on these images.
Maybe if Enderlin had been there, he wouldn’t have drawn maps that place the Israelis on the wrong side of the street:
Enderlin’s hand-drawn map next to a real map of Netzarim Junction. Notice how Enderlin has placed the Israelis opposite the barrel, not diagonally across the junction.
But the real problem here is Enderlin’s form of argumentation. Historians call it “argument ex silentio” — claiming proof from lack of contrary evidence. In this case the silence of the Israeli army soldiers is proof, because presumably if the Israelis saw anything so suspicious they would have objected formally and publicly.
This argument has a major flaw: the Israelis have other things to do, especially when the bullets are flying. Even when they’re not, even when the soldiers can see fakery right in front of them, they don’t consider it important.
Here is the testimony of a soldier who was at Netzarim that day, interviewed by Schapira in 2001 and included in the new movie:
But al Durah’s more serious. Wouldn’t they have reported that?
It was pretty clear that the kid was never shot. But the conviction on the face of the “journalist” who shot the video was so convincing. The propaganda that has come out of the anti-Israel islamist groups is incredible. They’d make the Nazis proud.
Excellent, Richard!
President Obama told the Iranians “The World is Watching”, but is he and “the world” really learning anything?
Not without clarity and accuracy from the media, unfortunately.
http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2009/06/iran-where-blood-is-real-and-world-is.html
In the same manner in which technological/scientific advances can be used for good or evil, so too can the iconic images of Neda and Al-Dura be used for good or abused for evil.
While on the face of it both are images which circled the globe after clashes between opposing forces,
however, this is where the similarity ends.One is a non doctored image of Neda,an on the spot visual, the other is a staged ‘murder’ of Al-Dura, with the COLLUSION of the MSM.
IF not for the dogged and heroic efforts of Landes and Karsenty this colossal travesty of injustice towards Israel would never have been exposed.
Even now there are many who refuse to connect the dots, albeit for their own anti-zionist/anti-semitic proclivities.
When a lie gains legs it is nearly impossible for it to die.You tell a lie often enough and enough people will believe it, them’s the facts.
Regardless, ALL people of conscience owe a debt of gratitude to the dynamic due of Landes & Karsenty.
Kudos!
And where are the world-wide demonstrations and rallies, with Neda’s photo, against the crimes of the Iranian regime? Where are the posters “Pasdaran=SS” and “Mullahs=Nazis”?
Oh, it isn’t the Zionist army. Nothing to protest.
tiens, that’s funny, one has nothing else to chew at the moment !
good point, Notre Dame de Sion. the response to al durah was ferocious.
The man is a moral cretin. But what is appalling is the silence of the MSM in this country.
After Abu Ghraib, the US Army brought the perpetrators to trial and punished them. As Bill Whittle put it in his “Pope John” essay “Power policed itself.” This was something unseen in that country. Since when has the MSM policed itself? And as long as it is in bed with the Left, it will never police the Democratic party. Nixon’s Watergate brought down a presidency, but the repeated theft of elections by the Democratic machine, including perhaps the one that Nixon lost to Kennedy, were never front-page news.
This a profound, terrifying danger to human freedom everywhere. For without the truth you can never be free.
If you search the sites google and yahoo, you can find further explanations of the Pallywood setup. There is an excellent one of Talal pointing to the area where the shots were coming from, “they were coming from directly behind me.” and he points with his thumb. Directly behind him were the Palestinians. Another major point is that if you look closely there is a tripod about six feet behind them. The whole scene was being filmed from behind. That film man was standing “in the line of fire” the whole time. His films were never included and he was never shot. Had the Israelis shot at him, he would have been a dead man. Other Pallywood sequences are also shown and shown to be fraud. Bob Simons is seen making one or his famous Sixty Minutes broadcasts stating that at least 30 people were killed there by the Israelis. That lie was never brought out by Sixty Minutes, explained or apologized for. Bob Simons helped the lie of al Dura have legitimacy.
The French have always been notorious anti-Semites! The idea that a French news organization would behave this way does not surprise me in the slightest.
Other news outlets will continue to lie until this incident begins to turn up in schoolbooks as an example of Jewish brutality against the Arabs. By then, it will be established as fact forever.
Everyone is able to look themselves in the mirror by repeating the lie “It is an accurate representation of what was happening all over the region at the time. The Jews were brutal occupiers and we simply showed their true faces.” That, after all is the defense they used!
MERDE!
bubblehead
If it’s French anti-Semitism, they found their useful Jew(s), Enderlin being the first and foremost one. But, as Oscar the Grump points out, it’s a world-wide phenomenon. And the double standards are only too visible when compared to media and public reactions to the current Iranian Intifada.
Speaking of selective editorializing, consider the NY Times keeping the fact secret that one of their journalists was kidnapped by the Taliban. Apparently their is some criticism over the NY Time’s motives; did they keep the secret to reduce the risk of the journalist’s killing or to keep the ransom cost down? Be that as it may, the more interesting observation is that when it’s one of their own the NY Times has no problem with news blackouts and keeping a secret; they only have a problem with news black outs and keeping a secret if it is Gitmo or enhanced interrogation pictures or releasing intelligence gathering sources and methods, because then only the troops get their throats slit. It does provide a reportable event however, also known as a revenue source. If it bleeds it leads is also an instance of pragmatism too, the favorite philosophy of realists.
See these sites, there are plenty of others.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_B1H-1opys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzsCBFhCsyY
i don’t think it’s anti-semitism (which i define as the paranoid belief that if you don’t exterminate the jews, they’ll exterminate you), so much as moral Schadenfreude or the thrill of being able to say, “you jews, 2000 years you were oppressed by others and the minute you get power, you turn around and do it to the palestinians. you’re just as bad as everyone else.” and then of course there’s the moral sadism of taking the next step: “in fact you’re worse, you’re like the nazis, you’re even worse than the nazis because you should know better.” that last position is moving rapidly towards anti-semitism. post-modern anti-judaism fuels muslim pre-modern anti-semitism, and there’s no better illustration of the destructive relationship than the imbecility and corruption surrounding the al Durah affair.
Whether the Al Dura matter is a manifestation of French anti semitism or not, the larger picture is colored by the fact that active antisemitism is on the rise in Europe. Its manifestations include physical attacks on Jews throughout Europe. Even more dangerous is the acceptance of antisemitic narratives among the elites. To say you don’t like Jews is much more acceptable now than it was 20 years ago. Acceptance of anti Israelism (and its accompanying antisemitic references) among academics is so widespread that to defend Israel is an act of courage. The Al Dura photos and accusations of Jews as child-killers certainly accelerated the outing of these sentiments and made them much more mainstream. An official refutation of Enderlin’s work might be back page news, but it would help reduce the sting.