Thread: Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair

Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair
Nidra Poller
Sept 13, 2205

This past June, Wafa Samir al-Bis, an aspiring twenty-one-year-old shahida, or “martyr,” was apprehended by Israeli guards at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza and found to be carrying 20 pounds of explosives in her underwear. The young woman intended to make a last trip to the Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva, where she had been receiving medical treatment for severe burns incurred in a domestic accident. Her goal this time was to blow herself up and kill as many young people as possible. Asked why she was aiming specifically at children, she replied that she wanted to retaliate for the death of Muhammad al-Dura.

Wafa Samir al-Bis is but one in a long line of shahids and would-be shahids inspired by the image of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy whose death scene was broadcast worldwide at the very onset of the so-called al-Aqsa intifada that broke out in September 2000. Televised images of the boy, reportedly killed by Israeli soldiers, instantly ignited anti-Israel and anti-Jewish passions all over the world, provoking a wave of violence from the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah to synagogue burnings in France. In the ensuing years, the story of Muhammad al-Dura has attained near-mythic stature in the Arab and Muslim world. In the West, though its essence is largely forgotten, it has fired the political imagination of many who accept it as emblematic proof of Israeli culpability for the outbreak of the armed conflict and even for Palestinian “martyrdom operations” against Israel’s civilian population.

The killing of Muhammad al-Dura is not the only long-lived accusation against Israel in the last five years. Another tale of atrocity, perhaps even better known, is the Jenin “massacre.” In the spring of 2002, the Israeli army moved into that West Bank city to wipe out a nest of terrorists responsible for a particularly intense sequence of murder and mayhem. Immediately, Palestinian sources claimed a figure of 5,000 dead (later reduced to a more modest 500) and an entire “refugee camp” bulldozed to rubble. By the time the truth emerged—Palestinians themselves finally confirmed a total of 56 dead, most of them in armed combat, and aerial views demonstrated the pinpoint nature of the Israeli operation—the damage had been done. Still today the Jenin “massacre” endures, out of reach of rational refutation.

But at least there is reliable information on what really happened in Jenin. That is not the case with the death scene of Muhammad al-Dura.

The background can be quickly summarized. In the summer of 2000, even before Yasir Arafat brought down the final curtain on the Oslo “peace process” by rejecting an American-brokered deal at Camp David, reports were circulating of a Palestinian military buildup. The first act of war was the murder of an Israeli soldier by his Palestinian partner on a joint patrol. But this was dismissed as a mere fluke. Instead, the spark that ignited the intifada was alleged to be Ariel Sharon’s September 28 visit to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site and also the home of a number of Muslim shrines, including the al-Aqsa mosque.

The next day, September 29, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, riots broke out as Palestinians exiting from Friday prayers in the mosque overran a police post and hurled paving stones, conveniently stockpiled nearby, onto the heads of Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall below. On September 30, Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank leader of Arafat’s Fatah organization, asserted that he could not and would not restrain further expressions of Palestinian protest.

It was later on that same day that a cameraman for France-2, a channel of the state-owned French television network, captured the death of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, allegedly shot in front of his helpless father by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. A news report, dramatically narrated by France-2’s Jerusalem correspondent, was instantly aired and was offered free of charge to the world’s media.

The effect was immediate, electrifying, and global. Overnight, Muhammad al-Dura became the poster child of the incipient Palestinian “struggle” against Israeli “occupation” and a potent symbol of the genocidal intentions of Israel’s government. A doctored photomontage was soon produced for Arab-Muslim viewers, featuring an imported image of an Israeli soldier apparently shooting the boy at close range.

That the death of Muhammad al-Dura was the real emotional pretext for the ensuing avalanche of Palestinian violence—and a far more potent trigger than Sharon’s “provocative” visit to the Temple Mount—is attested by the immediate and widespread dissemination of his story and of the pietà-like image of his body lying at his father’s feet. Streets, squares, and schools have since been named for the young Islamic shahid. His death scene has been replicated on murals, posters, and postage stamps, even making an iconic appearance in the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading. His story, perhaps the single most powerful force behind the Palestinian cult of child sacrifice over the last years, has been dramatized in spots on Palestinian television urging others to follow in his path, retold in a recruitment video for al Qaeda, and immortalized in epic verse by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

But is it true?

Although serious doubts were immediately raised about the veracity of the France-2 news report, they were swept aside by the emotions it provoked and by the flare of violence in the last months of 2000. France-2 indignantly turned down all requests to investigate or even to help others investigate by releasing outtakes. To this day, many people believe that even to raise a doubt about the authenticity of the report is tantamount to denying the reality of the 9/11 attacks on New York City.

But let us begin at the beginning, with France-2’s prize-winning scoop, aired just hours after the incident.

((continues))

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/ar...aid=12002025_1

Here is what viewers saw and heard: a few seconds of rioting somewhere on the West Bank, followed by a vague scene of armed men at Netzarim junction, a crossroads in the Gaza Strip. A jeep comes down the road. A single shot rings out, and a man in uniform at the open door of the jeep falls or jumps to the ground, clutching his right leg. An ambulance pulls up, stops on the far side of the road. The man is dragged across the ground, placed on a stretcher with his weight resting on his wounded right leg, and loaded into the ambulance. Charles Enderlin, France-2’s correspondent, announces in an eyewitness-style voiceover:

Three PM at Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip. A dramatic turn of events. The Palestinians shot live ammunition, the Israelis replied. Ambulance drivers, bystanders, journalists are caught in the crossfire.

Now the camera focuses on a man and a boy crouched behind a concrete barrel or culvert, their faces contorted in fear. Enderlin: “Here Jamal al-Dura and his son are targets of gunfire from Israeli positions.” The camera pans to a nearby Israeli outpost. The father waves with his right hand in the direction of the Israeli position. The father is hunched behind the barrel, the boy nestled against his back. Enderlin:

Muhammad is twelve years old. His father tries to protect him. He waves. But another round of fire bursts out. Muhammad is dead, and his father grievously wounded.

During the 55-second sequence, two shots have hit a concrete-block wall that stands like a backdrop for the scene, landing far afield of the father and son. Other bullet holes, similarly off-target, can be seen in the wall as well. The father shields the boy; the father’s arm is clearly visible, perpendicular to the ground. Guttural cries are heard, adding to the feeling of panic. The last round of gunfire kicks up a cloud of dust, obscuring the man and boy. When the dust clears, the boy is stretched out at his father’s feet; the father bobs his head as if groggy.

And that was it. As Enderlin would later explain, the reason France-2’s scoop was offered free to the world was that the producers did not want to earn a profit from so tragic an incident. Only the terrible moments of the child’s death throes, he added, had been edited out, being “too unbearable.” The film sequence itself, attributed at first to a “France-2 cameraman,” was subsequently identified as the work of the station’s Palestinian stringer, Talal Abu Rahmeh. By then, the full authority and reputation of France-2 itself had been indelibly stamped on the footage.

Within days, an elaborate narrative was being disseminated to flesh out the elusive details of the 55-second video. On October 3, 2000, testifying under oath before the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the cameraman Talal Abu Rahmeh alleged that Israeli soldiers had intentionally, in cold blood, murdered the boy and wounded the father. Abu Rahmeh’s testimony was precise and vivid. There had been, he said, a five-minute exchange of fire between Palestinian policemen and Israeli soldiers. This was followed by fully 45 minutes of gunfire coming exclusively from the Israeli position and aimed directly at the man and the boy crouching desperately behind a concrete barrel. According to the cameraman, he had captured on film a total of 27 minutes of this fusillade, risking his own life in the process. As an experienced war photographer, he could attest without hesitation that the Israeli outpost was the only position from which the boy and the man could be hit.

This amplified version of the incident, with slight but significant variations and a wealth of human-interest details, then took on a life of its own, being repeated and embellished in numerous background stories, special reports, and interviews about the tragic fate of the “simple boy from Gaza, who loved birds.” In one of these narratives, Jamal and Muhammad were said to have left the El Bureij refugee camp early on the morning of September 30 to visit a used-car market. Finding the market closed, they headed home in a communal taxi, arriving at Netzarim junction shortly before midday. The taxi was blocked by a raging gun battle, so Jamal decided to go the rest of the way on foot. In an interview on Israeli television, Jamal said that upon entering the crossing he found the firing so heavy that he took refuge behind an upended concrete culvert, where he and his son were pinned down for the 45 minutes of relentless gunfire aimed deliberately at them from the Israeli position. He waved to the soldiers, who could see he was an innocent civilian trapped there with a boy; they shot him in the hand. He tried to protect his son with his arm, but they shot him in the arm and shoulder. He tried to protect him with his leg, but they shot him in the leg, smashing his pelvis. The tragic outcome was described for a BBC documentary by Talal Abu Rahmeh: Jamal tried to call for help on his cellphone, asking someone to get the soldiers to stop shooting, or to send an ambulance. The ambulance driver was shot dead. The soldiers kept on shooting until they killed Muhammad, who died either instantly from a fatal wound to the stomach or, in another version, bled to death for 15 to 20 minutes because no ambulance could get through to evacuate him.





In the following weeks, journalists like Suzanne Goldenberg in the (London) Guardian, Gilles Paris in Le Monde, and dozens of others would write about this incident as if they themselves had been at Netzarim junction on the fatal day.


The al-Dura story was so immediately and so deeply harmful to Israel that no matter what government officials might say or do, they only seemed to make matters worse. Enderlin has stated that, before airing the report, he called the IDF spokesman to inform him of the breaking news and to caution him against shirking Israeli responsibility. The soldiers in the fort, however, had reported nothing remotely resembling what Enderlin described, for the simple reason that they had seen nothing. And yet, the first official Israeli statement on the incident included an apology for the death of the boy and a promise to investigate. It took a few days before the IDF concluded that, given the shooting angle from the Israeli position, the man and boy could not have been hit by IDF gunfire. This was treated as adding insult to injury.

Other objections were dismissed with similar contempt. Early on, for example, it was pointed out that the 55-second video did not show any of the normal signs consistent with wounds from high-power bullets. There was no blood on the victims’ clothes, on the wall, or on the ground. Their postures appeared wholly voluntary, with no sign of shock or trauma. As for Abu Rahmeh’s claim of a 45-minute free-for-all, experts in ballistics concurred that automatic rifles fired uninterruptedly for that length of time would reduce their victims to shreds, and the concrete block wall behind them to rubble. Nor did such behavior accord with what one knew about the ethics, discipline, and skill of IDF soldiers.

Early doubters of the received version included the French documentary filmmaker Pierre Rehov, who sued France-2 for spreading false information; the case was thrown out of French court. Nahum Shahaf, an Israeli physicist who led the first official IDF investigation, has been studying the incident ever since, accumulating one of the most exhaustive film libraries on the subject. Metula News Agency (MENA), an Israel-based, French-language service, likewise undertook a lengthy and still ongoing investigation. Esther Schapira, a German television producer who went to Israel convinced of IDF guilt, came away with a film exposing the contradictions and discrepancies of the France-2 news report; she was convinced that the boy had been killed by Palestinians. In a June 2003 article in the Atlantic, the American journalist James Fallows concluded that Muhammad al-Dura “was not shot by the Israeli soldiers who were known to be involved in the day’s fighting,” but also that we would never know who killed him.

Was Muhammad al-Dura shot by Israelis? By Palestinians? Perhaps not shot at all? Most attempts to develop a cogent counter-scenario have fallen victim to the tangle of conflicting details and the sheer accumulation of minutiae. Though it is almost impossible to say anything meaningful about the 55-second filmed news report to someone who knows little or nothing about the elaborate surrounding narrative, it is extremely difficult to get beyond the emotions elicited by the visual image to a critical examination of that narrative. Even “corrective” articles regularly commit factual errors about everything from the chronology of the intifada to the layout of Netzarim junction, ignore anomalies in the eyewitness accounts, or are oblivious to the absence of corroborating evidence. Finally, and fundamentally, every effort to reproduce the event dispassionately butts up against quite understandable resistance from those who cling to the packaged version.

But we do have extensive evidence of what was occurring at Netzarim junction on September 30, 2000. More than a dozen cameramen were at the junction filming the action that day. They were all Palestinian, but they were working for Reuters, AP, NHK, France-2, and other prestigious networks. Aside from Abu Rahmeh’s footage, brief excerpts from what they shot have appeared in news broadcasts. But hours of outtakes also exist, and their eloquence is astounding. I cannot claim they show everything that happened, but enough raw footage exists to substantiate what follows.

Netzarim junction is a simple intersection where one road leads (or, following Israel’s disengagement, will have led) to the Jewish settlement of Netzarim and another to the Palestinian village of El Bureij. A rudimentary Israeli outpost stands on the road to the settlement—a small fortress of blind slabs with a few tiny gunslits surmounted by a fragile lookout cage. Otherwise, Palestinian police and civilians circulated freely throughout the area on the day in question. They occupied a pair of three-story apartment buildings, known as “The Twins,” that overlooked the outpost and that housed the families of Palestinian policemen assigned to joint patrols under the Oslo agreement. Palestinians also held another building, an abandoned factory, that towered over the Israeli position. In addition, they operated from a mound of sandy earth directly facing the al-Duras and known because of its shape as “the pita,” and, down the road a bit toward El Bureij, from a cluster of what look like concrete bunkers.

On all the outtakes I saw, only one exchange of gunfire takes place: a brief outburst from the bunkers and a responding series of shots, ostensibly from the Israeli position. As for the death scene, it was filmed in front of a concrete-block wall abutting a makeshift building, opposite the pita but situated at an angle that made the al-Duras’ barrel inaccessible to gunfire from the Israeli outpost.

In one version of his story, Talal Abu Rahmeh went to Netzarim junction at seven in the morning on a hunch that the children would be out demonstrating “because it was a school day,” and he knew they demonstrated on school days. In another version, he ran over to the junction at 3 PM, after someone called his office to inform him that there were fierce battles going on. The outtakes show he was there from early morning. Apparently, a dozen of his colleagues had the same intuition; they too can be seen in the raw footage.

The Reuters, AP, and France-2 outtakes that I viewed show two totally different and easily identifiable types of activity at Netzarim junction: real, intifada-style attacks, and crudely falsified battle scenes. Both the real and the fake scenes are played out against a background of normal civilian activity at a busy crossroads. In the “reality” zone, excited children and angry young men hurl rocks and Molotov cocktails at the Israeli outpost while shababs (“youths”) standing on the roof of the Twins throw burning tires down onto the caged lookout; this goes on seemingly for hours, without provoking the slightest military reaction from Israeli soldiers.

At the same time, in the “theatrical” zone, Palestinian stringers sporting prestigious logos on their vests and cameras are seen filming battle scenes staged behind the abandoned factory, well out of range of Israeli gunfire. The “wounded” sail through the air like modern dancers and then suddenly collapse. Cameramen jockey with hysterical youths who pounce on the “casualties,” pushing and shoving, howling Allahu akhbar!, clumsily grabbing the “injured,” pushing away the rare ambulance attendant in a pale green polyester jacket in order to shove, twist, haul, and dump the “victims” into UN and Red Crescent ambulances that pull up on a second’s notice and career back down the road again, sirens screaming. In one shot we recognize Talal Abu Rahmeh in his France-2 vest, filming a staged casualty scene.*

Split seconds of these ludicrous vignettes would later appear in newscasts and special reports; the husk, the raw footage that would reveal the fakery, had been removed, leaving the kernel rich in anti-Israel nutrients. Such staged scenes showed up, for example, in a dramatic CBS 60 Minutes special report on Netzarim crossing—a place “now known,” intoned Bob Simon, echoing Palestinian sources, “as Martyr’s Junction.”

The al-Dura death scene was filmed right in the middle of these falsified incidents. It can be localized and situated. In one section of Reuters footage we see the man and the boy crouched behind the upended culvert as a jeep drives slowly up the road, stops in firing range of the Israeli position that is clearly visible in the near distance, makes a U-turn, drives in the opposite direction, stops short of the barrel/culvert, and helps perform the clearly faked evacuation of a man wounded in the right leg, as also shown in the France-2 news report. In fact, two ambulances stand for a long moment no more than fifteen feet from the al-Duras. There is no evidence of armed combat in their vicinity. No sound of gunfire. Men run down the road, passing in front of the al-Duras. No one is hit.

Nobody who was present at the junction that day has ever corroborated Abu Rahmeh’s testimony, though he claims that several children huddled around him for protection as he filmed, and voices—of grown men—were recorded by the microphone attached to his camera. None of the other cameramen working at the junction that day filmed the al-Duras during their alleged ordeal under Israeli fire (though the pair can be discerned on one occasion, inadvertently captured in the background in an uneventful stretch of Reuters outtakes).

I also viewed a copy of the satellite feed transmitted by Abu Rahmeh late in the afternoon of September 30. In addition to the 55 seconds aired that evening, it includes a final image of the boy who would be described afterward as “killed instantly by a shot to the stomach”: in it he is seen shifting position, propping himself up on his elbow, shading his eyes with his hand, rolling over on his stomach, covering his eyes.

In addition, I saw outtakes from an interview in which Abu Rahmeh tells how he discovered the boy’s identity. Leaving the junction at around 4:30 PM, he bumped into a colleague and showed him the images he had just filmed. The other journalist, by chance a relative of Jamal al-Dura, supplied the names of the victims. Mourners in the massive funeral procession, allegedly held before sundown that very day, carried Muhammad al-Dura posters. Where and when were they printed?

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It is no easy task to challenge the integrity of a powerful broadcaster in France, where the state-owned media operate with limited independence and no real competition. Charles Enderlin’s prestige and the dominant position of France Télévisions were enough to discredit the most diligent early analysts. To this day, Enderlin (a French Jew who became an Israeli citizen some 20 years ago and has served in the Israeli army) refuses to reply to questions about the accuracy of the news report and its enveloping narrative; responding with ad-hominem counterattacks, he threatens to sue his detractors for libel.

More than normal journalistic pride may be involved here. Enderlin’s news report was consistent with his stated overall view of the Middle East conflict. In his 2003 book, Shattered Dreams, he places the blame for Oslo’s failure squarely on Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and U.S. President Bill Clinton, effectively absolving the Palestinians of responsibility. The same interpretation is, of course, shared by virtually the entire French intellectual and political elite, and endorsed by influential print media like Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Télérama.

Still, in 2004, as the intifada slowed and its myth-ology faded, the al-Dura story, too, began to break down. Charles Enderlin and the French media gradually backed away from their initial assertion as to the origin of the fatal bullets, leaving the incident in a limbo where the Palestinians could continue to accuse Israel of murdering the boy in cold blood while the French let it be understood that he was killed in a crossfire. Then, at the end of October 2004, something happened that would have broken the logjam if the French media were truly free, which they are not.

Luc Rosenzweig, a retired Le Monde journalist who had doubted the veracity of the al-Dura news report from the first, completed an investigative article in which he formally accused France-2 of an “almost perfect media crime.” His essay was scheduled to appear in the mainstream newsweekly l’Express on the fourth anniversary of the intifada. But the magazine’s editorial director, Denis Jeambar, decided to delay publication in order to double-check Rosenzweig’s facts.

Given his position, Jeambar was able to arrange a meeting with France-2’s news director. He was accompanied there by Rosenzweig and Daniel Leconte, a prize-winning TV producer. Asking simple questions about Abu Rahmeh’s satellite feed, the trio got shocking answers. They requested the 27 minutes of raw footage showing the al-Duras pinned down by Israeli gunfire; they were shown a half-hour of fake battle scenes similar to those described above. They asked why there were no pictures of Israeli soldiers aiming at the al-Duras; they were told that on this point the cameraman had retracted his testimony, given “under pressure” to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. They asked to speak to the cameraman, then said to be undergoing medical treatment in Paris; they were told he did not speak French and that his English was too rudimentary (patently untrue). They asked to see the scene of the child’s death throes, professedly edited out by Charles Enderlin because it was “too unbearable”; they were told that no such images existed. They in turn produced pictures of a dead child, identified as Muhammad al-Dura, who had been admitted to Gaza’s Schifa hospital at noon or 1 PM on September 30, several hours before the alleged incident occurred; his face did not match that of the boy in the shooting scene, his wounds did not match the eyewitness descriptions. They were told that the channel’s forensic specialists would look into the matter.

At this point, Jeambar, perhaps thinking that the whole affair had become too hot to handle, reneged on his commitment to publish Rosenzweig’s exposé. Seizing the initiative, Metula News Agency immediately leaked a report of the meeting and, at a press conference in Paris, reiterated its case for the al-Dura death scene as an outright falsification. Thereupon France-2, threatening legal action against anyone daring to question the integrity of its journalists, launched a spin operation: it sent Abu Rahmeh to Gaza to film Jamal al-Dura’s scars and showed the resulting footage at a press conference from which all known skeptics were excluded. Articles appeared defending Charles Enderlin and denouncing Metula News Agency; most of them were incongruously illustrated with an image from the original news report clearly showing Jamal’s bare arm—perfectly intact—a few short seconds before the round of gunfire that ended the scene.

But the bubble of tolerance protecting the French media had begun to stretch and tear. Three months after their October 2004 meeting with France-2, Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte came forward with their side of the story. The gist of their essay, published in Le Figaro after being rejected by Le Monde, confirmed the MENA release while chastising both Rosenzweig and MENA for jumping to the unwarranted conclusion that the death scene had been staged. Jeambar and Leconte also enjoined France-2 to make a full disclosure, withdraw its unjustified accusations, and recognize the incalculably damaging effects of its report in inciting violence and blackening Israel’s name.

The very next day, Enderlin responded with an article in Le Figaro suggesting that his distinguished colleagues join him in a sort of gentleman’s agreement to lay the affair to rest. His broadcast may have been hasty, he wrote, but it was justified on the grounds that the public had to know the truth, because so many children were being killed. He should have said, “were going to be killed,” because Muhammad al-Dura, as his father proudly proclaimed, was the first shahid, and Enderlin’s broadcast itself was instrumental in much of what followed. But, more than four years later, Enderlin was still trying to defend his report as an accurate reflection of the situation on the ground.

Whatever his intentions, the result for Enderlin was disappointing. Indignantly defending their integrity, Jeambar and Leconte took him to task for having compromised his own. As Jeambar stiffly noted, journalists are supposed to report on what happens, not on what might have happened. Or, one could add, might not have happened.


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So, is there now general agreement on the truth about the al-Dura affair?

Interviewed on a French-Jewish radio station in the thick of the controversy, Jeambar and Leconte described their sense of astonishment upon discovering the staged battle scenes. And yet, by the end of the interview, they were assuring themselves and their audience that the death of Muhammad al-Dura was not staged, that the father’s injuries were authentic, that the Metula News Agency had exaggerated, and that the poor child must have been killed in a crossfire.

This notion of a death by crossfire is the deus ex machina of the al-Dura controversy. I have heard it a hundred times, and once used it myself. It is invoked in order to save reasonable people from even contemplating the possibility of a fabrication. But it is a figment of the imagination. The sole eyewitnesses—the cameraman and the surviving victim, Jamal al-Dura—have described 45 minutes of uninterrupted shooting from one direction only.

And what does the filmed news report show? The answer is staring us in the face, cinched by the collapse of France-2’s four-year concealment of its lack of evidence. As even Charles Enderlin has tacitly admitted, the al-Dura report was not some brief excerpt from a longer stretch of filmed reality but a scene with no depth, no duration, no origin, and no continuation. The 45 minutes? Gone. Abu Rahmeh’s 27 minutes? Gone, too. We are left with approximately a single minute of Jamal and Muhammad al-Dura filmed in continuous time.

In that minute, the two crouch behind an upended culvert and contort their faces in fear. Guttural screams are heard, but they do not come from the man or the boy; they come from men standing within range of the France-2 cameraman’s microphone. Jamal bobs his head. Muhammad stretches out at his father’s feet. Then, in the brief portion that was carefully edited out but that can be seen in the outtakes, the boy changes position several times, using voluntary muscles that only living people can activate.

During the 55-second sequence we see two bullets hitting the wall, which is already pockmarked with a number of other bullet holes nowhere near father and child. A cloud of dust obscures the last few frames. There is no sign or sound of a crossfire. There are no death throes.

The rest, as we say in French, is literature. There can be no further attempts to reconstruct the incident by adding to those 55 seconds since, as France-2 has now revealed, there is no additional footage.

But now look again at the Reuters outtakes. A jeep drives up a road, turns, goes down the other side, takes part in a battle scene. An ambulance pulls up, a “wounded” man is dragged across the road, placed on a stretcher, loaded into the ambulance, the ambulance drives away. Men run from position A to position B. Children toss Molotov cocktails at the IDF fortress. There is much laughter and cheering from the “audience,” clusters of cheerful young men watching the show. All this time, traffic trundles through the intersection, schoolchildren go by with their bookbags, a fashionably dressed woman talks on her cellphone and chats and jokes with cameramen who stand nonchalantly with their backs to the Israeli position. Things are moving, the energy level is high, the shababs are fearless. Palestinian policemen mingle in the crowd, occasionally shoot a few rounds into the air, join in the battle scenes, get “wounded” and come back for more. Children set fire to tires; you can almost smell the rubber burning. The France-2 cameraman, Abu Rahmeh, is there, too, clearly visible, in the heat of the action, filming ambulance evacuations of fake casualties in large patches of real time. Familiar, retrievable, believable.

Where then did the story, the enveloping narrative, come from? Where did all those prestigious journalists get the background information they developed with such evident sincerity in their reports? There is only one source: Talal Abu Rahmeh. The story told by Jamal, bandaged in a hospital room, dovetailed with Abu Rahmeh’s story. Enderlin religiously confirmed it. Everyone else repeats it.

Charles Enderlin constantly reaffirms his confidence in the professional competence and honesty of Abu Rahmeh—they have been working together for years—and systematically reiterates the dramatic facts of the al-Dura incident just as he heard them from his trusted cameraman. Where else could the story have come from? Though Enderlin narrated the incident as if he were on the spot, he has made no secret of the fact that he was in Ramallah on September 30, covering Marwan Barghouti’s press conference. His account of the dramatic phone calls he received from Abu Rahmeh is part of the fleshed-out narrative. According to Enderlin, the cameraman phoned to say that he was caught in a shooting zone and that his life was in danger. He asked the France-2 correspondent to look after his family if the worst should befall him. The two men called each other several more times, the photographer describing the scene of the man and the boy trapped, the father repeatedly wounded, his hand, his shoulder, his elbow, his hip. The child’s horrible death. Somewhere around 5:30 PM, the cameraman transmitted the satellite feed that would be edited into the famous news report narrated by Charles Enderlin.

How long did it take Enderlin, a seasoned journalist, to realize that his cameraman was lying, and that there were no additional images, no 45 minutes and no 27 minutes, to confirm the scene Abu Rahmeh said he had filmed? How long did it take France-2 officials to realize they had made a mistake in trusting the word of Enderlin? As long as the burden of proof rested on France-2’s challengers, it was relatively easy to quibble over details. Now that the event has been reduced to its 55 inconclusive seconds, one must ask a different question. What was the role of the government-owned French television network, which is to say the French government itself, in devising, implementing, and spreading this atrocious calumny, whose repercussions are with us to this day?



Nidra Poller, who lives in Paris, has written for National Review Online, Frontpage, the New York Sun, and other publications. Her essay, “Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate’s Lament,” appeared in the March 2004 Commentary.




* Students in a special course at the Israeli Military Academy, who had access to this raw footage, tagged and tracked the amateur actors as they went through their day, playing multiple roles. The injured and dead jump up, dust themselves off, play at offensive combat; casualties evacuated by ambulance are later seen loading a fellow actor into an ambulance or smiling with satisfaction as the ambulance door slams shut.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/ar...aid=12002025_1

The father of all fauxtography

The staging of pro-terrorist photos for the theater of jihad has been going on a long time.

I've blogged before about a notorious incident involving iconic images of a Palestinian boy, Mohammed al Doura, broadcast by French state-owned television in 2000. The boy was allegedly gunned down by Israeli soldiers. But as Nidra Poller and David Gelernter, among others, have reported, the truth was not on the terror sympathizers' side.

See also Pallywood and the investigation by Richard Landes here. http://www.seconddraft.org/movies.php

Now France-2 TV is suing critics of the Mohammed Dura video for defamation. The trial starts 9/14.

Pesach Benson is blogging. http://backspin.typepad.com/backspin/2006/..._clouds_ov.html

Pajamas Media is covering the trial, with exclusive reporting from Nidra Poller. http://pajamasmedia.com/2006/09/a_scent_of..._a_trail_of.php

Richard Landes will also be trial-blogging at at Augean Stables. http://www.augeanstables.com/


And IHC writes: http://www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.p...e=5/c/120920061

Is it defamation to question the media?

I would say that it’s downright irresponsible not to. But remember, this is 21st century France, and the Lady of the Republic has been raped, Lady Liberty’s in bondage, and Lady Justice has a migraine - as she’s been standing on her head for way too long.

But what is most difficult for a lot of us Anglos to understand, is that this is more about a French code of honor than anything else. People are being put on trial for expressing opinions that dishonor or embarrass France, as France 2 Television represents the French Republic. Forget the courts - this calls for a duel.

The Al-Dura trials begin this 14 September in Paris. The mainstream media may not deem the story fit for coverage (which in and of itself is intriguing and worthy of investigation), so I guess it’s up to us concerned and informed folks to push this issue into the headlines.

Perhaps it’s the public’s love affair with the macabre, and their lust for the sensational which enticed France 2 television to recklessly release footage reportedly depicting the shooting to death of a young boy, and the wounding of his father - at the hand of the Israelis (at least that’s what the voiceover said). In the rush to air 55 seconds of exclusive footage, which was rushed to France 2 by their Palestinian cameraman who filmed the scene; 27 minutes of rushes (unedited footage) were deliberately left on the editing room floor. France 2’s Charles Enderlin was so anxious to get the news out, that he generously distributed the 55 second clip free of charge to the global media.

Despite the incredible questions surrounding the case, France 2 has persistently refused to release the unseen footage to the general public. However, those few who have seen the footage report that it’s rather embarrassing, as it essentially records 24 minutes of youths feigning injuries, and ambulances evacuating the uninjured. ‘

This is not some over-the-top conspiracy we are dealing with. Highly regarded journalists and historians have gone out on a limb to question and probe the circumstances surrounding the case - the kind of people who can comfortably sip Chardonnay and discuss liberty, equality’, and brotherhood with top intellectuals in Paris - and they can do it in French (uh, let’s see... that would be liberté, egalité’, et fraternité). The kind of people who have Harvard, Princeton and Oxford under their belts and whose writings are published in the the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and respected academic periodicals.

But the mainstream, mediocre media just doesn’t want to go there. They’ve lost their ability for serious introspection, cutting edge journalism and investigative reporting. And why bother when, thanks to that very same media, so much of the public is dumbed down, passive and scandal-fatigued anyway?

Some argue that even if France 2 was negligent in handling the affair, why obsess over an event which happened six years ago. Leave it for the history books and get on with it already.

Except that it isn’t exactly history yet. At present, we’re still living, in realtime, the results of France 2’s rendering and editing of that footage. Inasmuch as there’s a surprising lack of blood in the footage, there’s been a staggering amount of blood spilled in this world in the name of Mohammed Al –Dura’s image...

...Whether we’re dealing with negligence, recklessness, or outright lies; the handling of the Al-Dura affair by France 2 was obscene, irresponsible and possibly devious. It must be taken seriously by the public.

Asking the right questions now and demanding valid answers may be the best way to avert further tragedy.

Watch this one.

How French TV Fudged the Death of Mohammed al Doura
Camera Obscura
by Richard Landes
Post date 10.17.06

In September 30, 2000, images of 12-year-old Mohammed Al Durah and his father--cowering behind a barrel at Netzarim Junction, in the Gaza Strip--circulated globally, along with a claim that they had been the targeted victims of Israeli fire. If Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount two days earlier had sparked riots, these images triggered all-out war. The ensuing horror and outrage swept away any questions about its reliability. Indignant observers dismissed any Israeli attempt to deny responsibility as "blaming the victim."

But, by 2002, two documentaries--one German, one French--raised troubling questions. The raw footage from that day reveals pervasive staging; no evidence (certainly not the most widely circulated tape offers evidence of Israeli fire directed at the barrel, much less of Israelis targeting the pair; given the angles, the Israelis could scarcely have hit the pair at all, much less 12 times (indeed the only two bullets that hit the wall above them came from the Palestinian side, inexplicably 90 degrees off target); there was no sign of blood on the ground where the father and son reportedly bled for 20 minutes; there was no footage of an ambulance evacuation or arrival at the hospital; there was no autopsy; and none of the dozen cameraman present filmed anything that could substantiate the claim that the father and son had been hit, much less that the Israelis had targeted them. These documentaries had limited exposure, in part thanks to France2's refusal to run the one by a sister station in Germany. But they did spark a demonstration in Paris outside the France2 offices by citizens outraged to discover that so horrendous an image may well have been a fake.

The demonstrations apparently ruffled feathers. Some writers lambasted France2's coverage--most prominently Philippe Karsenty, who called for Al Durah beat chief Charles Enderlin and France2 chief Arlette Chabot to resign, and, in response, Enderlin and France2 itself--using the same law invoked against Emile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair--have accused three critics (including Karsenty) of "striking at their honor and respectability."





Now, four years later, the lawsuits are finally coming to trial in Room 17 of the Palais de Justice in Paris. The three suits (one for each defendant) come in rapid succession--September 14, October 26, and November 30--with judgments four weeks following each hearing. And, in at least two of the trials, I, a medieval historian, have been asked to testify.



have become involved for two reasons. First of all, I noted almost immediately that Palestinians and anti-Zionists, insisting that Israel killed the boy on purpose, used Al Durah in a way familiar to medievalists--as a blood libel. This was the first blood libel of the twenty-first century, rendered global by cable and the Internet. Indeed, within a week, crowds the world over shouted "We want Jewish blood!" and "Death to the Jews!". For Europeans in particular, the libelous image came as balm to a troubled soul: "This death erases, annuls that of the little boy in the Warsaw Gherro," intoned Europe1 editorialist Catherine Nay. The Israelis were the new Nazis.

And second, when I saw the raw footage in the summer of 2003--especially when I saw the scene Enderlin had cut, wherein the boy(allegedly shot in the stomach, but holding his hand over his eyes) picks up his elbow and looks around--I realized that this was not a film of a boy dying, but a clumsily staged scene.

On October 31, 2003, at the studios of France2 in Jerusalem in the company of Charles Enderlin and his Israeli cameraman, I saw the raw footage of Al Durah from the only Palestinian cameraman who actually captured the scene on film--footage France2 still refuses to release for public examination. I was floored. The tapes feature a long succession of obviously faked injuries; brutal, hasty evacuation scenes; and people ducking for cover while others stand around. One fellow grabbed his leg in agony, then, upon seeing that no one would come to carry him away, walked away without a limp. It was stunning. That was no cameraman's conspiracy: It was everyone--a public secret about which news consumers had no clue.

But the real shock came when I mentioned this to Enderlin, who said he trusted this cameraman. "They always do that," he said. "It's a cultural style." So why wouldn't they have faked Al Durah? "They're not good enough," he said. A year later, the higher-ups at France2 made the same remark to three French journalists who also noted the pervasive staging: "You know well that it's always like that," they said.

I tried unsuccessfully to interest the mainstream press in this obvious fakery, but nobody was interested. "I don't know how much appetite there is for this material here," one person at a major studio told me. So I made Pallywood (Palestinian Hollywood)--a video-essay showing the dishonesty and the still-more-astounding Western complicity in using this footage to inform us about the Middle East. Then I made a follow-up, Al Durah: The Making of an Icon (and soon, Icon of Hatred). I established a website, The Second Draft, where I posted the movies along with my evidence so that, unlike France2, people could check my sources. And now the accused have asked me to testify.



hy did they want me? In trying to dismiss my first testimony, the plaintiff's lawyer wondered, "what does he know about images? He's a medievalist." Well, I know about the power of images, of narratives, and of forgeries, and especially blood libels. And, since my first book, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History, was about a set of forgeries that continued to fool historians for decades even after a critic revealed them as fakes in the 1920s, I also know something about the difficulty of getting specialists to acknowledge they were duped.

But this image goes beyond blood libel and anti-Semitism, beyond blackening Israel's image and whitewashing Palestinian violence. Al Durah became the icon not only of the Intifada, but of global jihad. Within months of the incident, bin Laden came out with a recruiting video that featured extensive Pallywood footage and highlighted Al Durah. Months later, Pakistani jihadis killed Daniel Pearl, interweaving Al Durah's image into their tape of the execution.

In 2000, anyone told of Muslim plans to Islamicize the West laughed with scorn. It was the least of Western worries. Today, some have already given up Europe for lost; others see it in the balance; and others are finally awakening with shock to the radical shift in the balance of forces. And every aspect of l'affaire Al Durah is emblematic of why: from the Palestinian forces that staged it; to the Western mainstream press and the NGOs that presented it as news without asking hard questions (and that believed any subsequent Palestinian claims of Israelis killing children and resisted efforts at correction); to the Muslim world that turned it into an icon of hatred and a call to genocidal holy war; to the "leftist" revolutionaries who jumped on the jihad bandwagon in Durban, South Africa; to a public distressingly eager for "dirt" on Israel and unaware of the forces empowered by diffusing such poisons.

Three court trials, then--in which France2 seeks to bury any serious assessment of their coverage--are also trials of France's ability to defend her republican values against an Islamist onslaught that it seems ill-equipped to resist. And, as France goes, so goes Europe. (Would France have it any other way?)



he plaintiff at the first trial, on September 14, was Philippe Karsenty of Media-Ratings, the boldest of France2's critics. No one from France2 showed up. Its solitary lawyer had no witnesses, no questions for Karsenty's witnesses, and no comments about the evidence damning her clients. Her summation insisted on France2's honor and reputation, offered a letter of praise from President Jacques Chirac, and cast aspersions on the defense's witnesses.

Then the procureur de la republique (a court-appointed officer charged with assessing the case in the interests of civil society) gave her nonbinding opinion. She rebuked France2 for not addressing the evidence, for not showing their raw footage, and for not even showing up in court. She further admitted that, although Karsenty had impugned Enderlin's and France2's reputations, he had offered enough evidence to make such assertions a legitimate part of public discourse.

Judgment on Karsenty's case is Thursday. Next trial: October 26. So far, the best coverage--surprise!--comes from the blogosphere.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061016&s=landes101706

04-12-2006, 10:36 PM Jolie Rouge

IS THE AP STAGING NEWS?
By Michelle Malkin · April 12, 2006 06:01 PM

Bill Roggio investigates. (Hat tip - Instapundit) http://billroggio.com/archives/2006/...orner_in_r.php

A Bombing in Karachi
April 12, 2006

A Street Corner in Ramadi [Updated with another photo from February of 2005]

Did the media fall for yet another insurgent information operation in Ramadi?

Click to play CNN video of Ramadi incident. Original caption: "U.S. Marines beat back the largest attack in weeks by Sunni Arab insurgents in western city of Ramadi."

Last weekend, several news sources, including the Associated Press and CNN, reported a major insurgent attack on the provincial government headquarters in the heart of Ramadi. We reported the story on Sunday, with skepticism, noting "Insurgents have conducted false propaganda operations in the past, such as the incident in early December where the Associated Press reported a fake uprising based on stringers, so the possibility exists this report is false as well."

The purported incident in Ramadi never made the press releases at either Multinational Forces-Iraq or CENTCOM. The Associated Press has a reporter (Todd Pitman) embedded with the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. Mr. Pitman's blog is called AP Blog From Ramadi, Iraq, and the site has not been updated since April 7th. An inquiry to Captain Alfred Smith, the Public Affairs Officer from the 2/28th Brigade Combat Team, which runs Ramadi, produced the following reply; "There was some action , a little more active than the norm but just another day for us." This Week in Iraq, a Coalition bulliten, has a brief description of a fight in Ramadi but nothing like the media accounts.


Original caption from The Examiner: Unidentified masked gunmen fire at a government building, in Ramadi, 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, March 14, 2006. Gunmen fired three mortar rounds targeting a U.S base and a government building on Tuesday in Ramadi. Police said one civilian was killed during an exchange of fire between gunmen and U.S. forces.

At first glance, it appears the media has fallen for yet another enemy Information Operation. But there is more.

A reader in Holland notes some curiosities between a video from last weekend's purported Ramadi attack taken on April 8th and a photograph taken in Ramadi on March 14th. Study the video, then the photo, and you will see both of these images were taken at the exact same street corner in Ramadi, and shot from an identical angle. Note the awning, the poles, the two 'booths', even the stance of the 'insurgents' and the direction which they are firing. This is without a doubt the same street corner in Ramadi. The video and photo are obviously taken at two different points in time (note the umbrella in the video, as well as the different dress of the insurgents). (You'll have to watch the video to get the full effect as I was unable to capture a screen shot for a photo comparison.)

And there is yet another photograph from the same street corner in Ramadi, this time from a different angle. Note the red riot-shutters and the 'Sharp' advertising on the building. The photograph was taken at the end of February of 2005 and published in The Global Beat, which is a self described "resource for the global journalist.". This street corner is quite popular with insurgents and 'photojournalists'.


Photo taken in February, original caption: Iraqi insurgents prepare to meet an assault by U.S. troops at Ramadi, west of Baghdad. Despite the U.S.-sponsored elections, the insurgency continues unabated, and has accelerated in recent weeks.

What are the odds video and photographs from two different incidents of insurgent attacks are taken from the nearly exact same perspective? Was the photographer/cameraman the same person? How did he know to be at this particular location at this particular point in time? How is the third photograph, taken from the exact same location over one year ago explained? Did the insurgency dig deep into their propaganda libraries?

The Associated Press has a reporter embedded with the Marines in the heart of Ramadi, the same Marines who would have "fought back with anti-tank rockets, machine guns and small-arms fire," and called in airstrikes from F/A-18s. Did they bother to ask him about this incident, or did they merely rely on a stringer to provide potentially doctored video? CNN's caption for the video is "U.S. Marines beat back the largest attack in weeks by Sunni Arab insurgents in western city of Ramadi." Did they really?


*******


And Neil Munro's investigation of phony MSM war photography at The National Journal:

Real Or Fake?

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njw...06/0410nj1.htm

Amid the digitized stream of compelling photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a few that are staged, fake or at least misleading. Photo editors struggle to filter them out.

This is a great article ... but lllooonnnggg; so I had pity on ya'll and ya'll just have to hit the link and read it fer yerselfs....


Stay tuned...

04-12-2006, 10:37 PM Jolie Rouge

Also a related must-read at The Jawa Report:

Bilal Hussein and the Continuing Saga of Insurgent Propaganda via the Media
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/169593.php

Remember our good friend Bilal Hussein? He's an Iraq stringer who works for the AP and who's up-close and personal photos of terrorists in Iraq helped to gain that organization last year's Pulitzer. Well, he's back in the news. This time as part of an expose of how photos are staged, faked, & doctored by pro-terrorist stringers employed by the AP, AFP, Reuters, and Getty Images.

On one forum that I frequently visit, some of these doctored photos discussed in the article have been used to justify killing American soldiers in Iraq. In all cases they are used by Islamic extremists to justify their hatred of America and recruit new jihadis. Thus, the images used by the AP & other organizations--which are often staged and sometimes fake-- lead directly to the deaths of American troops and will eventually help justify the next act of terrorism against American civilians.

Via James Joyner here are some of the highlights of the National Journal article:

Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media's best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional....

The photo editors for Time and The New York Times' Web site declined to comment. Other publications printed images of damage from the missile strike that seem entirely accurate. For example, Newsweek and The Washington Times published wide-angle photos of locals standing beside houses that had obviously been severely damaged. The New York Times print edition published the same wide-angle photo on January 18.....

The problem sharpens when no Western reporter is on the scene, but a photographer, usually an Iraqi stringer, is. Photo editors, or even local Western bureau chiefs, have trouble judging the veracity of the images that come from such an event. Last October, for example, The Washington Post printed a striking image of four caskets, purportedly containing dead women and children, and a line of mourning men on a flat desert plain outside the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The photo, provided by the Associated Press, accompanied an article that began this way:

"A U.S. fighter jet bombed a crowd gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of a provincial capital in western Iraq, killing 25 people, including 18 children, hospital officials and family members said Monday. The military said the Sunday raid targeted insurgents planting a bomb for new attacks.

"In all, residents and hospital workers said, 39 civilians and at least 13 armed insurgents were killed in a day of U.S. airstrikes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, a Sunni Arab region with a heavy insurgent presence.

"The U.S. military said it killed a total of 70 insurgents in Sunday's airstrikes and, in a statement, said it knew of no civilian deaths." ....

The funeral photograph was taken by Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi stringer working for the Associated Press. AP officials declined to make Hussein available for an interview, and National Journal was unable to contact him directly in Iraq....

A series of Hussein's photographs illustrate another dilemma for photo editors -- whether to publish images that may have been created for the photographer. Last September 17, in Ramadi, Hussein took pictures after a battle at a dusty intersection. At least one U.S. armored vehicle had been damaged and towed away, leaving behind its 40-foot dull-gray metal track tread. Hussein's photographs showed the locals piling debris and auto tires onto the tread, and then celebrating as they lit a fire. Without the fire, smoke, and added debris, the photo would have presented a pretty uninteresting image of people looking at a leftover tank tread. With the smoke, fire, and debris, the image seemed to convey that a major battle had just taken place.

Weeks later, USA Today published a similar Hussein photograph from a different incident in Ramadi, which featured celebrating Sunnis, burning car tires, and a tank tread pulled over on its side.

Lyon said that AP bars photographers from asking people to change a scene, but that a crowd's spontaneous decision to change a scene in front of a cameraman presents a different situation. "You have this [dilemma] every day all around the world," he said. "There's nothing new there."

Bilal Hussein was in Fallujah when it was run by a Shura Council known to murder people even looking too Western. U.S. troops found torture chambers, hostages, and murdered civilians throughout the city, yet Bilal Hussein made no complaint about this, but instead chose to make blood libel accusations against U.S. troops who liberated the city.

Neal Munro makes this powerful argument as well, and proves he is a Jawa Reader:

But even these remedies would not solve the deeper problem. Because images can have a powerful impact, all sides in the Iraq war are using and pressuring photographers to tell their story, making it difficult for the photographers to act as strictly neutral observers. Iraqi insurgents, for example, frequently use videotape and photographs of their attacks on U.S. forces to magnify the propaganda impact. Insurgent groups will then distribute these images on CDs throughout the Arab world and worldwide through the Internet. The videos, usually shot at some distance from the attacks, typically show a fiery explosion enveloping a U.S. armored vehicle, but the cameras rarely show the extent of damage to the vehicle or the fate of the passengers.

Clearly, terrorists and insurgents know the value of images. In an undated letter from Osama bin Laden to the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, bin Laden wrote about how important the media was in Al Qaeda's war with the West. "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles." The translated letter was provided by the U.S. Army's Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point.

Baz said that, today, unlike in wars past, journalists are constantly pressured to choose sides, and that many combatants on either side don't believe that journalistic neutrality exists. This wartime pressure on photographers is "terrible," Baz said. "It is absolutely unbelievable that you are automatically branded East or West, Muslim or Christian, and you have [to] go on one side or the other." The Post's Elbert echoed the lament: "We're part of the story, and that's wrong."

Journalists do not want to choose sides in this war, and that, I would argue, is the heart of the problem. Being neutral between Republicans and Democrats is part of an ethic I support. Being neutral between America and her enemies is called treason. Either you want your country to win its wars, or you do not. It's really that simple.

Al Dura Trial Takes Huge Turn
by Nidra Poller
September 19, 2007 12:08 AM

Fauxtography?

PJM PARIS….FLASH: The French Appellate court trial of Phillippe Karsenty in the matter of Mohammed Al Dura - the epochal case of the Palestinian boy allegedly shot by Israeli troops in 2000 - took a huge turn today. Photos of the boy have been accused of being the birth of fauxtography. For the first time the court has ordered France 2 to produce the original tapes that could prove the whole enterprise a fake.

Appellate Court Presiding judge Laurence Trébucq has demanded that France 2 hand over the 27-minutes of raw footage shot on the afternoon of September 30, 2000 by Talal Abu Rahmeh. France 2 lawyer Maïtre Bénédicte Amblard tried to convince the judge that the request was not appropriate, relevant, necessary or even advisable. But the judge wants to see the outtakes with her own eyes.

This is the first time the French court has made such a demand that would be normal in the US system. The court will now be able to determine if the Al Dura shooting and tape was a fake, as many have alleged.

Maître Amblard was not able to reach her clients to confirm availability of the footage. Today’s hearing was adjourned. The next hearing is scheduled on November 14th… to view the raw footage.

Details will follow tomorrow.

PREVIOUS MATERIAL FROM EARLIER IN DAY:

By Nidra Poller

Philippe Karsenty, director of Media-Ratings, has appealed his November 2006 libel conviction in the case brought against him by state-owned France 2 Television and its Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin, in what has become known as the al Dura affair.

The case will be heard tomorrow in the Appeals Court at the Palais de Justice. A major turning point in this case is the Israel Defense Force’s imperative demand for handover of the 27 minutes of raw footage filmed by France 2 stringer Talal Abu Rahmeh which purportedly shows additional images of the alleged victims of Israeli gunfire, identified as Jamal al Dura and his son Mohammed.

Abu Rahmeh affirmed, in sworn testimony, that Israeli soldiers fired deliberately and continuously at the man and the boy for 45 minutes, until the boy was dead and the man critically wounded. He claimed to have filmed 27 minutes of the 45-minute incident. France 2 journalist Charles Enderlin insists that the 55-second segment broadcast by his network and distributed free of charge to international media, is an excerpt from more ample coverage of the incident contained in that 27-minute video.

France 2 has refused countless requests, including several from the Israeli army*, to release the 27 minutes of raw footage. Charles Enderlin and his hierarchy continue to insist that the withheld footage substantiates claims that the boy and the man were shot … by Israeli soldiers…or by gunfire from an undetermined source.

To my knowledge, four people have viewed the 27-minute video: Richard Landes (professor of history at Boston University, director of www.seconddraft.org and Augean Stables), Luc Rosenzweig (a retired first-class French journalist), Denis Jeambar (former editorial director of the news weekly l’Express, currently director of Editions du Seuil), and Daniel Leconte (reputable journalist and director of Doc en Stock, producer of documentaries for French TV).

All four witnesses have testified, formally or informally, to the absence of images of Jamal and Mohamed al Dura in the 27-minute outtakes. They have all, in differing degrees, noted extensive footage of staged battle scenes in the 27-minute segment. None of the four have claimed that the 27-minute segment includes any image that could substantiate the voiceover in the narrative of the “death scene” as broadcast by France 2 on September 30, 2000.

Landes and Rosenzweig maintain that the 55-second video is a staged scene. Jeambar and Leconte maintain that the boy was killed and the father injured in a crossfire. There is no evidence of a crossfire in the 55-second “death scene” video. There is no other image of Jamal and Mohamed al Dura in the 27-minute outtakes.

To my knowledge, the only mention of the upcoming hearing in the French media was a Radio J interview with Philippe Karsenty. The Radio J journalist, Michel Zerbib, is the only French journalist to have given consistently serious attention to the al Dura affair over the past few years. Mainstream media that reported on Karsenty’s conviction, misinterpreted as proof that the al Dura “death scene” was not staged, have not mentioned the recent IDF demand for handover of the outtakes — despite the fact that it expresses serious doubts about the credibility of a major news report.

Asked if the change in government might influence the outcome of his trial, Karsenty replied that there are two possible avenues of success: either the court could rule in his favor and/or President Sarkozy could instruct Patrick de Carolis, director of France Télévisions, to turn over the outtakes as requested.

Recalling that a letter of praise for Charles Enderlin from then president Jacques Chirac weighed heavily in the case against Karsenty, it will be interesting to observe the attitude of the Court during tomorrow’s hearing.

http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/09/the_...in_appeals.php

Israel officially denies responsibility for death of al-Dura in 2000
Ronny Sofer / Israel News
10.01.07, 22:16

Seven years after death of Gaza boy captured by France 2 cameraman was blamed on Israel, Prime Minister's Office issues first official document stating incident was staged. French reporter defends video, calling it 'authentic'

Seven years after the death of the Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura in Gaza, the Prime Minister's Office speaks out against the "myth of the murder".

An official document from Jerusalem denied – for the first time – that Israel was responsible for the death of al-Dura at the start of the second intifada.

The document argued that the images, which showed al-Dura being shot beside his father and have become a symbol of the second intifada, were staged. "The creation of the myth of Muhammad al-Dura has caused great damage to the State of Israel. This is an explicit blood libel against the state. And just as blood libels in the old days have led to pogroms, this one has also caused damage and dozens of dead," said Government Press Office director Daniel Seaman.

The arguments were based on investigations that showed that the angles of the IDF troops' fire could not have hit the child or his father, that part of the filmed material, mainly the moment of the boy's alleged death, is missing, and the fact that the cameraman can be heard saying the boy is dead while the boy is still seen moving.

On September 30, 2000, on the second day of the intifada, then 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura was going with his father to buy a car. The two got caught between heavy fire clashes between Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian gunmen.

The incident lasted some 45 minutes, 27 of which were filmed by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, who was working for the France 2 television network.

Charles Enderlin, Jerusalem bureau chief of France 2, who was not present at the incident, broadcasted the report. The report accused the IDF soldiers who were involved in the incident of causing the child's death and the father's injury.

The report has been investigated by various bodies over the years, and four intensive journalistic inquiries examining the incident said there was no evidence that the boy was shot by the soldiers. Some of the inquiries stated that according to calculations of the angle in which the boy and his father were hit, they were most likely shot by the Palestinians.

During the past seven years, Israel has preferred not to confront the most popular television station in France, but following repeated requests by Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center, the first official document from the Prime Minister's Office, signed by the GPO director, was issued last week.

The document argued that based on investigations that were carried out, the boy's death was staged by the French network's cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma.

France 2 reporter calls allegations 'nonesense'

In a letter to Shurat HaDin, Seaman wrote, "It turns out that the events could not have occurred as they were described by the network's reporter Charles Enderlin, since they contradict the laws of physics… Furthermore, it was not even possible to hit them (the boy and his father) in the place they were hiding according to the report."

Nonetheless, following consultation with Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, the GPO director decided that Israel should not take criminal steps against France 2's reporters or revoke the government journalist certificates that were given to them in Jerusalem.

In his letter to Shurat HaDin, Seaman said he was instructed by the attorney general the treat the matter "on the public-media plane and not on the criminal plane".

Shurat HaDin Chairwoman Nitzana Darshan-Leitner said she did not accept the GPO's position. "Shurat HaDin plans to continue to act in order to bring the truth to light," the chairwoman said.

"Among other things, we plan to petition the High Court of Justice and demand the journalist certificates and other GPO certificates are revoked from all France 2 crew members in Israel – reporters, cameramen, produces, etc – as long as the network does not publicly announce that the al-Dura report was staged and was biased.

"In addition, Shurat HaDin is considering filing a damages claim for the accumulated damage the report has caused, and specifically for the line of attacks and riots it has led to. This modern-day blood libel has led to the death of hundreds of Arabs and Jews and has ignited hatred solely for the purpose of ratings and poor journalism. We will demand that those responsible for this crime pay for their deeds."

Charles Enderlin, the France 2 reporter who is still working in Israel, said in response to this report, "This is not the first time that Seaman makes such allegations against me – it is nonsense. It is pure slander. The video that we filmed is authentic and I stand behind it.

"We plan to show the film in court in France, and I am certain it will end the repeated mudslinging," the French reporter said.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...455496,00.html



MK Tibi criticizes gov’t statement on al-Dura death
10.01.07, 23:25
Israel News

Commenting on the government’s shirking of responsibility for Muhammed al-Dura’s death, MK Ahmad Tibi (United Arab List-Ta'al) said Monday, “The statement is not credible, and it constitutes abuse of al-Dura’s body.”

“Those behind the investigation are shameless people. Those responsible for this terrible murder, which the whole world saw live, must be brought to justice,” Tibi added. (Ali Waked)

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...455523,00.html

The world saw nothing live. It was all selectively edited (after having been staged).

US plans case against AP photographer
By BRIAN MURPHY, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 10 minutes ago

NEW YORK - The U.S. military plans to seek a criminal case in an Iraqi court against an award-winning Associated Press photographer but is refusing to disclose what evidence or accusations would be presented.

An AP attorney on Monday strongly protested the decision, calling the U.S. military plans a "sham of due process." The journalist, Bilal Hussein, has already been imprisoned without charges for more than 19 months.

A public affairs officer notified the AP on Sunday that the military intends to submit a written complaint against Hussein that would bring the case into the Iraqi justice system as early as Nov. 29. Under Iraqi codes, an investigative magistrate will decide whether there are grounds to try Hussein, 36, who was seized in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi on April 12, 2006.

Dave Tomlin, associate general counsel for the AP, said the defense for Hussein is being forced to work "totally in the dark."

The military has not yet defined the specific charges against Hussein. Previously, the military has pointed to a range of suspicions that attempt to link him to insurgent activity.

The AP rejects all the allegations and contends it has been blocked by the military from mounting a wide-ranging defense for Hussein, who was part of the AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo team in 2005.

Soon after Hussein was taken into custody, the AP appealed to the U.S. military to either release him or bring the case to trial — saying there was no evidence to support his detention. However, Tomlin said that the military is now attempting to build a case based on "stale" evidence and testimony that has been discredited. He also noted that the U.S. military investigators who initially handled the case have left the country.

The AP says various accusations have been floated unofficially against Hussein and then apparently been withdrawn with little explanation.

Tomlin said the AP has faced chronic difficulties in meeting Hussein at the Camp Cropper detention facility in Baghdad and its own intensive investigations of the case — conducted by a former federal prosecutor, Paul Gardephe — have found no support for allegations that he was anything other than a working journalist in a war zone.

"While we are hopeful that there could be some resolution to Bilal Hussein's long detention, we have grave concerns that his rights under the law continue to be ignored and even abused," said AP President and CEO Tom Curley.

"The steps the U.S. military is now taking continue to deny Bilal his right to due process and, in turn, may deny him a chance at a fair trial. The treatment of Bilal represents a miscarriage of the very justice and rule of law that the United States is claiming to help Iraq achieve. At this point, we believe the correct recourse is the immediate release of Bilal."

Calls for his freedom have been backed by groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Tomlin said it remains unclear what accusations, evidence and possible witnesses will be presented by military prosecutors in Baghdad.

"They are telling us nothing ... We are operating totally in the dark," said Tomlin, who added that the military's unfair handling of the case is "playing with a man's future and maybe his life."

Although it's unclear what specific allegations may be presented against Hussein, convictions linked to aiding militants in Iraq could bring the death penalty, said Tomlin.

U.S. military officials in Iraq did not immediately respond to AP questions about what precise accusations are planned against Hussein.

Previously, the military has outlined a host of possible lines of investigation, including claims that Hussein offered to provide false identification to a sniper seeking to evade U.S.-led forces and that Hussein took photographs that were synchronized with insurgent blasts.

The AP inquiry found no support for either of those claims. The bulk of the photographs Hussein provided the AP were not about insurgent activity; he detailed both the aftermath of attacks and the daily lives of Iraqis in the war zone. There was no evidence that any images were coordinated with the insurgents or showed the instant of an attack.

Gardephe, now a New York-based attorney, said the AP has offered evidence to counter the allegations so far raised by the military. But, he noted, that it's possible the military could introduce new charges at the hearing that could include classified material.

"This makes it impossible to put together a defense," said Gardephe, who is leading the defense team and plans to arrive in Baghdad next week. "At the moment, it looks like we can do little more than show up ... and try to put together a defense during the proceedings."

One option, he said, is to contend that the Pentagon's handling of Hussein violated Iraqi legal tenets brought in by Washington after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Among the possible challenges: AP claims that Hussein was interrogated at Camp Cropper this year without legal counsel.

Hussein is one of the highest-profile Iraqi journalists in U.S. custody.

In April 2006 — just days before Hussein was detained — an Iraqi cameraman working for CBS News was acquitted of insurgent activity. Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein was held for about a year after being detained while filming the aftermath of a bombing in the northern city of Mosul.

Tomlin, however, said that freedom for Bilal Hussein, who is not related to the cameraman working for CBS, isn't guaranteed even if the judge rejects the eventual U.S. charges. The military can indefinitely hold suspects considered security risks in Iraq.

"Even if he comes out the other side with an acquittal — as we certainly hope and trust that he will — there is not guarantee that he won't go right back into detention as a security risk."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071119/...ar8J0aBzkUewgF