They never learn

In this case "they" are not the politicians but the next group in the low-life stakes, journalists of the MSM. As it happens, we have not written much about the momentous events in Iran, partly because it is hard to fit them into the pattern of this blog and partly because they have been widely covered.

I suspect we shall have to change that attitude just as I have changed my entirely negative attitude to twitter - in some cases that rather ridiculous idea has enormous uses. Indeed, cyber-technology has shown its awesome powers and not the way the Iranian mullahs would have liked it. (Not to mention the State Department that has explained that their desire to be friendly with the Iranian regime has not been affected by recent developments.)

One story that has been covered widely is the shooting of Neda, a medical student who stood next to her father watching what was going on. Again, the story has been widely covered by various media outlets, including the Financial Times that has managed to live up to its reputation of being somewhat less than entirely reliable in its reporting of foreign news.

"Web video of woman dying in street becomes image of Iran protests", says the headline of Najmeh Bozorgmehr's story from Tehran. Nothing wrong with that, one might think until one reads the first paragraph:

The footage of a Palestinian man being shot dead next to his 12-year-old son, Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah, by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2000 has been etched in the minds of many Iranians, as state television has continually replayed the images to highlight the “Zionist regime’s brutality.”

Now, the Islamic regime itself has become the subject of similar allegations at home and abroad after gruesome footage of a dying young woman during the suppression of an opposition protest on Saturday was released on the internet.

Etched or otherwise, ladies and gentlemen of the Financial Times, the Al-Dura story and images are fakes. We have followed the story to some extent ourselves but the expert on the subject is Richard Landes who has an update on Augean Stables and on Pajamas Media (where one commenter enquires about those demonstrations against the Iranian regime's behaviour towards Iranian people).

One cannot help wondering who does the research on that venerable rag, the Financial Times.

COMMENT THREAD

Agents of influence and useful idiots

My colleague has already outlined in what way the propaganda news coverage of the present war in Gaza is different from that of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. There is much prattling in the media about the Israelis learning military lessons from the earlier engagement. Maybe so, but what the Israelis have clearly learnt is the need to bypass the so-called main stream media and to put out as fast as possible their own story for the world to see.

In other respects we can safely say plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, not least in the selection of "experts" that the media indulges in. Our attention has been called by a number of people to the ubiquitous presence of a Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert and his colleague Erik Fosse.

They entered Gaza on December 31 and have, according to Dr Gilbert, been performing operations day and night on an ever larger number of casualties of whom an ever larger proportion are definitely innocent civilians. This miraculous behaviour does not appear to have prevented Dr Gilbert from appearing on every Western TV station with a frequency that makes one wonder when exactly he has time to do any operating.

Camera.org (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) has the story on the good doctor and his colleague. He is a long-standing member of the political Red (Rodt) party, a revolutionary socialist party in Norway and has expressed his view on numerous occasions that medicine cannot be separated from politics. He is a long-standing supporter of Hamas and, indeed, of any terrorist organization, who told the world in 2001 that the attacks on the United States were justified. This is the man the Norwegian government subsidizes and the world media listens to.

Not all is lost, however. Thanks to Power Line, which has a good posting on that UNWRA school, we also have the story of France2 (the TV station involved in the infamous Mohammed Al-Dura case) admitting that ... ahem ... they made a mistake in some photographs they displayed prominently.

It would appear that the dead civilians and Hamas operatives got to be that way because of a truck with explosives detonated in 2005 in a refugee camp and not because Israel bombed the place in 2009. I suppose, as we were told during the row over Qana, they are dead and that's what matters. How and why are luxuries.

Here is some more reading matter: a fascinating analysis of what might well be the Israeli strategy in the Jerusalem Post and another stonking article by Christopher Hitchens. The man specializes in giving no comfort to anybody. Even if one disagrees with much of his analysis, the article is well worth reading.

COMMENT THREAD

News from the big bad world

So, they ask, where is she? Well, no, I don't suppose they do ask but, anyway, I am around, just busy with other matters, such as attending a conference on "soft Jihad" and how to fight it. There will be a long report or two on that and news of a new publication by Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, launched tomorrow, entitled "The Plan". Here are some of their proposals:

Scrapping all MPs' expenses except those relating to running an office and travel from the constituency

Selecting candidates through open primaries

Local and national referendums

"People's Bills", to be placed before Parliament if they attract a certain number of signatures

Placing the police under locally elected Sheriffs, who would also set local sentencing guidelines

Appointing heads of quangos, senior judges and ambassadors through open parliamentary hearings rather than prime ministerial patronage

Devolving to English counties and cities all the powers which were devolved to Edinburgh under the 1998 Scotland Act

Placing Social security, too, under local authorities

Making councils self-financing by scrapping VAT and replacing it with a Local Sales Tax

Allowing people to pay their contributions into personal healthcare accounts, with a mandatory insurance component

Letting parents opt out of their Local Education Authority, carrying to any school the financial entitlement that would have been spent on their child

Replacing EU membership with a Swiss-style bilateral free trade accord

Requiring all foreign treaties to be re-ratified annually by Parliament

Scrapping the Human Rights Act and guaranteeing parliamentary legislation against judicial activism

A "Great Repeal Bill" to annul unnecessary and burdensome laws

Can't say I agree with all of it but the ideas are worth discussing and, after all, is that not what we are all complaining about: lack of policy. There is one great advantage to this plan - it cannot be achieved without an exit from the European Union. So if the Conservative Party adopts it ... well, I might vote for them in 2010.

In the meantime I intend to attend the launch tomorrow and shall blog about that. Tim Montgomerie will probably beat me to the finishing line. He always does.

Let me link to another story, one we have been following on this blog. It is most definitely from the big bad world - nothing to do with the EU or our own little party squabbles but much to do with the media, truth and freedom (in whatever order you would like to place those).

Richard Landes reports that France 2 has agreed to an independent enquiry on the Al-Dura affair. He links to a number of articles and comments. Why, one wonders, is France 2 doing this? It can't be bad conscience, as journalists rarely know the meaning of that. Financial problems? Well, we shall see how it develops and whether those missing film minutes will ever be recovered.

What are we to make of this?

Sadly, a pressing engagement in London meant that I could not go over to Paris to see the much-trumpeted film rushes of what is known as the al-Dura episode, which France2 was going to show in court, though I was asked. So, I have to rely on other people’s accounts to continue the story and my own analysis of what Charles Enderlin and his employers as well as their colleagues might be up to.

In some ways we, on this blog, are fortunate. Absolutely nobody in Britain, certainly not in the MSM (I may have missed blog postings on the subject) has displayed the slightest interest in what is a major media scandal. A quick check on Google will show all kinds of references but the only British one is our story as republished by the Free Market News Network to whom we are duly grateful.

The story so far can be followed through our postings and the links in them. The latest update was on the November 13, the day before the showing of the "raw footage".

As was noted at the time, though still not by anyone in the British media, old or new, the "raw footage" had shrunk. Instead of the 27 minutes that a few people had seen, only 18 minutes were shown, explained by Charles Enderlin variously as never being more than 18 minutes and having some irrelevant material that he had cut out.

The raw footage was not so raw. And it was barely al Dura. If we take the cameraman’s word for it, given under oath a few days after the incident, not something but everything is missing. This is supposed to be the raw footage of the al Dura death scene. What we get is raw footage of Palestinian youths throwing stones, firebombs, and burning tires at the Israeli outpost. And provoking no reaction, except for one teargas bomb. Real provocations alternate with those familiar fake battle scenes with instantaneous ambulance evacuations.

Between them Richard Landes and Nidra Poller have an interesting time showing up the various anomalies in the rushes that were shown though this was only two thirds of what was there originally. Landes had seen the original rushes before, Poller was new to them but noted the various cuts and splices as well as Karsenty’s comments about inconsistencies in the film and the commentary.

However different a culture is there will always be a difference between “the boy is dead” and “the boy is in danger of dying”. As Richard Landes says,

And the courtroom laughed. It was one of Charles’ less briliant moments.

As I recall France2 had been ordered to show the entire raw footage. Cutting that down by one third and brazenly showing what remains could be called contempt of court.

The court case will resume in February but an interesting gap in the story remains. There is still no evidence of Mohammed al-Dura’s death. On the other hand, there is an interesting story about his father’s wounds.

This is by Nidra Poller again, who has followed up the story on Metula News Agency. It seems that there is evidence that Jamil al-Dura’s wounds were not caused by Israeli bullets in 2000 but an axe and possibly something else attack in 1992.

To add a certain piquancy to the tale, it would appear that it was Israeli surgeons who had restored almost full use of Jamil al-Dura’s hand.

According to the Metula release, Jamal al Dura declared on medical records in 1992 that Palestinian militia had attacked him with axes. Doctors at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital* were able to save his life but he lost the use of his right hand because they could not repair a ruptured tendon in the forearm. Palestinian doctors referred Jamal to Tal Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv in March 1994. Dr. Yehuda performed reconstructive surgery, grafting a tendon taken from the foot,
and restoring almost normal use of the hand. The medical record of that operation also refers to the removal of “foreign bodies,” suggesting that other instruments besides axes were used in the 1992 attack.

Alerted by the Ména [Metula News Agency] to the film of Jamal’s wounds produced in 2004 by Talal Abu Rahma at the demand of France 2 news director Arlette Chabot, to silence investigators, Dr. Yehuda and his colleagues declare that the scars shown in that film were incurred in 1992 and result from axe blade wounds and definitely not from gunshot. They are ready and willing to testify to this in any court.

So far, this is only one story and until some medical records are shown, that is how we must view it. Somehow I feel that the story will be supported by evidence and that evidence is going to be ignored by large sections of the MSM.

In the case of the British MSM, I suspect, the whole story will be ignored, though at the time they were happy enough to use the dubious picture without asking any questions. And talking of pictures, the one at the top of this posting is of Arlette Chabot, the highly regarded French journalist, head of France2’s editorial team and a lady that seems to have no more than a nodding acquaintance with the concept of truth. Then again, I am rather tired of that phony photo of the crouching man and boy.

Who guards the guardians?

Yes, indeed, dear readers, this is another piece about the MSM and its less than glorious record in some parts of the world. We have followed the crucial Mohammed al-Dura story, with the latest posting in October.

Tomorrow is the day on which France2 will supposedly show the unedited rushes of the episode to the court and, presumably, all other interested parties. Unless there is a fire in the warehouse, of course. Awfully flammable, film is and so are those new-fangled disks.

In the meantime, Richard Landes, the man who must have done more than anybody else to unravel the tale has another long piece on the subject.

Discussed at length by Helen on Umbrella Blog 3

Do they know they are lying?

One way or another we have written a great deal about the misleading nature of the MSM, whether it be my co-editor’s extraordinary unravelling of the Qana story or my own slightly more historic discussion of the small lies that triumphed over the big lie. It is for that reason that we, too, have followed the Mohammed Al-Dura story ...

Helen writes on Umbrella Blog 3.

They will comply, it seems

The Al-Dura case proceeds apace, even if the pace set is that of an arthritic snail. As we reported before, the Israeli government has, finally, issued an official statement that denies the killing of the lad.

Nidra Poller writes that

Presiding magistrate Laurence Trébucq officially confirmed the court order anticipated during the September 19th Appellate Court hearing of Philippe Karsenty’s appeal against his October 2006 conviction for defamation against France 2 and Charles Enderlin. The Court has ordered France 2 to turn over, before October 31st, the unedited raw footage filmed by France 2 cameraman Talal Abu Rahma on September 30th and October 1st 2000.

Maître Bénédicte Amblard, representing France 2, confirmed that her client will comply with the order. The 27-minute video will be projected in the (open) courtroom on November 14th. The case will be heard in full on the 27th of February 2008.

It seems that the French MSM, who rejoiced mightily when it looked like France2 were winning, has been keeping silent on the subject, while Charles Enderlin, the reporter in question has been writing joyfully on his blog that the idea to show the footage is entirely his own.

Except for Charles Enderlin who dances with joy on his France 2 blog. Announcing the decision to project the footage as if it were his own ultra bright idea, he justifies the refusal over the past seven years to expose it to public or even semi-private scrutiny as a sign of exquisite legality. Only the Court has eyes pure enough to contemplate the handiwork of camerman Talal Abu Rahma.

Ms Poller also explains why the appeal court's decision will be, in theory, based on convoluted legality but, let's face it, once that footage is shown, we shall be able to understand a great deal about this "iconic" image.

Augean Stables has a good deal of information as ever and many links. In particular, it quotes extensively and analyzes an interview with Jamal Al-Dura, the lad's father, whose rather garbled comments are interesting to read as are Richard Landes's about the man who is, most probably, being used for propaganda purposes.

COMMENT THREAD

It's official

One can sympathize with Nidra Poller of Pajamas Media who says:

Ainit the truth! You work on a story for years, and the day you oversleep your mailbox spills over with breaking news. “Al Dura death was staged. It’s official.” Everybody and his brother gleefully informed me of the breaking news.

It’s all right for us. We may have been following the story on this blog for some time but there is no particular danger of the British MSM picking up the story. Far too much like real news.

Anyway, the big story is that Israel is fighting back on the propaganda front as well as in the shooting war. For the first time Israel has denied officially that it was responsible for the death of little Mohammed Al-Dura whose life and death has been called into doubt by a number of commentators.

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.

As we have said before on occasions too numerous to mention or refer to we are not fighting just a shooting war. Actually, when you think about it, not big war is just a shooting war. There was a good deal of propaganda in those religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, in the two World Wars of the twentieth century and in the Cold War.

If we do not win the propaganda war we may as well not bother with the shooting one.

COMMENT THREAD

Break-through in the al-Dura case

Why do we keep writing about the case of Mohammed al-Dura? Because, in our opinion, it is turning into the trial of the century, despite the deliberate lack of attention paid to it in the MSM. Just as with the original “trial of the century”, the Kravchenko case, briefly described in the posting, so with the war we are fighting now: it is a war of ideas as well as of bullets. In fact, the war of ideas and of propaganda may well turn out to be more important now as it did in the Cold War.

That being so, it is worth recalling that our media is not necessarily on our side; it has an agenda of its own and that agenda needs to be perceived quite clearly. In this war we have a certain advantage – the internet. The MSM, as we have pointed out ad nauseam, no longer has everything going its way. In other words, this may not be the World War II situation as far as the media is concerned but neither is it the Vietnam situation. Too many journalists find that hard to understand.

The Mohammed al-Dura and France2 case is absolutely crucial in this battle. As we have said before, the picture of the little boy crouching behind his father and the story that the wicked Israelis kept shooting at the two until the boy was dead and the father severely wounded have done wonders for the Palestinian cause (or did wonders until Fatah and Hamas fell out among each other).

It put the Israelis badly in the wrong, led to violent anti-Israeli and, often, anti-Jewish demonstrations and attacks in the West, and once again took attention away from the terrorist activities of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa.

The pictures and the story were distrusted from the very beginning but, somehow, France2 managed to get away with not releasing the rushes, despite more or less admitting that 90 per cent of the supposed 27 minutes was staged. Or maybe not, as they sometimes said.

Anyway, as we wrote under a fortnight ago, the case is back in the public eye, though you would never know it from the media or, for that matter, much of the blogosphere. Thankfully, Nidra Poller attended the trial and posted reports of it.

The first important report came two days ago when she wrote that

For the first time the court has ordered France 2 to produce the original tapes that could prove the whole enterprise a fake.

Obviously, that is not how the judge phrased the request, which is near enough a demand, but it seems to have been taken very badly by France2 and their lawyer. In her second report Nidra Poller describes the events in court, slightly breathlessly but very amusingly.

Maître Bénédicte Amblard, representing Charles Enderlin and France 2 in their libel suit against Philippe Karsenty (Media Ratings) dropped her pencil and lost her composure when presiding judge Laurence Trébucq, overriding the opinion of the Avocat Général, firmly demanded handover of the 27-minute unedited film shot by Talal Abu Rahmeh at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000. The Maginot Line of France 2 collapsed then and there. From here on in, anything is ossible.

It will be interesting to see what happens next. According to Nidra Poller:

If the footage is not turned over voluntarily by the 3rd of October, the court will issue a formal request. The next hearing is scheduled for November 14th … to view the said footage. A relay hearing is scheduled for January 16, and the case will be heard in full on the 27th of February.

At present, the footage is held by the legal team of France2 but seemed to be unavailable when Maître Amblard tried to find it. Could it be, as one person on the forum suggested, at the bottom of the Seine? If it is not, will France2 finally produce it for all to see? Another interesting development might be President Sarkozy’s possible involvement. As France2 is a state-owned TV station, he has the right to order it to comply with the court’s request. After all, “a letter of praise for Charles Enderlin from then president Jacques Chirac weighed heavily in the case against Karsenty” and what is sauce for the goose …..

COMMENT THREAD

It ain't over till it's over

One of the stories that has been poorly covered by the MSM (or should that be one of the many stories?) has been the saga of Mohammed Al-Dura and France2. Yet, this is enormously important in our understanding of the way the media functions and, in particular, the way the Western media reports news from the Middle East.

Mohammed Al-Dura was the little boy whose picture as he was cowering behind his father trying to escape from the bullets of the wicked Israelis back in 2000 was brodcast to all. The report, by France2 informed the world, whose conscience, naturally, was shocked, that the boy was shot dead.

Almost from the very beginning the story was doubted and a court case resulted when France2 and Charles Enderly, its correspondent in Israel, sued Philippe Karsenty of Media Watch that had challenged the story and, above all, the film, for libel.

We wrote about the case here and here. Karsenty lost the case and France2 were not forced to make the uncut rushes public, though the two senior journalists who have seen it, say that there was no footage of the boy’s death. Worse, nobody has ever been able to locate the boy, dead or alive, certainly not under the name of Mohammed Al-Dura.

The case is back in the public eye (though not its conscience) as Karsenty’s appeal against the verdict, whose rightness was disputed by everyone who followed the case in the court, is coming up and a petition is being circulated that urges France II to release those crucial tapes as well as any films they might have of pigs flying.

Richard Landes who has ensured that the case is treated with the seriousness it deserves, gives the text of the petition in French and English on his excellent blog, Augean Stables. Here is another discussion of the story and its significance. For anyone who wants to go through the chronology of the case, Richard Landes helpfully provides one.

If ever a picture was worth many thousands of words (though, to be fair, it also generated many thousands of words) it was that. Little Mohammed became the symbol of the Palestinian martyrdom and the evil that was Israel. Since the pictures of children blown up by suicide/homicide bombers inside Israel were too horrific to be shown, the world had to make do with Mohammed the Martyr.

The idea that the whole episode was staged; that Mohammed was not really Mohammed Al-Dura, was not cowering from Israeli bullets and was not shot naturally discombobulates too many people. Nor does the media particularly want the world and its conscience pay too much attention to the many other cases in which it followed the scenario as set out by Hezobollah. (This may be a good opportunity to remind our readers of the sterling work done by my colleague and a number of his assistants on our forum in uncovering some of the murky doings in Qana last year.)

Should anyone have doubts about the lopsidedness of reporting from the Middle East, let me remind them about the curious lack of interest in the four-month long siege of Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp by the Lebanese army.

Naturally enough, we covered the story here, here, here and mentioned it in other pieces on the situation in Lebanon. (Yes, yes, I promise to do a round-up soon. If nothing else, we need to know if UNIFIL is still alive.)

The siege of the camp is now over. David Pryce-Jones sums up:

After a pretty dismal performance dragged out over these four months, the Lebanese army has finally routed Fatah al-Islam, killed Shakir al-Absi and his deputy, and identified some of the dead terrorists as Saudis and others as men who have fought in Iraq. Between two and three hundred have been killed, about half of them Lebanese soldiers. And meanwhile 40,000 Palestinians have fled from their homes, most probably never to return. Lebanese artillery has turned Nahr al-Bared into the sort of ruin the Russians have made of Grozny in Chechnya.

He may be a little too harsh on the Lebanese army. It is not easy to fight in those circumstances. Even the Russians have not been able to impose total control on the wreck that used to be Grozny and they have been at it for considerably longer than four months.

Mr Pryce-Jones does make the point we have made over and over again, notably in the first part of this posting:

The media is no help, of course, hardly reporting the Nahr al-Bared crisis unless in a paragraph on some inside page. In contrast, just cast your mind back to 2002 when the Israeli army cleared Fatah terrorists from the refugee camp of Jenin on the West Bank. No artillery, no indiscriminate destruction, no 40,000 fleeing for their lives, less than a hundred dead all told, but pretty well every front page and every news bulletin accused Israel of war crimes and atrocities. I particularly remember one Professor Derrick Pounder on behalf of Amnesty speaking of massacre, and proclaiming that the dead under the rubble were too numerous to be counted. The absence of such media professors and human-rights groups from Nahr al-Bared now certifies the whole lot of them as foremost specialists in the double standards underpinning the usual Western representations of the Middle East.

Nobody is going to compare Nahr al-Bared to Stalingrad or any other important battle.

The Palestinians may be perennial victims but some victims are more equal than others. If you want the West to pay attention to what is happening to you, try to ensure that you get under the Israelis' feet. Then it really does not matter that you are treated far better than your brethren in Lebanon or Gaza – the world will know with many advantages of your plight.

A fight over principles in France

As we have pointed out before, it is not the Continental countries that were found wanting in the War of the Danish Cartoons, but Britain. To be quite precise, the British media, not a single one of whom dared to reprint the cartoons, bleating idiotically about not wanting to upset people. Especially people who might come after you, one suspects. The Guardian and the Independent have had no problems about printing anti-Semitic cartoons of the kind that could have come out of Der Stürmer.

One of the magazines that did do the right thing was the French Charlie Hebdo, now sued by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organizations for inciting racial hatred.

It is not that they want censorship, they whine, but they do not think cartoons that make fun of Islam should be published.

A televised debate between Charlie Hebdo publisher Val and Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Grand Mosque, broke up acrimoniously on Tuesday after they squabbled over the limits of free speech.

"If we can't criticise religion anymore, there will be no women's rights, no birth control and no gay rights," Val said in the raucous TV debate.

Boubakeur said the controversial cartoon showing Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban was not simply satire, but an insult against all Muslims by suggesting they were all terrorists.

"We don't want censorship, we don't want the sacred to be protected by blasphemy laws or medieval jurisdiction," he said.

Boubakeur said last week he wanted to show that reprinting the cartoons was a provocation equal to acts of anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial, which are both banned under French law.

Um, well, of course, anti-Semitic attacks have gone up in France (and in Britain) in the last few years and many of them originate with the Muslim community. Those attacks are not simply words or cartoons but actual physical acts against people, schools, cemeteries and synagogues.

To repeat for the benefit of those of our readers who do not bother with most of what we write: this blog does not believe Holocaust denial should be illegal in any country.

It seems that the case may well be one of the seminal ones in French legal history, though in a different way from the Al-Dura one, which we wrote about here and here.

Politicians, intellectuals, secular Muslims and left-wing pressure groups have lined up behind Charlie Hebdo, arguing that Muslim groups have no right to call for limits on free speech.

"I just cannot imagine the consequences not only for France but for Denmark and Europe if they lose the case," Fleming Rose, the Danish editor who first published the cartoons, told a news conference with Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val.

The left-wing newspaper, Libération has reprinted the cartoons, saying quite firmly that it is not words or pictures that kill but bombs. True enough and time it was said forcefully. Are we going to see a similar outburst of bravery in our media or will it all be left to the blogs again?

COMMENT THREAD

How could any of them be wrong?

The more lurid Palastine sympathisers have it that the, "Judeo-Nazi army commits huge massacre in Gaza".

Thus we have writer Khalid Amayreh declaring that the "Israeli occupation army on Wednesday killed at least 25 Palestinian, mostly women and children in northern Gaza and the West Bank, apparently taking advantage of international media preoccupation with the mid-term American elections."

We also get "medical sources in Gaza" saying that Israeli tanks fired artillery shells on densely populated residential neighborhoods in northern Gaza, killing and maiming "dozens" of innocent men, women and children.

An eyewitness who identified himself as Abu Yousuf said he saw a decapitated child's head. "It was a real massacre. We are talking about heavy artillery shells weighing hundreds of pounds hitting homes packed with women and children. Even the Nazis didn't do that. It was like a slaughterhouse, only here we have humans instead of animals."

Another witness, Ra'ed Hasanin, accused the Israeli army of "indiscriminately, knowingly and deliberately slaughtering our children very much like the Nazis killed Jewish children at concentration camps. The Nazis may have used gas chambers to kill their enemies. But the Nazis of our time, the Jews, are exterminating Palestinian children, using artillery and warplanes. The result is the same, the mentality is the same."

Even from the completely impartial BBC we get Attaf Hamad, a "22-year-old eyewitness" cited as telling Reuters: "It is the saddest scene and images I have ever seen. We saw legs, we saw heads, we saw hands scattered in the street".

But have we been here before?

There is the Grossman story, the Battle of Jenin, Pallywood, the Al-Dura case, the Gaza beach shelling, the Lebanon ambulance hoax, Reutersgate and, of course, Qanagate.

Are we then supposed to believe everything we are told about this incident? Do we even have a right to raise even the mildest query – such as asking about the curiously undamaged room (pictured) in which a shell exploded. Are we allowed to ask whether the blood in the streets was absolutely genuine - and human? And is it permitted to wonder whether the grieving relatives are actually related to the victims?

Or is it the case that, with Reuters, AP, AFP and the rest of them all there, everything has to be above board. How could any of them be wrong?

COMMENT THREAD

The Al-Dura case revisited

There is no need, as it happens, for me to go into any details on the case as other people have done so.

This blog has referred to the story of the mysterious film about the supposed killing of the equally mysterious little boy, Mohammed Al-Dura, by the wicked Israeli snipers, broadcast on September 30, 2000 by the state owned French TV channel, France2 with the speaking voice of its star reporter, Charles Enderlin.

The picture became an iconic one as it was transmitted round the world and made people forget that the second intifada was entirely the fault of the late unlamented Chairman Arafat.

Then, as John Rosenthal points out in WorldPoliticsWatch:

Soon, however, doubts began to arise about the France2 report. It would turn out that Charles Enderlin had not been at Netzarim that day and that his narration had been based on the account given by France2 cameraman Talal Abu Rahma: the sole known witness of the events. No autopsy was performed. No bullets were recovered. When asked by the German television journalist Esther Shapira about the latter point, Rahma would insist that France2 had collected the bullets -- before realizing the implausibility of the claim, chuckling, and remarking enigmatically "we have some secrets."

Mr Rosenthal traces the various ramifications of the case in his article as well as providing a full dossier on the case on Transatlantic Intelligencer and comes to the trial, which this blog has also posted on.

France2 and Charles Enderlin sued Philippe Karsenty and Media-Ratings for pointing out the various problems with the film. In fact, France2 has threatened to sue everyone who suggests, whether on the basis of available evidence or not, that the entire sequence may have been staged. I am looking forward to them taking the Wall Street Journal Europe to court.

The court found Philippe Karsenty guilty of defamation, though as Mr Rosenthal carefully analyzes, his comments were deliberately misinterpreted and a good deal of evidence was simply ignored.

But what is most notable about the court's ruling against Karsenty is that such a matter has come before the courts at all. It should be recalled that neither Charles Enderlin, nor, needless to say, the France2 executives in Paris, were present in Netzarim to witness the events at issue. They are thus no more in a position definitively to "affirm" that the scene was authentic than the Mena and its supporters are in a position definitively to affirm that it was staged. In both cases, we are dealing with just more or less plausible hypotheses. In a free society, such controversies are the stuff of public debate: with individuals being at liberty to form -- and express -- their convictions as they see fit. In France in 2006, this is evidently not the case.

As we have said before, though we are only six years in, this could be the trial of the century as far as Europe is concerned.

COMMENT THREAD

Another century, another trial

In 1943 a Red Army captain, a supposedly loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, was posted to the Trade Mission in Washington DC. Very soon, he abandoned his post and asked for political asylum, bringing a good deal of information about his homeland and its political system.

At first Viktor Kravchenko went into hiding but eventually he published a terrifying book, called "I Chose Freedom", in which he wrote a detailed account of collectivization and the accompanying deliberately created famine (witnessed by him at first hand), the purges and conditions in labour camps.

The book became a huge success with the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement paying the back-handed compliment of conducting a vicious campaign against it.

The French Communist weekly, Les Lettres Françaises, accused Kravchenko of being a liar and a Western spy. He sued for libel and the 1949 trial was described as "the trial of the century". The Soviet Union sent "witnesses" in the shape of Kravchenko’s ex-wife whose family remained behind as hostages, and various of his former colleagues.

Kravchenko's lawyer marshalled survivors of the Soviet camps, among them the wonderful and admirable Margarete Buber-Neumann, whose account of the Soviet and Nazi camps, "Under Two Dictators" is a classic of twentieth century memoir writing.

Let me remind our readers that this was happening in 1949, when the ending of World War II and the work of various Communist sympathizers still suffused Stalin and his evil system with a rosy glow. Nevertheless, Kravchenko won his case, though he was given a derisory amount in damages. It was a huge blow to the pro-Communist left. The man, himself, survived till 1966 when he was found dead of gunshot wounds in his flats. The circumstances have never been satisfactorily explained.

Autre temps autre moeurs. We have just had another interesting trial in France in which the action has been reversed.

The case revolved around the infamous film of the little boy, Mohammed Al-Dura supposedly shot by the Israelis in circumstances never fully explained. The film, which, needless to say, "shocked the world's conscience" (odd how its conscience never gets shocked by suicide/homicide bombers deliberately targeting small children in Iraq or Afghanistan) but, as time went on, various anomalies in the film and the story it told appeared.

These anomalies were chronicled by, among others, Philippe Karsenty, founder and director of Media Ratings who demanded that the state-owned France2 TV company and its correspondent in Israel, Charles Enderlin, own up to the fakery and that the head of news be sacked. France2 and Enderlin sued for libel and the film has been watched and analyzed by various journalists and other experts.

There is very little doubt that the famous sequence is a staged performance of the kind we have become so used to over the last couple of years and, particularly, this summer in Lebanon. As the Washington Post says in its account:

The original report, which included some 50 seconds of the incident but did not show the moment of the boy's death, has been submitted to close scrutiny but the channel has also been criticized for not releasing its raw, uncut tape.Two senior French journalists given access to the footage as part of an investigation into the affair later said that the film did not show that Israeli troops had killed the boy or even that he had died at all.

But they also said there was no evidence to suggest deliberate staging or manipulation.

It appears from people who followed the trial carefully, that there was barely any dispute of the fact that the film was staged. Nevertheless the judge of the Court of First Instances decided for the TV Company and ordered Karsenty to pay France2 and Charles Enderlin nominal sums in reparation. He had, according to the judgement, whose full publication we still await, not done enough research. In other words, he had dared to tell the truth about the state-owned TV company.

France2, who is suing several other websites and blogs, announced pompously that the case was not about the money but about their good name and the need to protect people whose duty it was to provide the world with information (whether, one presumes, it happens to be true or not).

Karsenty put it differently:

It is a very somber day for France. The French justice system has validated a false report. We are going to appeal straight away. It is a very surprising judgment.

Historian Richard Landes on Augean Stables followed the case from the beginning:

The implications of this reversal of Madame le Procureur's clear recommendations, for what appears to be — we'll have a translation and analysis of the judgment ASAP — a critique of Philippe that somehow absolves Enderlin of all of his journalistic failings, failings that came out abundantly in court, are deeply troubling.

He and Nidra Poller promise fuller accounts as the text of the judgement becomes available. We shall be returning to the story as well.

Vive la liberté?

We are all more or less used to the distortions provided by the main stream media that has acquired the soubriquet MSM, which makes it sound as if it were some terrible disease that probably causes autism. Well, perhaps it is.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in France where large sections of the electronic media are owned by the state and the newspapers are controlled one way or another through political pressure.

We can recall the lack of proper discussion in the run-up to the war in Iraq when L’escroc Chirac was given unlimited and unchallenged airtime, President Bush merely quoted by a newsreader and French politicians who supported the war, such as the impeccably left-wing Bernard Kouchner, not allowed anywhere near a camera.

Is it any wonder, we ask, that the French populace or, at least, those of them who watch the official media, tends to be a little paranoid on matters to do with foreign affairs?

There are times when the French political establishment and the media it controls oversteps the marks of all decency. One such case is the famous “shooting” of the twelve year old Muhammad al-Dura at the beginning of the second intifada in 2000.

The image of the terrified boy crouching with his father and shortly afterwards lying at his father’s feet shot by a heartless sniper winged its way round the world, caused a great outcry, did a great deal of damage to Israel, took attention off the fact that it was the late unlamented Chairman Arafat who had broken off the Oslo negotiations and ordered the intifada and – worst of all – became a symbol for numerous other Palestinian children who blew themselves and Israeli (Jewish and Arab) children in the name of Muhammad al-Dura.

Now, some years on, it appears that not all is well with that story. Its creation and broadcasting was investigated in detail as was the role of France-2, the channel responsible for it, controlled as it is by the government.

The details of the original story, the doubts that arose immediately, the threats, denials and cover-ups are told in this month’s Commentary magazine by Nidra Poller, a journalist and writer, domiciled in Paris. I do not think anything needs to be added by this blog.

COMMENT THREAD