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Charles Enderlin is the French journalist responsible for the notorious Muhammad Al-Dura footage that ignited an orgy of mass murder by Palestinian Arab jihadists. The footage has been proven to be a hoax. But journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet finds that her journalistic colleagues are somewhat less enthusiastic about admitting a hoax when it exonerates the Israelis and the "extreme right."
"L'Affaire Enderlin: Being a French journalist means never having to say you're sorry," by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in the Weekly Standard, July 7:
[...] Having dug in his heels in time-honored fashion, Enderlin, a seasoned journalist and a French-Israeli dual national who'd spent most of his adult life at the same job, never imagined the al-Dura story would dog him. He was covered by his superiors in the hierarchy, affording him the Zen-like serenity achievable in large French organizations, which are profoundly top-down and basically unchanged in spirit since the court of the Sun King. His coverage of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, while regularly criticized by pro-Israeli groups, was highly esteemed by his peers. He had produced a well-informed documentary series on the Oslo Accords, the peace process, and the 2000 Camp David talks, tied to a book that has been published in English; and, while it could be argued that he was perhaps too close to some of his sources (several of the parties to the peace talks actually held discussions at the France 2 bureau, loaned by a helpful Enderlin as discreet neutral ground), this was a notable achievement. Such a person could not, in the order of things, be seriously threatened by a bunch of activists or scruffy bloggers behind their computer screens questioning his professional judgment. When he dismissed accusations of a cover-up by explaining that he had chosen "not to show the full footage of the child's agony," which would have been "unbearable," he fully expected to be taken on trust.Yet the bloggers and the activists refused to let the story die. In fact the unlikely alliance of, among others, a professor of medieval history from Boston University, a hot-headed former financial executive, and a former Le Monde reporter soon brought to light practices that would surprise no journalist with experience working in a totalitarian state. Most foreign correspondents covering the Palestinian territories from Israel rely on local stringers, cameramen, fixers. These Palestinian nationals do not benefit from the protections routinely granted international journalists. They and their families can be subjected to all sorts of pressures by a system not known for its respect for human rights and free speech niceties. The staging of scenes for the benefit of photographers is common.
The medieval history professor, Richard Landes, a soft-spoken American who spent his childhood in France and got his early education in a Paris public school, now one of the case's most devoted parsers, coined a word for Palestinian manipulation of the media: "Pallywood." He believes the whole al-Dura incident was staged. Using footage taken by other cameramen on the scene that day, he argues his case forcefully on two well-visited and regularly updated websites (theaugeanstables.com and seconddraft.org) as well as in countless articles and interviews.
Enter the hothead. Philippe Karsenty is a French Jew who felt so let down by the mainstream coverage of the second Intifada and the Middle East in general that he gave up a successful career in finance to start a media monitoring agency. His Media Ratings (web address m-r.fr) challenges the validity of press stories on all subjects with a test he dubs "the P.H.I.L.T.R.E method," rating articles for "accuracy, consistency, independence, freedom, transparency, accountability, and exhaustiveness." Karsenty took up the al-Dura case and started firing away at everyone he saw as responsible for perpetrating a dangerous lie.Karsenty is a boyish character in his early 40s with rapid-fire delivery, a serious cell-phone habit, and an unflagging, self-appointed sense of mission. He makes enemies among his friends with as much gusto as he takes on the French establishment. (There is something of the neighborhood kid ringing all the doorbells on the block about him.) He has attacked various French Jewish leaders as well as France 2's news director, Arlette Chabot; Enderlin; France 2's chairman, Patrick de Carolis; and a slew of politicians. He routinely uses expressions such as "I will bury him!" and "I will end that conniving bastard's career!" He is a bit mad, but it can be argued that many saints and heroes were a bit mad-if Joan of Arc had been happier in her Lorraine village, we Parisians might all be speaking English.
Karsenty is no saint, but it was his peculiar blend of bravado, doggedness, testosterone, and plain bad manners that eventually caused France 2 to blink. (I was reminded, meeting him, of the former New York senator Alfonse D'Amato, who gloried in his "Brooklyn Rottweiler" nickname and was turned loose by the Senate Banking Committee on Swiss banks that refused to reveal the number and balances of their Holocaust victims' accounts. Until then, the Swiss had only been confronted with polite delegations headed by the suave likes of Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and Stuart Eizenstat, the former undersecretary of state. They had gotten nowhere. D'Amato, taking no prisoners, unlocked the process in a couple of months.)
At any rate, two years ago, after one Karsenty op-ed too many about the "arrant hoax" of the al-Dura affair, France 2 sued him for libel. In a country where judges are civil servants, their first ruling surprised few observers: They ruled for the national institution, France 2, and ordered the outsider, Karsenty, to pay one euro in damages to the plaintiffs, a fine of 1,000 euros, and another 3,000 euros in costs. Even accounting for France's relatively moderate legal rates, this was a slap on the wrist. Taking a gamble, Karsenty appealed.
The appeals court convened last month and asked for-gasp-evidence, namely the famous 27-minute France 2 unedited master footage, which not even Enderlin had seen when he filed his item for the evening news. (His Palestinian cameraman, Talal Abu Rahmeh, had sent him by remote link about 6 minutes from which to make the news segment.) France 2, dragging its feet, eventually produced 18 minutes of film. (There is practically no such thing as "contempt of court" in such circumstances in the French judicial system.) The showing of this film made for an eerie moment at the trial, when the hitherto blasé judges sat up and started watching with more attention, then took a recess, after which they asked for all of France 2's footage. It would prove to be the turning point in the proceeding.
Karsenty came to court loaded for bear, with trolleyfuls of documentation, including a 90-page ballistics report. Out of it all, the court also trained its sights on a telling 2005 Le Figaro opinion piece by two establishment journalists, Denis Jeambar, then editor in chief of L'Express (France's answer to Newsweek), and Daniel Leconte, head of news documentaries at the state-run French-German cultural channel, Arte (a kind of French-German PBS), both unlikely participants in this undignified scrum. Jeambar and Leconte, egged on by a former Le Monde journalist, Luc Rosenzweig, who had taken a great interest in the case and started writing about it for the small Israeli news outfit Mena, asked France 2 as early as 2004 to show them the original raw rushes. Acknowledging Jeambar and Leconte's weight in the French establishment, France 2 had done for them what it had refused to do for countless others and had shown them, and Rosenzweig, the 27 minutes of film.
What happened then was typical of the cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof behavior even powerful French figures display when faced with any kind of violation of the unspoken but well-understood order of precedence obtaining among the elite here. While Jeambar and Leconte took their time to ponder what they'd seen, Rosenzweig had the nerve to file a piece for Mena describing the tape's scenes of staging just before the fatal shooting. You could see Palestinians being carried on stretchers into ambulances, then coming out again unharmed, all in a kind of carnival atmosphere, with kids throwing stones and making faces at the camera, despite what was supposed to be a tense situation. The tape showed occasional gunshots, not continuous firing. From the general horsing around captured on film by Abu Rahmeh, Mena concluded that the whole scene must have been staged.
Their being preempted by Rosenzweig incensed Leconte and Jeambar, who expressed their displeasure in the 2005 op-ed in the center-right Le Figaro. They spent so much of the piece denouncing Rosenzweig, his gall in reporting first on what he'd seen in the company of his betters, and the conclusions he'd dared draw independently, that it was easy to overlook a key fact: Jeambar and Leconte themselves not only conceded that the tape showed Palestinians stage-managing various shots and horsing around, they also described joking about those very scenes with the France 2 executives who were screening the tape for them.
All of those present at the screening-illustrious visitors and France 2 executives alike, the op-ed recounted-had ended up in full agreement that it was impossible to determine where the bullets had come from, but that it was highly unlikely that they could have come from the Israeli garrison. More crucially, Jeambar and Leconte also had caught Enderlin lying (or, as they kindly put it, "extrapolating"): "There was no 'unbearable agony' of the child anywhere on the tape," they wrote. "It wasn't edited out, it simply did not exist."
The Figaro piece had little impact when it was published, but it turned out to be one of the crucial elements in Karsenty's challenge to France 2's version of events. He won his appeal. The ruling, handed down on May 21, stated that he had acted in good faith as a media commentator and that he had presented a "coherent body of evidence," although the hoax could not be definitively proven. The judge also noted "inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions in the explanations by Charles Enderlin," whose appearance in court was his first sworn testimony in the matter.
You might think Enderlin's professional standing would have been damaged by all this. You would be wrong. In less than a week, a petition was whipped up by his friends at Le Nouvel Observateur, France's premier left-wing newsweekly. The petition conceded no gray areas, no hint of doubt. It called Karsenty's vehemently argued but exhaustively documented stance a "seven-year hate-filled smear campaign" aimed at destroying Enderlin's "professional dignity." It flatly stated in the opening paragraph that Muhammad al-Dura was killed "by shots coming from the Israeli position." It expressed rank astonishment at a legal ruling "granting equal credibility to a journalist renowned for his rigorous work, and to willful deniers ignorant of the local realities and with no journalistic experience." It professed concern about a jurisprudence that would-shock! horror!-allow "anyone, in the name of good faith and of a supposed right to criticize and so-called freedom of speech, to smear with impunity the honor and the reputation of news professionals."
There followed the names of over 300 journalists-sorry, "news professionals"-and hundreds more miscellaneous celebrity intellectuals (under the heading "Personalités"), as well as a vast slew of mere web surfers ("Internautes"). Note, here again, that while the journalists were listed in apparently neutral alphabetical order, the managing editor of a provincial news conglomerate cheek by jowl with a lowly travel magazine stringer-the key distinction between pros and outsiders was maintained. It was as if the eight-year controversy had been irrelevant. From "news professionals," who were viewed as right by definition, no accountability could possibly be required. The guild was closing ranks.
Scanning the long list (to which new signatures are added daily at the Nouvel Obs website), I experienced a kind of life-flashing-before-my-eyes moment. There were the names of people from every magazine or newspaper I'd ever worked at; people I'd trained with; people I'd been great pals with before life packed us off in different directions; and people I'd last seen only the week before. It was, to tell the truth, Stepford-like scary.
I resolved to call as many of the familiar names as I could. I knew, or thought I knew, where these people came from. Why had they signed? It might be awkward to ask, I reasoned, but wasn't it our business to ask questions?
As it turned out, it was plenty awkward. I came to recognize the moment when, after the "voice-from-your-past" greetings and the "where-are-you-now" fat-chewing and the nostalgic memories of past editors, colleagues, competitors, copy-takers ("all done by computer now, nobody to tell you you're not making sense!"), I got around to the subject at hand. As I started explaining that I was writing a piece on the al-Dura affair and was wondering why they had signed the petition, I learned to recognize the telltale pause, the "Good Lord, she's caught Scientology! She's gone over to the crazies!" moment, after which the whole object of the exercise would become to hang up on me as fast as possible.
There were those, like a foreign editor at a liberal magazine with whom I'd spent boozy evenings bemoaning the failings of our respective boyfriends 25 years ago, who now brushed me off like an inconvenience. "Haven't got time, too many pages to edit, staffer off sick, really, why do you ask such questions, have a catastrophic week, can't really talk to you until . . . well, Friday, but you will have filed by Friday, right?"
"Oh, no, there'll still be time on Friday." (Palpable disappointment on the line.) I did call the following Friday-I only got past her voicemail by reprogramming my cell phone not to send out my caller ID-and got an angry hiss in answer to my greeting. "I'm in an interview, can't talk, have nothing to say"-click.
There was the noted Paris-based former Washington Post foreign correspondent, 75-year-old Jon Randal, a Middle East expert I'd looked up to for years as a cub reporter, who trenchantly explained that he was seeing in all this a dangerous American trend of "vindictive pressure groups interfering with news organizations," now unfortunately crossing the Atlantic. (Having lived in Paris for over 40 years, Jon had become alarmingly French.)
"Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they're persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters. I can't imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don't care if it's the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn't make a story up."
But, I tried to interject, the absence of the boy's "agony" from the tape?-
"Nonsense! Televisions don't show extreme violence. You know that. Look, I don't know what side you're on in this?"
"I'm trying to make sense of it all."
"I want you to call my friend at NPR, Loren Jenkins; call David Greenway at the Boston Globe; they'll tell you about pressure groups."
That was a different story; I had no time left and didn't call.
Similarly, there was the seasoned reporter from Le Figaro who thought Charles Enderlin, quite simply, was the best reporter operating in the Near East today. "These people, the ones attacking him, they're extreme rightists, yes? You can't take anything they say seriously." I conceded that the hoax wasn't proven, but that the shots had in all likelihood come from the Palestinian side. Esther Schapira . . . There was a sniff. "Pas très sérieuse, non?"...
Read it all.
Posted by Robert at June 30, 2008 8:21 AM
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Unbelievable. The truth doesn't matter any more. Those "journalists" should all have their credentials taken away and anything they report on thrown in the dirtbox.
Posted by: Dsinc![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 30, 2008 9:34 AM
This story should be read in full -- every word. And savored.
Posted by: Hugh at June 30, 2008 9:37 AM
There's a term for this now. Charles Enderlin got "rathered" And the response of his defenders seemed "ratheresque" to me. "Don't confuse things with the facts! We're professionals after all!! And the substance of our story was true even if the footage was staged" And us ignorant common folk who used to be so easy to manipulate when the news was a monopoly in the hands of a few pay less and less attention to the journalistic manipulators. And they fade into irrelevance. Hahaha.
Posted by: Rick at June 30, 2008 9:57 AM
One can't help wondering how many esteemed journalists have participated in these Pallywood productions. This is by far not the first. A few years ago an American TV news man was proven to be part of a staged shooting incident in which the area he reported from looks very much the same. For some reason the TV Commentator was let go as having been duped by the host of poor actors and yet other video showed the whole thing to be obviously staged by Palestinians.
The most obvious staging in the Al Dura film is what is not shown to the left of the child and his father. There is in fact a fully exposed and very visible camera crew barely 6 or 7 feet away against the same wall and with no protection filming the Al Duras' during the same period. Also noted on videos where ambulances scurrying around and the same people walking or running around with very little concern about what appears to be AK 47 rounds being heard in the background.
How many more times can the Pallywood production people yell wolf?
Posted by: Mackie at June 30, 2008 9:58 AM
So the Palestinians are afforded reasonable doubt but the Israelis aren't?
Anyone who doesn't go along with the media's version of events is a pressure group?
And they wonder why people don't trust the media!
France, shmance!
Posted by: PMK at June 30, 2008 10:22 AM
Enderlin in the past has bemoaned a "campaign of intimidation" by those determined to unearth every last fact about the report he broadcast about Al-Dura, and about the Arab cameraman, and about the scenes of Arabs acting out being attacked or shot -- all to be, once rehearsed, then caught on camera, by the Arab cameramen who work for Western news agencies, and who are the willing (or willing-and-scared) collaborators of propagandists for the Gazan Arabs or the "West Bank" Arabs. This kind of scene-setting, play-acting, role-playing, is similar to many other events that we are familiar with by now, such as those "severely wounded" Arabs taken away in Red Crescent ambulances, and then are caught, a few minutes later, having arrived elsewhere, having apparently miraculously recovered and seen jumping out of those same ambulances. That has happened not once, not twice, but many times. And who can forget -- or who remembers? -- that during the 2006 war, Hezbollah kept arranging the same pseudo-harrowing scenes, with the same men carrying, in different poses, sometimes with a slight change of address, the same corpse, over and over again, to make it seem each time as it if were a new "victim," or the old woman repeatedly shown by a damaged building, pictures taken from every angle, and then appearing on different days, in different news accounts, as being of different acts of wanton Israeli destruction. It was all a farce. And being a farce, it should have been closed down by Western news agencies at once. For they all have their petits enderlins, and a whole lot of reckoning, in the history books, is going to go on with these falsifiers and handmaids and willing collaborators with terror and Jihad.
It has been suggested that Enderlin does not dare to admit what he now should admit because the real intimidators -- the Arabs, in this case the "Palestinians" -- have threatened him with death if he dares to begin to tell the truth. Such things have happened before, and of course the entire news-gathering operation in Arab and Muslim areas is all about intimidation, all about the fear the journalists have, which is why reports from the spot have to be viewed through the prism or filter of a clear understanding of that fear, by those who are not already, for ideological reasons, part of the very movement they are reporting on or filming.
Posted by: Hugh at June 30, 2008 10:22 AM
Western news agencies, and who are the willing (or willing-and-scared) collaborators of propagandists for the Gazan Arabs or the "West Bank" Arabs.
-by Hugh
Maybe it's time for Western news agencies to pull out of all war zones, and Gaza and the West Bank are war zones. If they can't report honestly then they should not report at all. In any case, the damage has been done. Enderlin may live but French journalism will die.
They can sermonize all they want about how the public is entitled to the truth and they are serving the public. This shows they are NOT. They're human, like everyone else. It's time they jumped down from their self-made pedestals. It's time WE stopped giving the media the benefit of the doubt. Our trust in them has sadly been misplaced.
Posted by: PMK at June 30, 2008 10:29 AM
B-b-b-b-but PMK....If they pull out of Middle Eastern war zones....they might not get that coveted interview with Nasrallah, or Abu Whatsisname. And THAT would be journalistic malpractice.
Speaking of which, has anyone been watching Christiane Amanpour's take on North Korea.....
at June 30, 2008 10:39 AM
If (actually, when) Obama is elected, it's not just talk radio that will be extinguished due to the revival of the fairness doctrine. His utter infatuation with "world opinion" will surely result in his collusion in turning over control of the internet from the current quasi-public corporation whose only regulatory power is the registering of domain names...to the UN, where it will be good-bye to Jihad-watch and scores of other "right-wing" web-sites, all in the name of outlawing "hate speech".
Obama's going to win folks...the economy in the tank assures as much. But I'm going down swinging. Viva McCain!!!...whose sterling asset is that he's the lessor of two evils.
Posted by: Cornelius at June 30, 2008 10:59 AM
Jewel,
That's the lie. What purpose is served by such an interview if you cannot report honestly on everything else in the same area? There's a word for it: PROPAGANDA.
The Lefigaro reporter's defense of Enderlin was to attack those who were questioning his work: "You can't take anything they say seriously."
A concise description of my opinion of French journalism. Nothing they say can be taken seriously, ever again. Let them say the sun rises in the East. They'll have to have proof. Too many journalists have broken the trust that their readers placed in them.
"Even after a long time. Corrections [to stories in American publications] were duly appended to stories on the websites of newspapers, to prevent the eternal metastasizing of factual errors. Maître Klein marvelled for a moment at such thoroughness. It seemed, I could tell, a little pointless to him: He, like almost everyone else I'd spoken to, rated facts far below reputation."
If facts don't matter to journalists then their work should be classified as what it is: FICTION.
Posted by: PMK at June 30, 2008 11:03 AM
The palpable fear in the snippets from the conversations with the petition-signing lemming journos confirms we now live in 1984. Maintain goodthink and continue to dole out the prolefeed to the masses, and maybe your career won't be sent to Room 101.
Posted by: Concerned Citizen at June 30, 2008 11:59 AM
What appalling egotism and elitism, what distain for truth, for decency, for transcendent justice and for human life--that's what France 2 and the French establishment hold fast to. Moral rot.
Posted by: John C at June 30, 2008 12:20 PM
Aw c'mon, what can you expect from a shitty little country anyway? France. Merd.
Posted by: perpster at June 30, 2008 12:52 PM
When the reporter becomes "the story" more than the truth of their report, it's no longer journalism but egotistical self-promotion and purulent propaganda.
Does simmering anti-Semitism in France explain it?
Posted by: profitsbeard at June 30, 2008 1:01 PM
"Does simmering anti-Semitism in France explain it?"
Yes. If the story dealt with virtually any other country there might be *some* outrage. Because it involves Israel it's of little to no concern.
Posted by: perpster at June 30, 2008 1:09 PM
Concerned Citizen, a double plus ungood error on your part, which, I'm afraid will get you sent to Room 101. The careers of those who would be purveyors of prolefeed who violate the goodthink policies of the Ministry of Truth shall be sent down the Memory Hole. Please keep this in mind, NEXT TIME.
Posted by: Jewel Atkins at June 30, 2008 1:25 PM
Look at me, I'm as dirty as a Frenchman.
Posted by: Richard at June 30, 2008 1:41 PM
"Rightist". When somebody trots out that all-purpose smear and code word for "you shouldn't listen to anything they say", you know you've got them.
Posted by: aynrandgirl at June 30, 2008 1:58 PM
Modern Western journalism is in a wretched state, entirely of its own doing, this Enderlin case serving as yet another example of such, and I agree with Cornelius that the fairness doctrine, which a President Obama, in conjunction with a Democratic Congress, would almost certainly make the law of the land, points like a dagger at the heart of Internet sites like Jihad Watch. So, for all those who have qualms about John McCain, as I have, know full well that he nonetheless is the only thing standing between Orwellian-like control of communication outlets and continued, undiluted freedom of expression. Put another way, a vote for Obama is a vote for censorship.
Posted by: Wellington at June 30, 2008 2:05 PM
There is one aspect of the coverage by those critical of France 2 that hasn't sat well with me over the past few weeks: the idea that the al-Dura hoax is responsible for scores of dead Jews over the past decade, incited the post-Oslo war against Israel and encouraged Muslims throughout Europe to act out violently against Jews.
Let's put the blame where it belongs: 1400 years of Islamic sanction for violence against infidels, Muhammad's anti-Jewish statements, the example of the "prophet" in ordering the slaughter of the Jewish tribes of Arabia, decades of "Palestinian" Nazi-style indoctrination against the Jews and the apologetics indulgence toward the actions and accusations of Arab "militants" by Western media, academics and intellectuals.
Certainly the al-Dura incident has served as a rallying point for the various anti-Israel elements, particularly among Europe's Muslims and leftists on both sides of the Atlantic. It symbolizes every way in which the jihad against Israel (and non-Muslims everywhere) is misrepresented in the media, on college campuses and by others with an even-more toxic political agenda.
However, as it relates to suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, my belief is that the "2nd intifada" was planned militarily--and inspired by Palestinian indoctrination in PA schools and media--from the day that Israel foolishly agreed to allow the PLO into the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo Accords.
Had Enderlin not perpetrated this fraud, the media and mosques in the West Bank, Gaza and Muslim communities across the globe were already showing constant pictures of supposed Israeli atrocities. The PA leadership, including so-called moderates, were clearly laying the ground work for war, even while negotiating with Israelis and Americans at Camp David. A quick online search will show all sorts of prominent PA operatives issuing statements about there being no Jewish connection to Jerusalem. Age old lies, reported by Western media as though they are new and credible accusations rather than disregarded as a familiar script used for centuries against non-Muslims, were being disseminated about Jewish plans for destroying Jerusalem's Muslim holy sites.
Add to that constant talk in the government-sponsored Palestinian media and by professors, doctors and Imams of Jews poisoning the water supply, stealing land, committing genocide, starving populations, betraying Muhammad, distorting the word of God, becoming the sons of apes and monkeys and generally being blamed for everything from the weather to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Oh yeah, we probably shouldn't forget all the Muslim-on-Muslim massacres, authoritarian kleptocratic governments in 22 Arab nation-states and lack of economic development on the 99.5 percent of "Arab-Muslim land" not "occupied" by Israel. That's all the fault of the Jews as well.
I am in no way excusing Enderlin, France 2, the complicit Western press or inept Israeli public relations. I simply believe that an "intifada" against Israel was inevitable due to the factors discussed above. I believe that a growing, emboldened and self-segregating Muslim population in Europe was bound to bring with it the disfunction, hatreds (including anti-Semitism) and endemic violence of its native lands, meaning that attacks on Jews in France and Britain were coming regardless of any single specific media event. European politicians, needing Muslim votes to stay in power and fearing terrorism, would be less than vigilant in protecting their Jewish citizens. Academics and left-wing ideologues, looking for a cause to rally around, were happy to turn their venom against Israel and its Western supporters, rather than troubling themselves with the growing threat to their freedoms and social values from a non-Western religion, which of course we were assured, couldn't be the source of the problem.
The Western media should be excoriated for not only promoting the al-Dura hoax, but for its refusal to pursue the truth once it became clear that something was amiss. Instead, the same journalists in the Middle East who gave us the non-massacre in Jenin and fauxtography in Lebanon, continue to quote the same sources, relay the same accusations and rely on the same Arab stringers, as though they haven't been been burned many times before. Rather than attempting to operate in a different fashion, the media tries to avoid any discussion of the problems of reporting in areas where they don't feel safe enough to tell the whole story, where they rely on local stringers and guides for access and translation and where the religion and culture mandate lying for the good of the cause as well as for self-presentation.
But let's be careful not to continue the pattern of blaming Western actions for every unpleasant occurrence in the Middle East. Many mistakes have been made in Iraq, but we didn't cause Sunnis and Shias to hate one another. Jewish sovereignty in any miniscule part of the Middle East may offend Muslims, but lets not pretend that Muslim anti-Semitism wasn't an essential part of Islamic life long before the modern Zionist movement. 1400 years of Islamic theology, the glorification of centuries of jihad against non-Muslims, the subjugation of the dhimmi and the values inculcated by Islam in its adherents have far more to do with the slaughter of innocent Jews than does one fraudulent story from a pernicious French journalist.
at June 30, 2008 2:13 PM
Better to be on the Extreme Right rather than the Extreme Wrong!
Right is from Left as truth is from falsehood!
Posted by: James at June 30, 2008 2:18 PM
The Bigs in the US are in a bad state business-wise for this very sort of thing. These pukes make the news they want to make. That this guy is an Israeli himself is utterly deplorable and utterly predictable. I just don't know if the Zionists collectively have the will to live. Certainly the peacenik wing of the nation enthuses to put themselves at the mercy of Abbas, tender nurturer that he is, on a good day. On bad days, they want to submit to Hezbollah. But be of good cheer. The affliction that has done so much to rectify press abuses in this country is alive and well in the al-Dura case. Let this not be the last one and let the reporters fear for their jobs, at the least.
Posted by: megapotamus at June 30, 2008 3:17 PM
4infidels,
It's not a case of blaming Western press for what happens in the Middle East as much as it is blaming Western press for lying to US. If they lied about this, what else are they lying about? They can be very sanctimonious when people ask if they're going too far, telling us it's their job to keep an eye on government. So where were they in this case? Lying to protect one of their own. Watch a public official do that and then see how much the press can crucify him.
After Watergate, the press became holier than thou, telling us it was their job to be a watchdog. Now we see the press engaging in a coverup of its own. To see them complicit in lies and deception only destroys their credibility.
You said: "Had Enderlin not perpetrated this fraud, the media and mosques in the West Bank, Gaza and Muslim communities across the globe were already showing constant pictures of supposed Israeli atrocities."
And I expect the press to do its best to verify the story, not run with it. If they can't operate safely in the country then they should get out and tell the world that they cannot report freely on what happens. Instead they paint a false picture of what life is like in that part of the world, all to avoid trouble. So what good are they? We don't need another Walter Duranty.
How many people will die because the press just wanted a compelling story, facts be damned? They don't report the news. They make the news. Sometimes, as here, they make up the news.
at June 30, 2008 4:13 PM
All of the people in the press who signed this in support of Enderlin should be ashamed, the concept of a free press is to try to report the truth. If they cannot do so then make it clear that they cannot and pull out of the territory completely.
This is not negotiable, now the press are seen as little better, perhaps worse than politicians...
Posted by: Daffersd at June 30, 2008 4:45 PM
Cornelius, I share your concerns about the "progressives'" eagerness to further erode freedom of expression. Microsoft, Google, and their ilk have proven only too willing to do the biding of totalitarian regimes. If the POTUS and Congress abdicate their responsibilities to uphold the U.S. Constitution, I fully expect the media whores to go along, especially if there is a buck to be made. Access to truth in the Orwellian world to come should be of paramount concern to us.
Posted by: Infidel33 at June 30, 2008 4:45 PM
PMK,
I agree with everything you wrote. I really don't think there is much difference with what I'm saying. I have a very low opinion of the press and all your criticisms are valid.
My point is that I've have read several articles elsewhere, from people with whom I usually agree, that suggest that the al-Dura incident caused or inflamed the 2nd intifada. I think Enderlin's behavior and the cover-up by other members of the press is atrocious and should be exposed. I also think he did terrible damage to Israel in some segments of the Western world, giving anti-Israel activists and their followers an issue to rally around. And all of that is reprehensible and deserves the strongest condemnation.
Not that I think any more positively about Enderlin or France 2, I assure you I don't. I just think that we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Muslims in the MIddle East and Europe would have acted violently toward Jews and other infidels regardless of the al-Dura affair. The impetus for those acts comes from the Imams they hear in the mosques, the propaganda in their media, the nature of Islamic societies and the words of the Koran and Hadith. I can't tell you how angry folks like Enderlin make me. But even if the Western media reported with the highest moral and ethical standards, Jews and Christians in both the Middle East and the West should still expect hatred and violence--motivated by religion and incited by grievances that can be made up without the help of France 2--aimed at them from Muslims.
Posted by: 4infidels at June 30, 2008 4:46 PM
I'll repeat myself: the Al-Dura/Enderlin/Talal Abu Rahmeh story can be the turning point in the kuffirs' education about things Islamic.
As Hugh said about the manufacturing of the "Palestinian people", it is never too late for the truth to come out. France 2, with their refusal even today, under a direct court order, to release the tapes, knows it. When the truth comes out about "Palestinian" manipulation of the truth, and about Western media's duplicity, the entire carefully manufactured facade of the "Palestinian Conflict" (and the larger jihad) will begin to crumble.
Once we can begin to fathom the idea that a group could (and would) invent the mythical story of the murder of a child for political purposes, and that Western journalists would assist in this myth-making, all sorts of the kuffirs' false assumptions about Religions of Peace, and Everyone Everywhere is The Same, and We All Want the Same Things, and We Can Trust the Media to Tell Us What is Happening, they will also fall into question. And being questioned, they will crumble into dust.
Only a prolonged unwavering pressure for an investigation into this story will allow the truth to be dragged out of France 2.
"These people, the ones attacking him, they're extreme rightists, yes? You can't take anything they say seriously.
As a lifelong Democrat and self-described "liberal", I say:
Bullsh*t.
Posted by: special_guest at June 30, 2008 5:59 PM
Journalism is dead, MSM are leftist wanting to defeat all things good about the West. MSM are not reporting the news but have an agenda and are making the news to fit their will, including phony polls. Obama must not win at any cost, hopefully Americans will understand how much of an elite he is and wants to cut America down especially military terms, with open borders!
Posted by: ZenaWarriorPrincess at June 30, 2008 6:52 PM
4infidels,
I think we're pretty much on the same page. Your last point is the one that I take issue with. It doesn't matter how much hate they have toward us or each other. The Palestinians might have found another excuse for doing what they did. The fact remains that it was France 2 that gave it to them and that it did so deliberately, knowing full well that its own footage didn't bear out what was said on the air. That should not be forgotten. I realize it's not what you meant but it sounds like: no harm, no foul.
at June 30, 2008 7:07 PM
Zena,
McCain isn't any better. He's another elitist. He'll give twenty million people amnesty once he's "secured the border". Pick your poison.
at June 30, 2008 7:19 PM
Thank God for Jihad Watch! Thank God for bloggers! Thank God for the Internet! Were it not for them, we wouldn't even know that that infamous video was a hoax. This travesty should get great publicity. There should be a mass revolt against the cowardly Western media Quislings playing right into the hands of the Global Jihad.
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.
Posted by: Enragedsince1999 at June 30, 2008 7:19 PM
Infidel33,
Your use of the word "Orwellian" to describe our prospective future is very, very apt.
I was once a pot-smoking hippy who actually believed in an eventual global convergence of culture and polity. I may still smoke herb from time to time, but the illusions of youth have long been extinguished. My older Bro, whom I love dearly but who has never graduated from such adolescent thinking, recently wrote to me that he still believes in "love and peace." I could only shake my head in despair. Ten years ago, I perceived such thinking as naive but basically harmless.
Today, I see it as naive and potentially very dangerous.
Posted by: Cornelius at June 30, 2008 9:29 PM
Yes, of course, the French extreme right has a long and nefarious history of conspiring with the Jews in their (the right's) 200 year war on the Republic. Everyone knows that. The ability of all these "journalism professionals" to have immediately caught on to that subterranean story goes a long way in explaining why we all admire the French intellectual class so much these days.
As to the fear Hugh mentioned, that's not unlikely and has been proved in many cases, more typically of journalists actually on the ground in Israel. See among other sources Stephanie Gutmann's The Other War -- the sickening photo on the front cover says it all. But why multiply causes unnecessarily, as that solid Englishman William of Occam once said? If you'll excuse the irony of quoting him in this context, I think Belloc's poem gets to the heart of the general moral corruption here:
You cannot hope to bribe, or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do,
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.
at June 30, 2008 10:58 PM
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