The symbol

via memeorandum
Richard Landes (Augean Stables) has an excellent essay on at Pajama’s Media Al Dura and the “public secret” Middle East Journalism. This week the judge handing the appeal of the Karsenty-France 2/Enderlin case will see the raw footage of the supposed killing of Al-Dura. In connection to the case, Landes asks and answers some questions, with unsettling results.

Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the “truth” is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years – Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes – continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?Here the evidence provided by the Al Durah affair suggests that, in some sense, journalists are “in” on the public secret. When representatives of France2 were confronted with the pervasive evidence of staging in Talal’s footage, they both responded the same way. “Oh, they always do that, it’s a cultural thing,” said Enderlin to me in Jerusalem. “Yes Monsieur, but, you know, it’s always like that,” said Didier Eppelbaum to Denis Jeambar, Daniel Leconte, and Luc Rosenzweig in Paris.

In the course of making his point, Landes writes about another incident that was a direct effect of the killing of Mohammed Al-Dura, the brutal lynching of two Israel reservists, Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich.

An incident at Ramallah, however, suggests that Western journalists have systematically submitted to Palestinian demands that they practice Palestinian journalism. On October 12, 2000, to cries of “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah,” Palestinian men tore to pieces the bodies of two Israeli reservists. Aware of the potential damage, Palestinians attacked any journalist taking pictures. And yet, one Italian crew working for a private news station, at great risk to their lives, smuggled out the footage.

Landes brings the case for a specific reason, but it also provides a contrast to the Al-Dura incident. At the time, the late Scott Shuger wrote Making Excuses for Ramallah. If journalists were prepared to believe the Al-Dura story because it fit their narrative, they played down the Ramallah lynchings because it was inconvenient to their narrative.

In the search for the journalistic Yeti leaving all these footprints, that mucky New York Times “explanation” of Ramallah is instructive. “Collision” suggests an accident between objects moving towards each other with equal force. “What each side sees” suggests that in the Middle East, one can never escape ethnic perspective to get at the plain facts. And “core ugliness” suggests that in this region, neither side is blameless.Now, looking at the whole sad history of the place, all these ideas are probably true. But the problem is that none of them accurately describe “what happened today” at the Ramallah police station: the Israeli soldiers were defenseless when set upon, therefore it was objectively wrong to kill them, and therefore on that particular day in that particular place, unequal blame can be apportioned.

Potentially the outcome of the Karsenty-France 2/Enderlin case should force the media to look at their preconceived notions about the Middle East and how their coverage doesn’t meet the standards of objectivity that they claim to believe in.

In reality if Karsenty wins his appeal it will be because, as Landes notes,

…Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Durah that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well…

This case should be to journalism what Watergate was to American politics.

PowerLine sums up the Landes column:

I would urge our readers to read Landes’s article with care, because it has implications far beyond the Al Dura case. First, Landes argues that western journalists are widely aware of the fact that much of the Palestinian video footage that comes to them is staged, but they prefer that their own consumers in the West not be in on the “secret.” Second, Landes notes that the Islamic Mass Media Charter, which sets out a code of ethics for Muslim journalists, implicitly encourages false reporting by establishing, as principles of journalism, the twin obligations to “censor all materials” where necessary to protect the umma, and to “[t]o combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.”

Captain’s Quarters emphasizes

Western news agencies rely on local stringers, reporters, and photographers in order to get news from hot spots such as Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. As the al-Dura incident has shown, they don’t care much for editorial fact-checking afterwards as long as they get something juicy enough to sell newspapers and TV advertisements. It doesn’t hurt, either, when the result confirms institutional biases against Israel and the United States.

Israel Matzav hopes that soon to be released tapes will have a good result.

At Pajamas Media, Richard Landes has a must-read article on the staged death of Muhammed al-Dura. The original France 2 tapes are to be played before a French judge this Wednesday, and the entire fraud may be exposed.

Except the media seems oblivious to the significance of what’s going on. I checked the Washington Post’s coverage. I searched both the papers recent and longterm archives for the name “Karsenty” and got no results.

The New York Times’ archives did return a single result about the case, but it was from two and a half years ago. The article is well reported and mentions a German documentary about the case.

The scenes were filmed by its Palestinian cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma, who was the only one to capture images of what Mr. Enderlin characterized then as the killing of a child by gunfire from an Israeli position. Mr. Enderlin was not present during the shooting.Esther Schapira, a German producer in Frankfurt, said she tried unsuccessfully in preparation for her 2002 documentary to see a master copy of the tape and was astonished when France 2 did not share it because European stations commonly exchange material. “If there is nothing to hide,” she said of France 2’s initial reluctance, “what are they afraid of?”

Still Enderlin insisted

Mr. Enderlin wrote letters insisting: “We do not transform reality. But in view of the fact that some parts of the scene are unbearable, France 2 was obliged to cut a few seconds from the scene.”

But a former France 2 reporter differed:

“That image has had great influence,” said Daniel Leconte, a former correspondent for France 2. “If this image does not mean what we were told, it is necessary to find the truth.”

It wasn’t just that the Al-Dura narrative was used by the Palestinians (second clip) to foment anger against Israel, it was used all over the Arab world.

Egypt and Tunisia issued postage stamps of the boy, Muhammad al-Dura, crouching against his father and under attack from a fusillade of bullets in September 2000. Egypt named a street in his honor, and suicide bombers invoked the boy as a martyr in videotaped farewells.

The Israeli government had quickly posted an annotated picture of the Netzarim juncition showing the positions of all those shooting. It shows that the Israeli solider could not reasonably have known that there were civilians in the area and that the Israelis weren’t at an angle where they could have easily hit the al-Dura’s. Yet no media outlet followed up on their claims. The idea that Israel had used overwhelming force to repel a popular (not staged) rebellion controlled the coverage of the shooting.

Once the media were deprived of the poor Palestinian who had been beaten by the Israeli policeman, they needed another symbol. That symbol was Mohammed al-Dura and nothing was going to prevent the media from appropriating him. Not even the truth.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.