AL-DURA: THE TRIAL (PART ONE)

Nidra Poller
Paris 13 September 2006

The commemoration of 9/11 was the occasion, here in France, for another round of shameful Bush bashing. Jumping on the just released Senate report, the media triumphantly announced that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda before 9/11. The report must have included all sorts of information, much of it contradictory to orthodox French anti-Americanism, but it was not deemed worthy of interest. The accusation stands: Bush deliberately lied in order to make illegal war on Iraq for his own personal reasons and voilà the disaster that ensued.

No such accusation has ever been brought against state-owned French television channel France 2, purveyor of the al-Dura death scene that triggered a new phase of jihad against Israel and a gigantic wave of violence against Jews worldwide.
Compared to the unjustified “Bush lied” slander, the demonstration that France 2 lied should be a pushover. On the contrary, it has been an uphill fight for six years. Six years during which the state-owned television network (France Télévisions), the media control agency (CSA), and French media all across the spectrum have refused to respect the basic rules of journalistic ethics. The simple re-examination of a questionable news report, with disclosure of all available evidence, would have settled the affair in the space of a few days. Instead of which it festers and spreads and poisons the atmosphere. It should be added that little help was forthcoming from Israeli officials or from the organized Jewish community in France or the United States.

People who have been struggling to discover and make known the truth about the al-Dura affair—I count myself among them—have often been shunned and dismissed. But they have made significant progress, and none of them have given up.

Charles Enderlin, the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who produced the al-Dura news report in collaboration with Palestinian stringer Talal Abu Rahmeh, has used a strategy of intimidation and indignation to ward off independent investigation of the affair. But the protective mechanism began to falter in the autumn of 2004 when current news director Arlette Chabot was instructed to allow three reputable mainstream journalists—Luc Rosenzweig, Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte—to view the ace in the hole evidence that would convince them of the authenticity of the report.

Leaks on that groundbreaking preview of the famous al-Dura outtakes made their way into high profile media, including the WSJ, IHT and, later, Commentary Magazine, LA Times, Reader’s Digest, and Fox News, etc. France 2 launched an aggressive spin operation, whipping up the same old arguments to prove the same old story and adding for good measure a lawsuit against X, X being anyone who would question the authenticity of the al-Dura report. Far from being intimidated, some of the potentially accused Xs forged ahead. The first of three subsequently individualized Xs —Philippe Karsenty, founding director of the online media watch enterprise Media-Ratings— will be judged for public defamation of the honor and reputation of an “individual,” namely France 2, Arlette Chabot, and Charles Enderlin. To avoid a lengthy digression on the French legal system, let us just accept as given that a holy trinity composed of the TV channel and two of its employees can be treated as an individual for the purpose of pleading the case against Karsenty. On the other hand it is easy to see the advantage of standing as a private party whose honor has been sullied rather than appearing as media professionals expected to hold to certain standards.

The same questions come to mind at every step of this simple-complicated imbroglio: do the plaintiffs know they are lying, do they think they are telling the truth, do they realize that the evidence would hang them in any honest trial, are they counting on a fail proof system of omerta to sustain the falsification?

The trial will take place in the august halls of the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris on the 14th of September 2006. Philippe Karsenty stands accused of casting dishonor on the reputation of the plaintiffs by suggesting, in a brief article published by Media-Ratings on 22 November 2004: “Arlette Chabot and Charles Enderlin should be immediately dismissed.” The sober factual article, devoid of inflammatory language and personal attacks, politely accepts the challenge inherent in the lawsuit against X and expresses the readiness of Media-Ratings to defend in court as it defends on its site the claim that the al-Dura news report is a staged scene. It should be mentioned that Karsenty has been sued three times in the short life of Media Ratings, simply for doing what media watch organizations do. The media are quick to remind critics that error is human but apparently in France a media watch organization isn’t even free to express itself when it is not mistaken. The incriminated article is based on concrete details that have led serious analysts to conclude that the al-Dura death scene cannot possibly represent the shooting, wounding, and killing described in Enderlin’s voice off commentary and elaborated in a stock narrative indiscriminately repeated ever since the incident allegedly occurred.

French society has never examined the implications of the news report that served as the founding myth of a Palestinian war against Israel, the so-called “Al Aqsa Intifada,” enflamed in September 2000 by the “death” of Mohamed al-Dura and the wounding of his father Jamal, “targets,” according to Charles Enderlin, “of gunfire from the Israeli positions.” Debate has been stifled by the defensive reaction of Enderlin, his hierarchy and, apparently, the government itself. It is significant that in the absence of debate the myth will be “judged” in the narrow confines of a lawsuit, within the strictures of legal language and rules of evidence.

How could France 2 have taken the risk of losing the lawsuits against Philippe Karsenty and, at a later date, Pierre Lurçat and Charles Gouz? Did they single out three supposedly soft targets with the intention of silencing all those who are actively engaged in dismantling the myth, and discrediting them in the eyes of clear-minded people who are slowly discovering that the al-Dura news report is a fake?

Within minutes of the September 30, 2000 broadcast astute observers saw that something was awry. Different people in different places for a variety of reasons noted disparities between the image and the commentary. Something was fishy about this scoop that just happened to pop up when needed. Today, six years later, a significant body of documentation confirms that initial intuition. In fact, everyone seems to agree on the prevalence of staged news, but few are willing to draw the logical conclusion. They sideswipe the question. The three French journalists who saw Talal Abu Rahmeh’s outtakes have discredited the al-Dura news report and rejected Enderlin’s attempts to justify it as “corresponding to the general situation.” A doctoral candidate at the Institute of Political Studies (IEP) in Paris declared, in a thinly veiled apology for Enderlin published two days before the trial:

As for claims that Hizbullah and the Palestinians “stage scenes,” even if they are all confirmed it won’t change the fact that 4000 Palestinians and 1300 Lebanese, most of them civilians, have been felled by Israeli gunfire in the past six years…(Arnaud l’Enfant. “Israel and the media,” La Libre belgique, Sept. 12 2006)

Many journalists who are unashamedly hostile to Israel admit that the Palestinians produce falsified news but they find nothing to deplore in this practice—it’s simply propaganda, and everyone does it. A France 2 official acknowledged in the presence of news director Arlette Chabot, whose honor is allegedly sullied by Philippe Karsenty, that the Palestinians regularly enact fake battle scenes, some of which are reported as news in Western media.

All of these people freely admit that some, much, or even most of the material contained in the 27-minute video shot by Talal Abu Rahmeh at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip on that fatal day are in fact staged scenes. (French journalists admit in private that the al-Dura scene, too, was staged; they say everyone knows it, no one will ever admit it publicly, this sort of revelation is totally and absolutely impossible in France, and besides it’s an old story and no one is interested.)
For four years Enderlin claimed to have absolute proof of the authenticity of the al-Dura report in the form of 27-minutes of footage, the golden outtakes, which he refused to make available for independent investigation. When Rosenzweig, Jeambar, and Leconte described, in articles and radio interviews, what they had seen, the golden outtakes were reduced, by reverse alchemy, to dross.

Enter the phlogiston theory of media integrity: the al-Dura outtakes are effectively composed of 27-minutes of staged scenes and one nugget of reality, a bit less than one minute by the clock, the “death” of Mohamed al Dura, the truth of which must not be contested. And there is no limit to the coercion, contortions, inventions, and distortions added to that skimpy minute of phlogiston-reality to make it hold.

Talal Abu Rahmeh was captured by another Palestinian stringer, working for Reuters, who shows him filming a staged scene. Common sense would reason that the France 2 cameraman knowingly filmed staged scenes at Netzarim Junction on 30 September 2000 and handed them over to his employers without any warning that they might be harmful to the health of media integrity. Given that the al-Dura death scene also seems, at first glance, to be staged, and further investigation by a variety of experts confirms that suspicion, it would be reasonable to conclude that the incident did not occur in any verifiable form that could qualify as appropriate material for a news report.

It is humanly impossible to prove that it did not occur.

Within, then, the realm of the possible it appears that Talal Abu Rahmeh is devious or unreliable, his immediate superior Charles Enderlin is complicit or incompetent, and news director Arlette Chabot is either ignorant or following orders from her superiors. Common sense would dictate that devious, complicit, and/or incompetent journalists should be fired.

Instead, we have a trial, an ordeal for the accused who must spend untold thousands of euros to defend himself against extravagant accusations brought by an alliance of individual journalists and a television network who are, in reality, the state. Obviously such a state of affairs precludes the slightest whimper of media watch. And what do the media do when no one is watching?

At the time when the lawsuits were brought against Karsenty, Lurçat, and Gouz, there was little reason to hope they would attract international attention. Nothing—not the initial investigation, not articles in known, unknown, and/or prestigious publications, not the lectures, meetings, books, videos, websites, letters, demonstrations, revelations—nothing had pierced the invisible wall that separated the truly fascinating documentation of a monumental hoax—with extremely grave and widespread repercussions—from the wall of indifference and confusion that blocked every attempt to bring the case to light and obtain some form of justice.

Ah, but reality is stronger than any theory, and phlogiston stands as the symbol of imposed ignorance in the face of troubling evidence. The July –August Hizbullah war against Israel brought a windfall of staged news. From Pallywood to Hizbollywood with its cohort of fauxtography the blogosphere rapidly produced a wealth of documentation on a phenomenon that replicates everything we had observed in the al-Dura case. But this time, the results were immediate. Reuters dismissed fauxtographer Adnan Hajj and withdrew his photos from their archives. The information leaped from blogs to mainstream. CNN journalist Anderson Cooper admitted he had been manipulated by Hizbullah handlers. The NY Times wriggled out of its false pieta with a lame excuse, but lame is better than nothing. Pristine cuddly toys among the ruins; Green Helmet bouncing dead kids in the air; rescue workers becoming, by turns, bereaved fathers, distressed neighbors, and Hizbullah operatives; a grieving old lady performing in front of several different ruined homesteads, all of them 100% civilian, all of them hers, all of them source of unbearable sorrow; a wounded ambulance driver miraculously cured; press cars hit by missiles and resisting better than a Merkava tank… all of this and more available for analyses that yield a coherent picture of something beyond propaganda—a weapon, a type of warfare that I call “lethal narratives.”

The difference between Gaza and Hizbullah strongholds in Lebanon is that Western journalists circulated in semi-freedom in the latter, at their own risk in the former, as attested by the kidnapping and forced conversion of Fox journalists Centanni and Wiig. The al-Dura story remains trapped in a gilded French cage six years after the fact; Hizbullah falsifications are out in the open and resulting in a few, admittedly hesitant and partial, changes in Western media practices.

We observe striking similarities between the different theaters of staged war-zone scenes.

The staged scenes are incredibly crude. No offense meant to those who have skillfully dissected them but, they are so big they hit you in the eye at first glance. Which, strangely enough, has served to protect them from detection. A series of logical reversals lead observers to conclude that the fake is so fake it must be real, that no one would dare to make such an obvious fake, and those who describe the fake must be a bit unhinged, or have an axe to grind, because if the thing were such a fake, everyone would know it.

The scenes obscenely violate the sanctity of life: real dead bodies are dragged in to serve as props on the site of a real false bombing, live people are presented as dead, corpses are set out in macabre displays of blood and gore without a shred of evidence as to where and how they died or were killed, bloodied bodies of small children are handled like meat on the hook, and this mishmash of a stew is served with the hysterical cries and breast beating of fake real false genuine mourners. When challenged, this collective gore is carved up into neat portions of rebuttal: yes, this or that scene was in fact staged, but so many have died, such terrible suffering, how can you be so cold-hearted as to pick over the corpses trying to see which ones are really dead.

Ambulances, press cars, convoys of fleeing villagers, refugees huddled in schools, mosques, convents are repeatedly attacked:…by Tsahal or by Hizbullah film directors? No one seems to care. The news reports are churned out and broadcast. The burden of proof is not in the image, not in the witness, but in the purpose served: do they illustrate the cruel inhumanity of Israelis? Yes? Then they are valid.

The technicolor accusations—Jenin massacre, Gaza Beach massacre, Qana massacre—gradually fall apart in the light of rational analysis and fade away when no longer sustainable, only to reappear when necessary, reconstituted, recycled, cleansed of the still unanswered legitimate questions about their validity. The narrative and the image are effaced but the effects are eternal.

A new kind of journalistic “ethics” has shifted the burden of proof from the originating source of the report to the challenger, placing the latter in the impossible position of proving that something did not occur.

In the al-Dura affair this has led to a counter-productive emphasis on the icon: the man and the boy up against the wall, cringing in fear, targeted, wounded… How many millions of words have been composed to describe the anomalies, incoherence, aberrations, contradictions, oddities, technicalities, absurdities of the scene and how many words, on the side of the myth’s defenders, to describe the circumstances, attempts to alert, to protect, the anguish, ordeal, suffering, the hail of bullets, the terrible wounds, the frantic waving, the fatal outcome? Whether in defense of the authenticity of the scene or in analysis of the discrepancies, the words overflow a thousand times the timeframe of the incident. Few of us are experts in ballistics, forensic pathology, or physics but we all know approximately how much drama can fit into a minute. Try this experiment: take the most minimal description of the ordeal, as told by Jamal al-Dura, and read it out while watching the 55-second broadcast.

No evidence has ever been produced to sustain the claim that Israeli soldiers shot at the man and the boy for 45 minutes; the claim was made by Abu Rahmeh, repeated by Jamal al-Dura, and echoed by journalists near and far. Later, the 45 minutes were discretely set aside without ever being retracted, and boiled down to the 27 “al-Dura” minutes allegedly filmed. In November 2004 the 27 minutes were reduced to roughly 24 minutes of staged scenes, and 3 minutes of doubtful material, including 1 minute of the al-Dura scene.

Here on earth, in the absence of an omniscient deity, all hypothetical portions of the drama are relegated to vain suppositions, leaving us with approximately one minute of filmed reality, real or fake. And yet every account of the incident describes fifty times more gestures than could ever be crammed into one minute of human time, no matter how intense it might be!

Through the looking glass

Now it is time to look at the case from the other side of the looking glass, here in France. Your ordinary French person knows nothing about staged scenes in Hizbulland. He might have read something about a Reuters photographer who got fired because he used photoshop to retouch the smoke from a bombing scene in Beirut, and most probably he would file that incident under the heading “heartless employers,” and never give it a second thought. He was told that Beirut was in ruins, Lebanon was destroyed, Israel was engaged in an offensive against Lebanon, the international community was pleading for a humanitarian ceasefire, but could not be heard because the war criminal states of America and Israel, with the backing of poodle Blair, were intent on pursuing the destruction of the beautiful land of Lebanon just because two soldiers had been captured. A small minority of web surfers may have visited the English-language blogsophere and discovered the extensive revelations about faked news; an even smaller minority would have been informed by Jewish media in France or French language news agencies from Israel (Guysen, Metula News Agency) but, for all intents and purposes we can assume that French public opinion has not been exposed to the mass of information on cheating news from questionable Lebanese sources. I wonder if the judges who are going to hear the Karsenty case know about fauxtography, child corpse fashion shows, vehicles that hardly dent when hit by missiles, and all the rest. My guess is no. And how about Charles Enderlin, Arlette Chabot, and their colleagues at France Télévisions? Could they possibly be uninformed? Or not recognize the similarities?

A vicious article by Pierre Veilletet and Robert Ménard, respectively president and general secretary of Reporteurs sans frontières (Reporters without Borders) accusing Tsahal of deliberately targeting the media (“Tsahal traite les medias en ennemis,” Le Monde, 4 September) begins this way:

Gaza, August 27th. Two Israeli missiles hit a Reuters press car. One of the journalists is seriously wounded. NGOs protest. Tsahal replies: They “shouldn’t have been there.”

France’s newspaper of record accuses the Israeli army of deliberately firing at journalists and destroying media property (including the Al Manar studios). France’s state-owned television network produces, broadcasts, and distributes worldwide a blood libel against Israel. A cameraman employed by France 2 films staged news. And somehow French society can accommodate all of these attitudes and practices. But when a media watch site calls for the dismissal of those responsible for producing, broadcasting, and defending a falsified news report that accuses Israeli soldiers of the cold blooded murder of a Palestinian child, the director is sued for defamation, for sullying the honor of the plaintiffs.
How will this case be pleaded, tried, and judged in a French court?

[Click here to read part 2]
[Click here to read part 3]
[Click here to read part 4]

Nidra Poller is an American novelist, journalist and translator living in Paris for many years. She is Pajamas Media’s Paris editor.