22-May-08: Facing down those who fashion the lies
The colossal damage done to the lives of innocent Israelis - including the parents writing these lines - by means of blood-libels fabricated by sober-seeming, mainstream media practitioners is the dirty secret behind the headlines of this ongoing war.If the editors, photographers, cartoonists, reporters and analysts who shape the reports delivered into the conventional news channels were obliged to face critical analysis, had to justify their frequently agenda-driven spinning, had to give an accounting for their prejudicial distortions and lies, then most of the venom directed at Israel and Israelis wouldn't be there. The al-Dura scandal is a powerful case in point. We've pointed visitors to this blog several times to the iconology that created a powerful image for the practitioners of lethal terror and their henchmen. See 7-Feb-08: Getting to the truth behind a lethal icon: the Al-Dura scandal, 28-May-07: The Ongoing Tragedy of Dead Palestinian-Arab Children, and 6-Sep-06: An unblinking look at French - and Western - values for three instances. The image of a cowering Al-Dura father and son has been invoked by the jihadists in countless murders and maimings of innocent Jews. Tom Gross, a fearless writer and analyst whom we've quoted here several times, points out that "Osama bin Laden referred to al-Dura in a post-9/11 video; the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl placed a picture of him in their beheading video; streets, squares and academies have been named after al-Dura. He became a poster child" for what we know as the Second Arafat War that started in 2000. So how true was it? A French appeals court has been asked to rule on that question. This week they answered. Before we get into the background, let's point out that as important as the court decision is, it remains almost completely unknown to the great majority of people who need to know it. They mainly live in Western Europe and especially France where the story has gotten scant coverage - and certainly only a tiny fraction of the attention which the original 2000 report gained. The legal case is about a Frenchman by the name of Karsenty. He took a long, cool look at the way France's main television channel put to air a video clip (15 seconds, out of what turns out to be either an 18 minute film, as France 2 says, or a 27 minute film as some of its critics have said) allegedly captured by the channel's Jerusalem correspondent. France 2 asserted that the recorded the cold-blooded killing of an Arab child in Gaza by Israeli soldiers - about the most incendiary kind of allegation you can make in a war of the perceived-strong versus the perceived-weak. Karsenty came to a definitive view that the video is a fake, and that the French media people knew it but pushed ahead for the worst of ideological motivations. Prof. Richard Landes' outstanding Second Draft website, which mounted a far more detailed and careful investigative effort on the case than the France media establishment ever did, published a video clip in which the Gazan boy, whom Enderlin has already pronounced dead, lifts up his arm and head and looks around before resuming the "dead" position. Karsenty went public with his findings, and for his troubles was sued by France 2 and its correspondent. In 2006, a French court found that Karsenty had committed a libel against France 2 and its man in Jerusalem. Against this decision, Karsenty appealed and this week he won. In the wake of the almost entirely unreported verdict, he wrote an emotional and important opinion piece that was published yesterday under the title French Court Vindicates Al-Dura Hoax Critic. Here's the full text. May 21, 2008Philippe Karsenty is the founder and president of Media-Ratings, an agency that closely monitors French media outlets for anti-American and anti-Israeli bias. |























