15-Jun-16: Contemplating a Pal Arab lust for terror, The Economist goes for whitewash

Villagers in Nabi Saleh prepare to celebrate the release (via the Shalit Deal)
of the most celebrated of the clan's numerous murderers, the woman who
engineered the Sbarro pizzeria massacre [Image Source]. For obvious reasons,
the adoration of its murderers is generally absent from
agenda-driven reporting about the odious clan.

Over at UK Media Watch ("Promoting Fair and Accurate Coverage of Israel") they have just published a critical analysis of what it takes to pull the wool over the eyes of the editors at one of the world's best-regarded weeklies:

The Economist fancies itself a sophisticated magazine, one which “offers authoritative insight” into news, politics, business, finance, science and technology.  However, as it pertains to Israel, they've sometimes proven themselves just as vulnerable to the mindless group-think plaguing the rest of the media. A case in point involves their review of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by Ben Ehrenreich (The view on the ground, June 11), a book featuring the Tamimis of the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh.  Though some British media outlets have caught on to the family’s well-choreographed ‘Pasbara’, the anonymous Economist critic barely shows even a hint of journalistic skepticism in the face of Ehrenreich’s risible narrative... ["‘Sophisticated’ Economist duped by Pallywood tale starring the Tamimis", Adam Levick, UK Media Watch - today]

Ehrenreich, who created what the editors at the Economist call "an elegant and moving account", came to our attention three years ago with a cover story he wrote for the New York Times Sunday Magazine - an appalling confection spun from fantasy, carefully-phrased half-truths, wishful thinking and adoration of the redemptive power of murder. 

We hated it. And not only because of the connection of the people of whom he was writing with the murder of our daughter Malki - a tight, meaningful, ongoing and ugly connection.

We wrote two responses at the time. One was in the form of a letter from Frimet Roth to the editors of the NY Times ["To See the NY Times Gloss Over this Travesty of Justice is Journalism of the Most Amoral Sort"] which they declined to publish. The other was a post on this blog - until today the most widely-read piece we have written ["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"].

Ehrenreich's previous round of
canonizing the Tamimi clan
[background]

Adam Levick's fine UK Media Watch piece today refers back to that, noting how Ehrenreich:

romanticized the culture of terrorism in the Tamimis’ ‘little village’ and whitewashed the crime of its most infamous resident, a woman named Ahlam Tamimi, one of the main terrorists responsible for the deadly Sbarro bombing in 2001. The Economist review makes no mention of Ahlam Tamimi or the disturbing fact that, according to Ehrenreich in his NYT Magazine feature, she is still quite admired in the town. It’s actually quite extraordinary that a publication which prides itself on peeling off the superficial layers of a story to reveal the story behind the story published a review of a book featuring the Tamimis without giving readers even the slightest inclination that the family, and the protests they stage, represents something akin to Palestinian street theater, a Pallywood production packaged as real news.

The village of Nabi Saleh, almost all of whose inhabitants are Tamimis (owing to a deep attachment to ensuring members marry within the small clan) is far from being an idyllic pastoral hamlet. But it very much wants to be seen as one and goes to extraordinary lengths to conjure up a Potemkin village facade, an illusion replete with contrived legends of a struggle for decency, respect, human rights and a beleagured little pond of spring water. 

It's mostly invented, and cultivated assiduously. We explained some of the how a few months ago ["11-Sep-15: How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really?"].

The true facts are not hard to get at. Yet no journalist we have met or whose work we have read appears to have made that effort. In fact, we can't recall even one published mainstream analysis where highly appropriate and seriously troubling questions were raised about the Tamimi narrative.

We're left to ponder, and not for the first time, the manifest decline in the mass media's commitment to careful, factual, non-partisan, well-researched writing and respect for the common values of democratic societies - above all the value of human life.

02-Sep-15: Lights, action, camera, bite: Scenes from a cognitive war

Iconic image: The Tamimi clan and last Friday's battle for Nabi Saleh [Image Source]
Knowing where the father and husband is at this exact moment is the key
to understanding what actually happened 

A reader of this blog has been on a personal odyssey for the past year. In a letter she sent us today, Pam, who lives in New York State, describes how she got to the point of feeling compelled to engage in some personal research on Israel and the challenges it faces. 

The process was triggered during the tumultuous days of last summer’s Operation Protective Edge when she found herself in discussion with a Palestinian friend on Facebook. Her friend's claims were so damning of Israel that she felt the need to personally dig into sources and separate out what was truthful from what was not.

Some days ago, she was invited to a local event. It looked innocuous enough - in her words “perhaps even worthy”. She looked a little more carefully into the cause promoted by the hosts of the gathering, and then she sat down to reply to them earlier today. Pam has kindly allowed us to share her letter here.

Subject: Bassem's Speaking Engagement in Woodstock
Date: September 2, 2015  

Hi Ellen and Ariel, 

I am going to decline this invite. I thought this speaker would be at a public venue, and not breaking bread with us on Rosh Hashanah. I don't break bread with patriarchs of a terrorist clan, nor do I break bread with people who engage in child abuse. Yes, I believe indoctrinating your children with hate and encouraging them to commit crimes, including orchestrating suicide bombs to kill innocent people is indeed child abuse.   Bassem's beloved daughter did just this. I understand that he is very proud of her. And well, I think we can surmise which direction his daughter "Shirley Temper" is headed. People are not born with hate in their heart; they are taught this. 

One of the victims of the Sbarro massacre was Malka Roth. She was 15 years old, and her only crime was eating pizza. Her father and mother have had to live with this tragedy for the last 14 years - their daughter taken from them in such a horrific way.

Do you have children? The loss of a child is indescribable. By having this man to dinner, one could infer that you condone these behaviours. I certainly don't. 

I take it upon myself to educate my fellow humans on the truths about Israel and the lies of many Palestinians, a narrative that gets oft repeated but clearly violates any semblance of reality. I also learn a lot from people like Bassem Eid, a true human rights advocate. Or Mudar Zahran, who is also Palestinian who speaks about one of the core issues of the Palestinians, all calls for violence must end and the right of return for descendants of refugees to the State of Israel will not happen. Palestinians have a unique definition for "refugee" that is not used by any other ethnic group on the planet - none. 

Bassem's urging of Pallywood charades do no service to his family either. His cute little son can't even remember which arm to wear his cast on as it keeps floating from one arm to the other. What kind of man, what kind of father encourages his child to engage in this behavior? Or should we conclude that this poor child has had multiple bones broken, in both arms, thereby requiring him to always wear a cast. If so, how horrid is this and shouldn't someone be looking into this? 

Peace will only come when Palestinians can elect a government that does not encourage violence towards its neighbours, in the form of rockets, stabbings, cars running over innocent people, or "by any means possible". They need to stop spreading lies that Israel wants to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque which is a complete fabrication. You do know that none of us here can even pray on the Temple Mount, yes? That sure sounds like religious discrimination to me, as a Jew. 

They need to stop wishing for a Judenfrei land, because that is their wish. Arabs that stayed in Israel after the war and are Israeli citizens are some of the best cared for Arabs in the entire Middle East, with full citizenship and all that it entails in any democratic society. The ones that left and "settled" in other ME countries such as Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan cannot say that about their own plight which is truly the tragedy. Israel ethnically cleansed thousands of Jews out of Gaza only to be thanked with suicide bombings and more rockets. My people have been virtually expelled out of the entire MENA area but that is not good enough for them. They want all of the Jews gone. Great, Muslim majority countries are doing such a bang up job with the countries they already have.  

Thank G-d for Israel's existence. Never again means that Jews from all over the world know that if circumstances were to change violently, as we are starting to see in many countries - they will always have a safe haven and Israel will protect them. Israel does more for its own people than any Arab country has ever done for their own, such as the Palestinians. 

So in conclusion, I am shocked that this man is allowed to fly freely into my country, as clearly child abuse is a crime. Encouraging and inciting violence is also a crime. However, what is important to note, is that Israel does allow him to fly. Sure sounds like oppression to me, said no one sane ever.

I can continue to educate humanity about the truth behind this conflict and G-d takes care of the rest.

You enjoy your Rosh Hashanah as I will enjoy mine, as I continue to pray for innocent people being killed for being Jews. 

Never forget. Never again. 
Pam

* * *

The guest speaker whom Pam was invited to hear is Bassem Tamimi. It's his family and clan that feature in the “clash” with IDF soldiers described in our previous posts:

• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists 
• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters 
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

We hear that Tamimi is going to be speaking at locations across the US in the next two weeks. We wonder whether he's going to explain in a frank and honest way the things that can be seen in the following photos. Let's call them the Nabi Saleh Photographer Swarm.

Image Source

Image Source

Image Source

These photos were taken from just behind where the now-famous boy-in-the-headlock scenes were captured in the little village of Nabi Saleh this past Friday. We became aware of them only today. They can be seen at a French site here.  

The man in the green shirt above is Bassem Tamimi, proprietor of Tamimi Press and arguably the producer/director/screenwriter of the entire show, a weekly production as many know but which the working media rarely reveal. Green-shirted Tamimi can be seen leading the march towards the staged "clash" with the IDF forces at the start of the Tamimi Press video of the Friday performance (here).

Those pictures above show the camera men pointing their lenses at a couple of children, plus women, who are shrieking, screaming and wrestling with an armed IDF soldier about, let's guess, eight feet from Bassem's face. 

Here's the thing: the little boy is his. The shrieking and cool-as-a-cucumber girl ("Shirley Temper") is his. One of the women is his wife. And what does Bassem, the father, do in the face of the violence that seems to have been inflicted on his family out of the blue and for no reason whatsoever, at all?

He stays out of sight and as inconspicuous as possible, away from where the cameras are pointing, on the perimeter, as these little-publicized photos show. Not intervening for a moment, he's evidently making sure - as a director should - that the images are captured to plan. And then once captured, fired out into the battlefields of the newspapers, TVs and web screens of US and Europe and beyond, because for him this is cognitive war. 

He and his family are soldiers. Europe and the US are the strategic goals.

Why should he intervene? It's fairly clear that, knowing what Bassem Tamimi knows from years of weekly charades like this one, he remains calm and unflustered throughout because he's well aware his family members are in no serious danger of anything other than slip-and-fall injuries. Syria, this is not. It's not even Ramallah. 

What this is, friends, is a minimum-risk operation, with a huge return on modest investment, underwritten via the willing collaboration of a host of camera-operators, reporters, headline writers and cable news presenters. 

People are going to be studying the lessons of this shabby, child-abuse-rich affair for years to come.

29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters

Nabi Saleh this past Friday [Image Source: Daily Mail UK]
Imagery in the service of jihad, mayhem and chronic
child abuse

There's a media fuss about images [here] of an Israeli serviceman tangling with "a little boy" in a Palestinian Arab village. The Daily Mail UK, one of the busiest online news sites, gave it very considerable attention on Friday here, correctly linking it to the particular form of image exploitation defined by Prof. Richard Landes as Pallywood

the alleged media manipulation by Palestinians to win public relations war against Israel [Daily Mail UK, today]

This short video clip of the same interaction provides a little more helpful context.

People not-so-much-in-the-know are unlikely to realize that the published photos are a small part of a larger, orchestrated event of the kind that happens in Nabi Saleh every week. Local press people know this because of the weekly invitations they get to come along and provide coverage. But most news consumers don't know that. They have no reason to understand - or to care about - the context and the larger picture.

Back in March 2013, we wrote ["A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"] about several of the people who appear prominently in today's photos: about their town; about its systematic abuse of its own children; about how a place hell-bent on acts of lethal violence directed against Jews and Israelis has succeeded in camouflaging itself thanks to the willingness of gullible reporters, photographers and editors who provide them with the exposure they crave like oxygen; about the girl - the one in the pink t-shirt in the photo above - who for years has been paraded in front of the cameras in a variety of spunky-on-demand poses (all based on the certainty that IDF personnel are required to be careful and considerate when facing children - this isn't Syria, Ramallah or Gaza) and who has fully earned the nickname given to her by insightful observers who understand the artificial nature of the provocations in which she is the central performer. They know her as Shirley Temper: it's a totally fitting stage name.

From our March 2013 post

That article remains the most viewed post we ever wrote. But most news consumers unfortunately have no idea of the points we made and are making now. The mainstream news reports didn't tell them.

We went back to the contents of that 2013 post tonight in light of what happened on Friday. And we were struck by something interesting that unfortunately we failed to notice much earlier. Here's part of what we said in 2013:

The Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh describes the village of some 550 people in notably gentle terms. Centred on an old religious shrine to the prophet Shelah whom we encounter in Genesis as the son of Judah and grandson of the patriarch Jacob, it was a hamlet of a mere five houses in the late nineteenth century when the Turks ruled the area. It grew slowly under the Jordanian military occupation that started in 1948; then declined when Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967, and flourished and multiplied in the past two decades. Today, it’s the scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s English-language version, a place where things are done to passive inhabitants and for no apparent reason. Now if you go to the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia, you see a quite different emphasis. It's not at all a direct translation of the English version. It's created by different people for a different audience and different sensibilities. The Arabic Wikipedia entry depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that boasts of having taken a prominent role in two Intifadas, providing “hundreds of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the altar of freedom”... The most prominent of the prisoners (Wikipedia's description) is a woman called Ahlam. Her surname is shared with almost every other inhabitant of the village: Tamimi.

(That woman is the convicted murderer of our daughter Malki. Often described as an "escort", she was in reality the chief planner of the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. She personally brought the bomb to the site that she had selected, and fled before the explosion. She lives free as a bird today in Amman, Jordan, from where she makes weekly TV propaganda programs encouraging more acts of terror. Her chilling demonstrations of pleasure at the deaths of her victims, and in particular the children she killed, have given her the status of an iconic figure in the social media of both sides.)

If you go to the Arabic Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh today, you will see only a small fraction of what we saw then. Every single reference to the village people's adoration of jihad, martyrdom and death to the Israelis has been erased. The place is filled with restored-virgins all over again.

This seems unfair to us, so we went digging and - bless the Internet and its boundless resources - found the original Arabic text as it appeared on Wikipedia in May 2013.

• We have now saved the original Arabic text here. 
• The contents of that page, machine-rendered into English from the source Arabic, are here. [We updated that link on March 6, 2018 after an alert Twitter user pointed out that our original link - here - no longer works. The new one does.]

Friends of Israel, and of objective and accurate news reporting, understand well that the negative, visceral impact of powerful imagery - irrespective of whether it is stage-managed or altogether faked - is powerful and often unstoppable. The Tamimis of Nabi Saleh know this better than most and act on it. Their abuse of children, truth and the global news media channels will certainly continue because... it simply works.

UPDATE: Here's a longer video of Friday's Nabi Saleh production courtesy of the Tamimi publicity enterprise. And another here. The IDF service men we see clearly have the power, the skill, the strength and the weaponry to do something dramatic and long-lasting to stop the unpleasantness to which they are exposed in this stage-managed eruption of violence. They choose to avoid rising to the locals' provocation, handing the provocateurs a publicity gift, but ensuring the patient men and women of the IDF will continue to face the same kind of challenge in the coming days in Nabi Saleh - as they have for years already.

20-Jan-15: Peering into the utter emotional turmoil

The Hebrew commentary of this revealing YouTube clip (hat tip to the 0404 news site for pointing it out) explains that the Arab woman sitting in front of the posse of photographers in Hebron and crying her eyes out on demand is the mother of the woman on the right who evidently can't stop giggling and laughing at the patent absurdity of the whole thing.



There's more background here, on the Israel National News site, and at the always informative Elder of Ziyon site, about the staging.

We're not suggesting all the video news coming out of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel fits the Pallywood paradigm, but it is surprisingly common. So too is the demonstrated willingness of news film crews and reporters to play along.

For an explanation of how Pallywood works, the blog site of Prof. Richard Landes, The Augean Stables, and its Pallywood section, gives a good intro. (Richard coined the term.)

15-Nov-14: Invented news and how easy it can be to get away with it

Photogenic Syrian boy braves flying Syrian bullets
to rescue a little Syrian girl [Image Source]

We have mentioned Pallywood here several times. Richard Landes, a professor at Boston University. coined the term to mean

"productions staged by the Palestinians, in front of (and often with cooperation from) Western camera crews, for the purpose of promoting anti-Israel propaganda by disguising it as news." [source]

or more simply, "staged material disguised as news", aimed at advancing the case for the Palestinian Arabs and their backers.

There is very little doubt in our minds that Pallywood really exists. Or that it has a toxic ongoing impact on the way news is reported and understood. We have looked systematically and up-close at several instances of Pallywood productions, and are convinced they exemplify how a deliberate attempt was made to fabricate events for the news-reporting industry so that damage would be done to Israel. To the extent it reflects an aspect of the ways journalism is done today, the Pallywood phenomenon highlights how the news industry is in desperate need of being exposed and fixed.

Pallywood as a concept is sometimes termed controversial. In large part, that's because it's difficult, and full of unthinkable consequences, to accept that smart, cynical media professionals could be duped by determined propagandists. Or worse, that those media people willingly swallow faked stories because they have an ideological agenda that supports those who do the faking.

Same scene, but with the film crew that the YouTube audience
didn't see. And it's not Syria: it's Malta [Image Source]

Many people, including personal friends whose views we generally respect, reject the Pallywood thesis. We hope they read this post.

This weekend, Pallywood along with the ideas for which it stands, is the focus of an unusual degree of media attention. In a nutshell:

Syrians have responded with outrage to a video showing a young boy rescuing a girl while under gunfire, after it emerged on Friday that the clip had been staged by a Norwegian filmmaker who said he wanted to raise awareness about the conflict. [Middle East Eye, November 15, 2014]

On Friday night, the BBC ["#BBCTrending: Syrian 'hero boy' video faked by Norwegian director"] revealed the agenda behind the authentic-looking and -sounding video clip. With a sound track filled with shouts of Allahu Akhbars from people standing close to the camera, just like the cellphone videos of Syrian barbarism that have been all over the social media during the past three years, it captures a dramatic moment in the ongoing Syrian savagery. As of tonight (Saturday) has achieved 3,913,840 YouTube views and 8,072 likes. (These numbers will certainly have gone up higher by the time you click the link to check. And there appear to be multiple places on the web from where it can be streamed, so that the audience is surely larger than the numbers we just quoted.)  Their article includes out-takes from the filming.

Millions of YouTube viewers have been captivated by the 'Syrian hero boy' who manages to rescue a little girl while under gunfire. Now a group of Norwegian filmmakers have told BBC Trending they are behind it. They say it was filmed on location in Malta this summer with the intention of being presented as real. Lars Klevberg, a 34-year-old film director based in Oslo, wrote a script after watching news coverage of the conflict in Syria. He says he deliberately presented the film as reality in order to generate a discussion about children in conflict zones. "If I could make a film and pretend it was real, people would share it and react with hope," he said. [BBC yesterday]

We now know that a seriously large film crew, working on the
island of Malta, was needed in order to fabricate a snippet
of made-in-Syria news video. Funding was evidently
no problem. [Image Source: BBC]

The film-maker goes on to explain how his clip was "picked up by Shaam Network, a channel that features material from the Middle East, which posted it on YouTube. Then it began to attract international attention." The BBC adds:

Since being uploaded to YouTube on Monday the video has been watched more than five million times and inspired thousands of comments. There has been a big debate about whether it is genuine. How those viewers will react to learning that it's a work of fiction remains to be seen. "We are really happy with the reaction," Klevberg said. "It created a debate." [BBC yesterday]

We're happy that he's happy. But without a doubt, millions of those people who saw the clip don't know, and perhaps never will know, that they were duped into believing in an act of fakery, an invented reality. That's how this works.

We have observed how "debates" sparked by video clips of events that didn't happen work, There's no more striking example than the Mohammad Al Durah video clip from 2000, an instance of Pallywood that has, thanks to its initial propagation by the national television network of France, led eventually to multiple acts of murder of innocent people, among them young children. Its devastating impact continues to be felt on the streets of Europe.

Video grab from the France2 television news production
of the Al Durah "killing", September 30, 2000

Klevberg, the director, proudly Tweeted on Friday that the funding which made his pretend news-report possible came from Norway's Film Institute as well as the Arts Council of Norway. Whatever the motivations, those of us who cherish the idea of a free, honest and objective news-reporting industry will appreciate the way Norwegian tax-payer money has gone to create an outstanding example of how the news industry is duped and manipulated by people with "debate" - or perhaps other things - on their minds.

Now let the global discussion about lethal journalism and its practitioners begin.

27-Oct-14: Can ordinary folk encourage the news-reporting media to live up to their own standards?

Link to the CAMERA
event announcement

If you are reading this post, it's likely you are concerned with issues like these. Hamas boasts it won the media war that raged on alongside the military battle. Did major foreign media outlets echo the Hamas story-line? Were journalists intimidated? Were the New York Times and the BBC impartial? How does the Israeli media effect international coverage? And what can we do to promote responsible and accurate coverage?

Those questions come from an event ad that describes a CAMERA public forum, "War By Other Means: Israel, Hamas and Media Coverage of Gaza", scheduled for the evening of Sunday November 9, 2014 at Jerusalem's Menachem Begin Heritage Center. We urge readers who are going to be in Jerusalem to be there.

The panelists are: Prof. Richard Landes of Boston University, the man who showed the world how the Pallywood industry (about which we first blogged in 2006) works; Ben-Dror Yemini, one of Israel's most-respected veteran journalists, now a Yediot Aharonot columnist and author of "Industry of Lies" (2014, Hebrew - very shortly to be released in English); Tamar Sternthal who heads CAMERA's Israel office; Hadar Sela, managing editor of CAMERA'S excellent BBC Watch affiliate; Gidon Shaviv, Senior Research Analyst at Presspectiva, the CAMERA unit that addresses the Hebrew-speaking sector. Arnold Roth, one of this site's bloggers, will chair.

Registration is necessary and can be done online here.

8-Aug-13: This video clip might just upturn the way people think about the conflict

The Al Durah scene: Testament to the
power of lethal journalism and
dishonest video recording

We hope the imagery below has gone viral by the time you see it here.

The caption on the LiveLeaks site where we first saw it says very little about who is behind it or their goals. But that's less significant than might appear to be the case at first. Though they participants are speaking Arabic, you don't really need to get into the meaning of their words to fully comprehend the message on show here.

What the people in front of the cameras and behind them have discovered, and which far too few in Western countries understand, is that if you take yourself seriously enough while inventing an entire narrative and looking injured and/or offended, practically no one is going to object or reveal the truth. In other words, Pallywood ("a bustling industry of alfresco cinema", according to the man who coined the term).

It has been a standard part of news coverage here in the Arab vs Israel conflict for at least a decade. It's in evidence every single day. Faked photos (sometimes call fauxtography), faked clashes, faked injuries, faked deaths, faked dramatic poses, faked arguments and faked responses.

Take a look at the whole two minute clip:

Now, while it's still freshly planted in your mind, would be a good time to take a look at the aldurah.com website, and the ground-breaking, 18-minute video "Pallywood: According to Palestinian Sources" (2008), the work of Prof. Richard Landes.

21-Mar-08: All in another day's work

An explosion for which Hamas blamed Israel (and the mainstream media obediently followed suit) is now revealed to be another "holy mission" gone awry (thanks to JihadWatch for pointing this out.) See "Hamas: Blast that killed 2 was accident," by Ibrahim Barzak for the Associated Press:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Palestinian militants accidentally set off a large blast at a Hamas training base in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing two members of the violent Islamic group and wounding another, a Palestinian medical official said.

Hamas initially blamed Israel for the blast, but later acknowledged that it was caused by a mishandling of explosives, saying its men died while performing a "holy mission." The Israeli military denied involvement.

Hamas security men kept photographers and TV cameramen away from the scene. Dr. Moaiya Hassanain, a Palestinian Health Ministry official, confirmed the deaths.

The only thing relatively rare in this report is that the deaths of still more Palestinian Arab Gazans are put in a context that exposes the proclivity of the jihadists, including and especially their chosen leadership, to bring death and destruction to their own.

A pity the mainstream media don't pay more attention to the steady flow of anti-Israel fabrications - and we use the word advisedly - emanating from Pal-Arab sources. See "14-Jun-06: What happened on the beach?" for one example among depressingly many.

6-Sep-06: An Unblinking Look at French - and Western - Values

The deeply-disturbing affair of Mohammad Al-Durah, a child who may or may not have been killed in Gaza six years ago, is at the heart of three court cases, the first of which is to be heard in France later this month.

Dr Richard Landes of Boston University writes about these legal proceedings on his blog The Augean Stables. The multi-faceted Landes is also the force behind the outstanding Second Draft, Al Durah: Birth of an Icon and Pallywood projects - all of them very well-made, provocative streaming-video views of the challenge posed to western society by manipulated and manipulative news and images emanating from the Islamic world. And all of them viewable on the web.

Commencing September 14, 2006, the trials in Paris will review the actions and words of three French citizens who used Internet sites to publish criticism of France2’s coverage of the Muhammad Al Durah affair and of Charles Enderlin, a television journalist. Dr Landes is going to be there, and will blog-report on them. Each trial invokes an 1881 law on press freedom that purports to protect individuals, groups, ethnicities and religions from defamation that strikes at the honor and consideration (reputation) of "the individual or institution in question".

In an analytical preview of the judicial proceedings, Augean Stables makes the case that the trials will throw a sharp light on the disturbing direction of events in Europe and the West since 2000. Among the issues:

1. The radical misreading of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a Palestinian struggle for national independence rather than a part of global Jihad, which has the Europeans siding with the forces of global jihad against themselves.

2. The ways in which this pro-Palestinian rhetoric has introduced an Arab street in Europe and strengthened the forces of Islamism and Jihad around the globe.

3. The roles played by the French and European media in this process, and the exceptional denial that permeates French public life on the issues of Eurabia and global Jihad. 

4. The fundamental significance of anti-Zionism in European perceptions of the Al Durah icon, and how Al Durah as a 21st century blood libel has opened the gates to both Islamic anti-Semitism and more overt European anti-Zionism.

5. The ways that French (and European) politicians have ignored the rise of antisemitism in their midst through repeated denial.

6. The relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism and the dimensions of France's "politics of resentment".

7. The close connections between the French media (especially AFP) and the French foreign policy elite.
8. The ways the French legal system has functioned both in encouraging anti-Jewish violence with its lenient sentencing of anti-Jewish comments and deeds, and is now being used to silence any criticism.

9. Overall, the way the Al Durah affair has played out in France over the last 6 years shows in painful detail the dysfunctions of French culture and politics, and illustrates the ways in which Eurabia operates. We can see clearly that Europe has become vulnerable to aggressive Islamism and Jihadism in the cause and effect of Pallywood's success among European media gatekeepers. The European media are astonishingly credulous when considering video footage that is transparently dishonest.

The Al Durah video has become an icon in the worst and most malignant sense of the word. Yet for all their influence and importance there are parts of it that have been seen only by a handful of people (explained on the Augean Stables blog). Dr Landes suggests that the reaction, if they were more widely available:

...would be astonishment — and indignation at the media. It would be obvious that there is a direct correlation between media manipulation of information and the broad public support for anti-Zionism. But, absent the complete video, the eagerness with which Europeans “learned” about Muhammad al Durah’s “death” at the hands of the Israelis, made the fake so much more acceptable. In like fashion, the shocking news from Kafr Kana has triggered a horrified call to cease fire immediately. The West is being victimized by its enemies’ manipulation of images, for those deceitful icons and faked reports are received uncritically, even when not enthusiastically, by the West’s own media. Given that synergy between Islamist malice and easily-duped news outlets, how can the Western public make intelligent decisions? ...If free and responsible (hence reasonably accurate) media are the eyes and ears of civil society, then we are flying blinded by this kind of information over very dangerous terrain. Much in our troubled world hangs in the balance. The more people know, the more the judges become self-conscious about making their decision, and the more we can hope that France will make a sane decision from the perspective of both the law and the media.

If you haven't viewed the streaming videos, please go and do it now, or tonight.