Thursday, January 08, 2009

Your Lying Eyes

From Tom Gross' Middle East bulletin today:

FRENCH TV AGAIN CAUGHT USING FALSE FOOTAGE DEFAMING ISRAEL

Bloggers in France have forced the state-owned French public television channel France 2 to admit that footage it aired that allegedly showed destruction caused by the Israeli air force this week,  was in fact taken from an incident in 2005 in which Gaza civilians were killed by an explosion caused by Hamas militants in the Strip.

The footage aired on France 2 on Tuesday afternoon showed dozens of dead bodies, including civilians, which the channel said were killed by an Israeli air force bombing raid on January 1st. The footage was in fact that of the devastation caused after a truck full of explosives Hamas was smuggling blew up in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in 2005.

The website of Le Figaro newspaper published the error after it was spotted by bloggers. France 2 has now admitted it "accidentally" used false footage.

France 2 is the same channel that broadcast a staged September 2000 report of the IDF allegedly showing the IDF fatally shooting a 12-year-old Palestinian boy called Mohammed al-Dura. A French court ruled last year that there was reasonable cause to claim the report and footage was staged.

The death-footage of al-Dura became a cause célèbre in the Muslim and western world. Osama bin Laden referred to al-Dura in a post-9/11 video; the killers of Wall St. Journal reporter Daniel Pearl placed a picture of him in their beheading video; streets, squares and academies have been named after al-Dura.

01/08 09:07 AM