Thursday, November 15, 2007
The Camera Never Lies?
Melanie Phillips today posts an amazing blog entry - with devasting video footage from SecondDraft.org - that demonstrates to a near certainty that the notorious "killing" of Muhammad al-Dura was staged and faked by a Palestinian freelance cameraman under contract to France's TV2.
I am in Paris where I have attended the Court of Appeal special session called to witness the 27 minutes of hitherto unseen footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah which the court had required France 2 to produce. For readers who are unfamiliar with this scandal, I wrote about it here, here and here.
Suffice it to say here that the iconic image of the child Mohammed al Durah, pictured crouching with his father behind a barrel next to a concrete wall in an apparently vain attempt to shelter from the gun-battle between Israel and the Palestinians that was raging around them before he was allegedly shot dead by the Israelis, served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities around the world after it was transmitted by France 2 at the beginning of the second intifada. Yet it is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence here which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after the France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead.
After Philippe Karsenty, founder of the French online media watchdog, Media Ratings, accused France 2 of staging the al Durah ‘killing’ and called for the resignation of both Charles Enderlin and France 2’s News Director, Arlette Chabot, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation, and won. In a disgraceful piece of judicial cronyism after the gratuitous intervention of the then French President Jacques Chirac, the court decided against Karsenty and in favour of France 2 and Enderlin. Karsenty appealed; the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of this incident; today it did so.
Well, sort of. What it actually produced was 18 minutes out of the 27 it was required to bring forward. From this footage, which according to France 2’s Palestinian cameraman was filmed during an implausible 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli soldiers, there is no evidence that anyone at all was killed or injured — including Mohammed al Durah who by the end of the frames in which he figured seemed to be still very much alive and unmarked by any wound whatsoever.
The Muhammad al-Dura case increasingly looks like a 21st century Dreyfus affair. Some of the most prestigious institutions in French society have connived in a defamatory forgery. Once again the victims of the forgery are Jews. But let nobody say that French society is inherently anti-semitic: This time, the leading figure in the forgery, French television journalist Charles Enderlin, is himself of Jewish origin. You have to credit the anti-Zionist variant of anti-semitism with this: It is truly an equal opportunity form of bigotry, welcoming Jews and non-Jews alike to the work of fabricating false accusations against the Jewish state.
11/15 10:47 AM
