This text was first posted July 10, 2008, but much of it is missing there. I will clean this text (with formatting) but in the meantime, I publish it here for the valuable material it discusses on why the West does not know that Hamas and Hizbullah and Iran are regimes with genocidal goals.
The Self-Destruction of the Al Durah Faithful
When I first began work on the al Durah affair, I my I knew I was on to a story whose unraveling would reveal a wide range of cultural dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century
• the dramatic dysfunctions of the Mainstream media’s news reporting,
• the resurgence of various forms of Judeophobia from the paranoid anti-Semitism of the Muslim world to the gratifying moral Schadenfreude of the European “left”,
• the mainstreaming of an active-cataclysmic apocalyptic movement in global Jihad and its weapon of choice, suicide terrorism,
• the cultural vulnerabilities of Western democracies faced with an asymmetrical war so lopsided they cannot take it seriously
• the pathologies of Jewish self-criticism,
• the disorientation of liberals prisoner of their cognitive egocentrism, and
• the moral failure of the “progressive left.”
By any standards this offers a fairly good scope of issues to illuminate with a “thick description” of one single incident, even if it strikes many as what one French friend classed as a “human interest story” (faits divers).
Part of what attracted me to the topic was its quality of “public secret.” Everywhere I looked there were public secrets: from the obvious staging of Pallywood and the stunning complacency in private of the Western media (“oh, they do that all the time”), to uncanny refusal of otherwise rational people to reconsider despite the deeply troubling evidence. Karsenty calls it the “so what” defense: No blood… so what; no bullets… so what; 55 seconds not 27 minutes filmed of an alleged 45 minutes of non-stop Israeli firing… so what; no “death agonies” that Enderlin cut to “spare the public”… so what; no ambulance evacuation scenes… so what; the kid moves after he’s supposed to be dead… so what; Talal lies… so what; Enderlin lies…
Indeed quite early on, in addition to seeing this story as having strong parallels to the Dreyfus Affair, I began to see it as a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Here the tailors are Talal and his friends who spin their story; Enderlin is the chamberlain who comes back from examining the evidence and announces that the tale is good and true, the MSM are the courtiers to whom he gave both the evidence and the talking points for announcing the great news in order to prepare the tale’s public exposure, the media launch of the icon of hatred, the martyr Muhammad al Durah. And a string of lonely individuals, from Shahaf, to Juffa, to Huber, to Poller, to Landes, to Karsenty, tried unsuccessfully to say, hey wait a minute, this martyr’s narrative robe is woven of wholesale deception. And each of us were told, as does the father of the child in Andersen’s tale, “Hush child.” Only whereas in the original tale, the “revelation” was that those who couldn’t see the magical cloth were “fools and unworthy to rule”, in this one, those who saw a fake were “far-right-wing Zionist conspiracy freaks.”
Like many such “public secrets,” this tale does not wear well over time. (The French call them secrets de Polichinelle, secrets like pregnancy that will, eventually, out.) What I did not expect, was how often the defenders of al Durah would reveal the nature of these dysfunctions I was trying to chronicle and explain. Now Larry Derfner has added his text to the dossier of self-revelatory texts that explain so much about the al Durah affair. He has, as a result, inspired the formal launching of the Al Durah Affair’s Public Secret Dossier. So in his honor, I propose to go over some of these extraordinarily revealing texts and compare and contrast them.
1) Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000
2) News analysis of William Orme for the New York Times, October 24, 2000
3) Response of Adam to James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly article June, 2003
4) Nouvel Obs Letter of Support to Charles Enderlin, May 27, 2008
5) Larry Derfner’s 2nd Column on Al Durah in Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2008
Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000
On October 12 (less than two weeks after the al Durah footage first aired and provoked rioting throughout Israel’s Arab population), two Russian-born reservists took a wrong turn and landed in Ramallah, Arafat’s “Oslo” capital. Palestinian police took them into custody, but the rumor of their presence spread rapidly. A lynch crowd soon stormed the police station, and in a frenzy, Palestinian men beat the soldiers to death with their bare hands, threw their bodies out the window, and a mob below literally tore apart their bodies, beaten to a pulp, dragging the parts through the street, shouting all the while, “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.”
A number of photographers and camera crews were there that day, and naturally filmed the affair. They were, however, assaulted by the crowds, their footage confiscated, their cameras broken, any resistance calling down blows. Wrote Mark Seager, a journalist who has great sympathy for the Palestinians, who was happy to escape with his life even if his favorite camera was smashed to pieces, in an article entitled, “<a href=”http://”>I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life</a>”:
It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places. In Kosovo, I saw Serbs beating an Albanian but it wasn’t like this. There was such hatred, such unbelievable hatred and anger distorting their faces.
Only one crew managed to get images out of Ramallah that day, an Italian crew whose Israeli member shamed them into defying the Palestinians. The Israelis got the footage, ran it on TV, and it shocked the world.
The next day, the head of the Italian public TV news station RAI wrote Yasser Arafat a personal and urgent letter designed to protect his reporters in the Middle East from danger. In cloying tones – “we congratulate you…” (on what?) – he explained that the people who had brought out the tapes were not from his station, but from another. “We,” he explained, “always respect the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work.” In other words, “we didn’t break the rules and show footage that was detrimental to the Palestinian cause, we would never do that, so please don’t retaliate against my people.”
The letter is stunningly craven, and reveals the public secret of Palestinian intimidation of journalists who systematically present the Palestinians to the world as they wish to be portrayed – plucky freedom fighters resisting the Israeli imperialist, racist, genocidal hegemon – and mute the ugly but public elements – the industry of hatred, the vicious and deliberate violence (no “collateral damage” here), the profoundly irredentist attitude towards Israel. As a revelation of the extensiveness of Palestinian intimidation – “journalistic procedures” – the letter is incomparable, and shed light on much more than just Mr. Cristiano’s organization. Properly understood this letter should arouse in any careful reader to ask alarming questions about the pervasive effect of Palestinian press intimidation on the quality of news delivery in the West.
Obviously, it was supposed to be a private memo to Arafat to avoid retaliation. Arafat, however, published the letter triumphantly in Al Hayat al Jadida, much to the embarrassment of Christiano. Having got caught red handed revealing trade secrets, he was shunned by his colleagues who, however much they played the same game, were still publicly committed to basic journalistic principles of a free press: to resist and report intimidation to their readership. Even the Israeli government, normally quite timid, sanctioned him.
Of course, at this time in the process, very few observers of the journalistic coverage of the incipient Intifada and the stunning unraveling of the Oslo “Peace process” were prepared to analyze carefully, to reconsider this dominant framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict as the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian David. Indeed, nothing signaled more clearly to close observers the determination of MSM to ignore these issues, than the analysis of William Orme two weeks later in the New York Times.
News analysis of William Orme for the New York Times, October 24, 2000
It turns out that Christiano’s letter was not the only controversial product of the Ramallah lynching. The following day in Gaza an Imam preached a particularly violent sermon, calling in no uncertain terms for a genocide against the Jews.
The Jews are the Jews. Whether Labor or Likud the Jews are Jews. They do not have any moderates or any advocates of peace. They are all liars. They must be butchered and must be killed… The Jews are like a spring as long as you step on it with your foot it doesn’t move. But if you lift your foot from the spring, it hurts you and punishes you… It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them any place that you find yourself. Any place that you meet them, kill them. (PA TV, October 13, 2000)
Now to those familiar with the Hadith of the “Rocks and the Trees” about an apocalyptic slaughter of the Jews in which nature itself comes to the aid of the killers, “servants of Allah”, this was not unfamiliar. It has been a favorite trope of Hamas since its inception in 1987.
Israelis, cognizant of the role of Palestinian MSM in disseminating the hatreds that provoked the lynching in Ramallah, retaliated symbolically by bombing the transmitters of the Voice of Palestine, the PA’s official radio network. William Orme, veteran reporter for the NYT, came to investigate and wrote a news analysis piece two months later entitled, “A Parallel Mideast Battle: Is It News or Incitement?” What could have been a brilliant and illuminating analysis of the real forces of hatred and violence in the region turned into a classic and profoundly dishonest exercise in “even-handed” reporting. Quoting Palestinians saying, “Every word the Israelis hear on the Voice of Palestine they think is incitement,” and portraying the attack as a blow at freedom of expression, Orme presented the Israeli position as follows:
Israeli officials said the air strike against Voice of Palestine was justified, citing NATO attacks on state television studios in Yugoslavia, where official media were accused of promoting violence in Kosovo. Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. ”Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,” proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings.
One might forgive the uninformed reader for siding with the Palestinians in this case. The Israelis look like fools complaining about something as petty as this.
Was Orme so morally obtuse that he did not think the genocidal passages that he cut added anything to the “inflammatory” speech he already quoted? Was he just plain dishonest in his editing? Was he responding to the “rules of journalism” when reporting from the PA that Christiano had just revealed, and of which he made not a mention in his article? Or was it his editor who cut it? (I doubt the last conjecture, since had he included the full quote, the rest of the article would have had to change.)
Wherever lies the fault, the losers in this astounding omertà surrounding Islamic genocidal hate speech are first, the readers of this disinformation, second, the Israelis whose apparent pettiness here only highlights the accusations of arbitrary violence the Palestinians level against them, and three, the Palestinian people, left in the grip of hate-mongering predatory elites who are strengthened with every such PR victory.
How many people understood what was at stake, how profound the disinformation, and how dangerous? Not too many in these pre-9-11 days. After all, who would prefer to trust the ravings of right-wing Zionist operations like PMW and CAMERA to the authority of a veteran journalist working for the NYT?
Response of Adam Rose to James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly article, June 2003
The first salvo of Al Durah criticism came in the Anglophone press almost three years after the event, in June of 2003 with James Fallows ground-breaking article in the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> – both journalist and publication part of the progressive camp, and thus above suspicion as some kind of “right-wing Zionist” initiative. Fallows presented all of the deeply troubling evidence available. However, firmly if respectfully distancing himself from Nahum Shahaf’s “staged” hypothesis, Fallows took the prudent, minimalist position that the “Israelis didn’t do it” without further asking what did happen that day. Making some closing reflections on the tenuous relationship of the Arab world with empirical evidence, Fallows concluded that no matter what the evidence, it was unlikely such findings would make any difference in a culture where Al Durah was a sacred martyr.
The response drew outrage from the progressive community, and a lengthy essay by Adam Rose, a founder and director of Support Sanity, a coordinating web-based organization promoting a “peaceful and sane solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” In it Rose criticized Fallows for his failure to understand philosophical “truth” – that what “really happened” did not matter so much as its symbolic meaning.
In other words, the critical question in an examination of the dynamics of Mohammed al-Dura’s “martyrdom” is not whether the singular “Story of Mohammed al-Dura” is true, but whether the universal “Mohammed al-Dura Story” is true. And the sad, incontrovertible fact is that the universal “Mohammed al-Dura Story” is true. According to multiple, credible international, American and Israeli sources, Israeli soldiers do kill little Palestinian boys on a regular basis. Sometimes for throwing rocks. Sometimes because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And sometimes (apparently) for sport.
Perhaps Rose had not seen the interview that Esther Schapira did with a PA TV official who explained why his team had inserted a picture of an Israeli soldier, firing rubber bullets at a riot caused by the al Durah footage, into the al Durah footage in order to make it clear that the Israelis intentionally targeted the boy in cold blood. His justification was strikingly similar to Rose’s:
These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.
This splicing became the accepted frame of the incident certainly in the Arab world and much of the European, and its broader meaning: the Israelis deliberately murder innocent and defenseless Palestinian children. It lies at the core of the “blood-libel” quality of the al Durah story. It permits Europeans eager to escape Holocaust guilt to claim that this picture “erases, replaces that of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto,” and compare Israel to the Nazis.
The official’s proud comment illustrates the stark divide between the Palestinian concept of journalism and of mythical “truth,” and the Western empirical one, where no reporter could act in such a way and survive scrutiny. And nothing better illustrates the post-modern dangers of fudging the boundary between empirical evidence and narrative than Rose’s eagerness to embrace this lethal weaponized narrative as “true.” Without realizing it, well-intentioned Adam Rose has joined the ranks of believers in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion who declare unabashedly that the fact that the text is forged does not discredit it, because it reflects a “higher truth.”
And when he tried to link his “higher truth” empirically to reality, he did so by appeal to organizations and individuals who were themselves products of the PA’s “truth”: reports from MSM journalists like Christopher Hedges and Amira Haas and NGOs who played the same game, and aimed at the same target – Israel’s image.
And in 2003, when Jenin massacre claims had swept the MSM before there was any evidence, and survived empirical disproof even from the UN, when anti-war demonstrations and campaigns of divestment and boycott demonized Israel and glorified the Palestinian resistance, few people on the Left were ready to question their commitment to the kinds of higher truths that supported their world view. Rose’s article, rather than consider what the alternative “higher meaning” might be – that the Palestinian narrative deliberately attributes malevolent intent to Israelis thus inspiring just that malevolence among Palestinians and destroying any chance for peace – ended up siding with the “higher truth” that permitted him, through some weird calculus, to be even-handed. And in the end, this peace activist fed the dogs of war.
Nouvel Obs Letter of Support to Charles Enderlin, May 27, 2008
The court of appeals verdict on May 21, 2008 shocked everyone on both sides, and once people read the decision, the shock deepened. It was a stinging rebuke to France2 and Charles Enderlin which essentially told Enderlin that as a prime time news broadcaster he had to expect scrutiny and criticism from both colleagues and fellow citizens. Furthermore, it remarked, in this case in particular, with its international impact, despite the fact that an accusation of running staged footage in the case of al Durah would constitute defamation were it irresponsible and motivated by bad faith, in this case the inconsistencies (incohérences) of both Talal’s footage and Enderlin’s responses to the court’s questions, meant that Karsenty had the right to make his criticism in the most lively language.
Enderlin, despite the brave face he put on it – “we’ll appeal, the decision merely found him innocent because they ruled he acted in good faith” – clearly could not have been happy. On the other hand, outside of the blogosphere, most MSM sources either ignored or minimally reported the event. Alone, outside of the Jewish press, the International Wall Street Journal tackled the issue with both an op-ed by Nidra Poller and an editorial. Despite how powerful the court’s statement, it looked like, once again, the counter-story would die on the lips of its frustrated tellers.
But then the “friends of Charles” did something remarkable and remarkably foolish. They put up a letter of support for their colleague that bemoaned the “campaign of hatred and vilification” that had dogged his steps for lo! these seven years… accusing him of a hoax when he told the world that the boy was killed by fire coming from the Israeli position. The court’s decision, they declared, surprised and worried them: surprised, because the court “granted the same credibility to Karsenty,” a mere civilian, as it had to Enderlin, the veteran reporter “known for the seriousness and rigor of his work, who exercises his profession in sometimes difficult conditions”; worried, because the court’s decision “gives a ‘permission to defame’ journalists, which would permit anyone, in the name of ‘good faith’ and ‘the right of free criticism,’ to strike with impunity at the ‘honor and reputation of information professionals.’” This, they concluded, coming “at a time when the freedom of action of journalists is the object of repeated attacks,” would undermine “this fundamental principle, pillar of democracy” and therefore they “renew our support and solidarity with Charles Enderlin.”
The text is as revealing as the Christiano letter both in its complete indifference to the Christiano letter’s message about the systematic intimidation of the correspondents in the field, and in its publishing a hidden secret. Never would it occur to the signatories that their “veteran reporter” might systematically misrepresent the “terrain” he knows so well and misreport events because “what would they say in Gaza if I didn’t report that the Israelis killed him?” On the contrary, the petition was written and signed by people who showed no interest in the evidence, who believe that their colleague should be given superior credibility because he is their colleague. And they clearly think that freedom from criticism by their readers guarantees their freedom of speech. It would be hard to imagine a more blatant expression of a privileged corporatist mentality redolent of the ancien régime. Ben Dror Yemini compares them to the “anti-Dreyfusards, who also stubbornly clung to the first version.”
And that’s how it struck the readership. The talkbacks to the letter were overwhelmingly negative, so much so that the editors at the Nouvel Obs began censoring the hostile ones and publishing the favorable ones… more evidence of the corporatism that does not hesitate to manipulate evidence in its favor. Once again, the “old media,” the MSM which had grown accustomed to throwing its considerable – video enhanced – weight around with impunity had run into unexpected opposition in the new world of cyberspace, where a public better informed than they “talked back.” Indeed, even members of the guild, even “friends of Charles,” began to break ranks, Alain Finkielkraut, Elie Barnavi, Ivan Rioufol, André Dufour…
As Andersen’s tale runs:
The Emperor realized that the people were right but could not admit to that. He thought it better to continue the procession under the illusion that anyone who couldn’t see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle.
Even Jean Daniel, stung by the rebuke of Eli Barnavi and the accusations of corporatism, broke ranks with his own letter and called for a committee of investigation that would examine – shock and awe – the evidence!
Larry Derfner’s Second Column on Al Durah in Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2008
Alas, even as the pro-Enderlin forces in France were in disarray, Larry Derfner decided to enter the lists, not so much on Enderlin’s side, as against the the “paranoid conspiracy freaks” who dare to suggest that the original footage was staged. He ran into the same response from his readers as the signatories of the Nouvel Obs letter did: almost universally negative, all better informed than he. Earnest proponents of the “staged” hypothesis tried to speak with him, met with him, went over the evidence with him. He spoke with Enderlin, with Gabi Weimann, a professor of communications at Haifa who has followed the case for a long time. So he tried a second time, at great length. This time he began quite explicitly criticizing Enderlin for his claim that the Israelis killed the boy. So Enderlin, even in Derfner’s relatively favorable account, is still on the hook for contributing to accusation of murder against Israel (i.e., what became, in the hands of the Muslims and the radical left, the first blood libel of the 21st century).
But the claim that the footage was staged… that was — to his mind — simply impossible. Derfner’s handling of the evidence was only slightly better than the French signatories… at least he looked at it. (I have addressed these elements in detail at my blog where one can look at the evidence as well.) But most of his argumentation is ad hominem, both positive and negative: the “professional, impartial, disinterested…” who (according to him) do not support the “staged” hypothesis, and the “paranoid, right-wing, reflexively pro-Israel/anti-Arab” who argue in favor of the staged hypothesis. In its own way, it’s as corporatist as the Nouvel Obs petition: professional journalists are disinterested and reliable, free-lancers with no training are zealots and unreliable.
In one case, Derfner is spectacularly wrong. In response to his article, Esther Schapira, the most thorough of the journalistic investigators on his list of heroes, wrote the following (for attribution):
It has been said several times that I didn’t find any hints supporting the accusation that the famous scene at the Netzarim junction was a hoax and this was why I didn’t include it in my film. This is wrong. Indeed even in 2001 I already came across a number of interesting hints indicating that the so-called “killing of Mohammed Al Durah” might be a Palestinian propaganda fabrication… Now, in retrospect with the knowledge of today, I know that it is very justified to question if he did get killed at all.
Schapira extends the arena of press intimidation exposed by the Cristiano letter to Europe in the first years of the 21st century, when contradicting the Palestinian narrative – even only half-way – took enormous courage.
Indeed, Derfner, ignorant perhaps by design of the pressures on various “professionals” like the two French journalist who saw the rushes in Paris in late 2004, cites in his support people whose “caution” was not born of the evidence so much as their concerns for their career. There is no corporatism without pressures to maintain solidarity. Before the court decision, the best one could hope for from any of the members of the guild who had examined the evidence – including people like those who attacked the Nouvel Obs letter – was the minimalist position, “the Israelis didn’t do it.”
“I would never say the emperor is naked… but I don’t think his new clothes are all that beautiful…”
But by far the most revealing aspect of Derfner’s letter comes when he brings in his moral calculus, something he does repeatedly:
I think it’s ludicrous and morally blind to claim that the Palestinian boy’s killing was a “hoax,” a staged event… all the conspiracy theories flying around the right-wing Jewish cyberspace are nothing but Arab-bashing nonsense… if you believe the alternative conspiracy theory… you not only have to assume Palestinians are naturally satanic liars, you have to assume they’re naturally satanic child-killers, too. THE AL-DURA conspiracy theories are wild and irrational, but they’re also more (or less) than that – they’re indecent. To believe that the boy is still alive and that the father was never shot, you have to assume that every Palestinian, from the highest to the lowest, is the biggest liar imaginable, and that when Palestinians work together, they invent hoaxes and cover-ups of inhuman genius and precision. To believe that the bullets never even hit the al-Duras, you have to explain away everything that doesn’t fit your theory about the implacably evil nature of Palestinian behavior by saying: Someone’s lying, or someone’s covering up for a lie.
One could scarcely hope for a more explicit expression of how a “moral” (really political) agenda trumps the evidence. We cannot say that the Palestinians staged this scene because to do so would be “Arab bashing.” To even think that they might stage so revolting a scene means we consider them “implacably evil… satanic liars.”
In other words, this text exposes one of the most important dimensions in the long and painful process whereby the story of Al Durah remained buried under a wall of silence for so long. If the Nouvel Obs petition exposes the corporatist omertà that kept the MSM from treating a the critique of a report they had done so much to disseminate, this letter explains why progressives have been so resistant to examining the evidence. It explains the puzzling responses I ran into when speaking of this to my “progressive” friends who not only refused to give me a platform to discuss my work, but would not even respond to the evidence. “I’ve always been opposed to the settlements,” said one American professor of journalism known for his defense of Israel in the face of media hostility; “If there hadn’t been settlers at Netzarim, there wouldn’t have been soldiers at that Junction,” responded another.
But the problem here is, the evidence leads precisely to the conclusions that Derfner considers unutterable. So his political agenda literally demands that he ignore the evidence on the one hand, and that he assault those who follow it as “Arab bashers” on the other. In other words, a recipe for stupidity.
