The Trial (cont'd)
h/t Farmer John
In a Paris courtroom last month, after seven long years, the myth of Muhammed al-Dura finally unraveled. That myth, propagated in a report by France 2 television network on September 30, 2000, falsely accused Israeli soldiers of killing a Palestinian child named Muhammad al-Dura while he was crouched behind a barrel with his father at Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip.
An IDF probe into the incident, ordered by then-OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia, has ruled out the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy was fired by IDF soldiers.
Last month, France 2 was ordered to show the 27 minutes of uncut footage its cameraman testified he filmed at the scene that day and from which the 55 second news story of the purported shooting of al-Dura by IDF soldiers emerged. Charles Enderlin, France 2's permanent correspondent in Israel who reported the story, made a grand entrance into the courtroom where Philippe Karsenty is appealing a libel conviction he received last year after Enderlin and France 2 sued him for publishing an article arguing that the al-Dura story was a hoax.
In the courtroom, in seeming defiance of the court order, Enderlin showed an 18-minute film - which eyewitnesses claimed was obviously heavily edited - of the events of the day. Although apparently doctored, the film's finale was all that was necessary to prove his report to have been a massive deception. For in the last three seconds of the film, al-Dura, showing no signs of injury, raised his hand and peeked at the camera after Enderlin proclaimed him dead and gone.
The French court is in recess until February but the session last month incontrovertibly destroyed the myth of al-Dura. Yet the truth which took seven years to come out cannot erase the consequences of the falsehood.
Enderlin published his report two days after the Palestinians launched their jihad against Israel. The false image of the victimized al-Dura served as a moral indictment of Israel which fueled the murderous campaign against Israel and Jews worldwide which followed. Just as al-Dura's name was invoked by Palestinians as justification of their massacres of Israeli civilians, so it was invoked by Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's executioners and by Muslim mobs in Europe as they attacked Jews and Jewish institutions.
Enderlin's alleged hoax went beyond journalistic malfeasance. He put blind faith in the reports of a cameraman who was clearly lying to him. And when faced with the facts of the deception, he aggressively dismissed them over the course of seven years. While it is hard to say how events might have unfolded if he hadn't chosen to act as he did, looking forward the murderous consequences of the al-Dura myth speak volumes about the moral imperative for journalists to get their facts straight and to acknowledge mistakes when they are discovered. So too, it underlines the need for policymakers to base their decisions on facts, even when they expose difficult and inconvenient realities.
FACTS OF course, are slippery things. Authoritarian regimes and political movements often engage in the deliberate dissemination of disinformation to advance their interests. The KGB in its day devoted the overwhelming majority of its efforts not to classical espionage activities but to the dissemination of false information to the West in an effort to demoralize Western societies and convince them that there was no moral justification for fighting communism.
Since Israel was established in 1948 the Arabs have devoted the lion's share of their efforts against Israel not to armed attacks against the state but to the dissemination of false information about Israel which is aimed at demonizing it internationally and demoralizing Israelis internally. So too, both the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority indoctrinate their own people to seek Israel's violent destruction through massive internal propaganda efforts.
Even when independent media outlets use their best efforts to report the facts in a credible way, they sometimes get it wrong. For instance, on November 27, the Jerusalem Post reported a quote made by an Arab diplomat to AFP news agency in Riyadh claiming that the Bush Administration had bowed to the Arab demand to force the Israeli delegation at the Annapolis conference to enter the conference hall through a separate entrance from the Arabs. In the diplomat's words, "The Saudis told Washington that they do not want to meet anyone from the Israeli delegation, either by chance or by prior arrangement. Hence it was decided that ... delegations would enter into the meeting room from different doors."
His assertion was made credible by statements from US officials regarding the Saudi demand for segregation between the Arabs and the Israelis at the conference. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "As the Saudi foreign minister put it, nobody's interested in these uncomfortable situations where there are theatrics for the sake of photographs. We'll of course be respectful and mindful of that as we'll put together the various events."
It was these twin reports that informed my own decision to begin my Nov. 30 column "Apartheid not peace" with the story of the separation of Israeli representatives from Arab representatives at Annapolis. Happily, after my column was published, both the State Department and Israeli officials denied that the US had enforced the Arab demand for segregated entrances.
YET WHILE the Bush administration did not bow to the Arab demand for segregation at Annapolis, it is moving to advance the Arabs' bigoted demand for apartheid rather than peace in the Middle East. Since the Annapolis conference, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has repeatedly invoked the false Arab view that the physical presence of Israelis beyond the 1949 armistice lines is the source of the Arab-Israeli conflict rather than the Arab world's expressed refusal to accept Israel's existence and Palestinian society's expressed resolve to destroy Israel.
Rice's open and repeated assaults against Israel's plans to build housing in Jewish neighborhoods in its capital city of Jerusalem and her studied silence on the issue of Arab and Palestinian Authority sponsorship of terrorism against Israel make her internalization of the bigoted and false Arab narrative clear. Indeed, in an interview with the BBC last week, Rice placed the blame for the seven-year suspension of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians not on the Palestinian Authority which directed and sponsored the terror war against Israel which has claimed more than a thousand Israeli victims, but rather on the Israeli government for its support of the presence of Jews in disputed lands. As she put it, "On the Middle East peace process, I don't think in 2001, with the intifada having just been launched and frankly, Ariel Sharon, the father of the settlement movement, having just been elected prime minister of Israel, that there was much prospect for a final-status negotiation."
IT COULD be argued that in adopting her overtly anti-Israel and bigoted view of the Arab world's conflict with Israel that Rice is the victim of disinformation and general ignorance. This view might have some credibility were it not for the fact that the administration itself is actively ignoring evidence which shows its view of the Palestinians and other Arab states to be false.
For instance, in upholding PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas as a man of peace, the administration ignores an overwhelming body of evidence showing his own security forces' involvement in terrorism and his government's rejection of Israel. Rice ignores the fact that Fatah security forces murdered Ido Zoldan last month while she supports the arming and training of those same forces. So too, while she insists that Israel must not build in its capital city and must plan to expel some 250,000 Israelis from their towns in Judea and Samaria, she has been silent on the fact that Fatah's 43rd anniversary posters depict the map of Israel covered by a Palestinian keffiyeh, a rifle, and a portrait of Yasser Arafat.
Regionally, as the US legitimizes Bashar Assad's murderous regime in Syria, the administration is making concerted efforts to prevent Congress from understanding the depth of Syria's involvement in terror and nuclear proliferation. According to a publication by the Federation of American Scientists, President George W. Bush is threatening to veto the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill because the bill requires that the While House fully brief the House and Senate intelligence committees about the nature and target of Israel's September 6 attack on what was reportedly a North Korean-built nuclear installation in Syria.
According to Congressional sources, the administration is withholding information about the Israeli attack for it believes that a revelation of the nature of the attack will cause an outcry in Congress. Such an outcry will force the US to back away from its current engagement of Syria and North Korea and instigate the tightening of sanctions against both countries - and perhaps against Iran.
TYRANNIES require disinformation to maintain and justify their grip on power to their own people and to the outside world. But democracies can only flourish through the open flow of information. When the media of free nations publish lies and distorted accounts of fact, and the governments of free nations base their policies on falsities, their national interests are necessarily harmed.
Mistakes happen. Falsities inevitably find their way into discourse. But with good will and a basic, underlying commitment to facts, these mistakes can be easily corrected.
Unfortunately, between the Western and Arab media's often deliberate dissemination of disinformation and the studied refusal of Western policymakers to acknowledge inconvenient facts in favor of easy lies and deliberate deceits which enable them to avoid contending with harsh realities, it is no surprise that our public discourse today is increasingly based on equal doses of mendacity and wishful thinking. And tragically, as the al-Dura affair showed so well, the murderous results won't be long in coming.
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Think this will make two lines at the bottom of Page 23 in the NY Times one day? I don't think I'll be holding my breath waiting for that day.
Comment by Farmer John— 2007/12/27 @ 07:15 AM — (Reply)
http://www.google.com/search?gbv=2&hl=en&q=palestinian+wall
Comment by Dugg— 2007/12/27 @ 07:27 AM — (Reply)
This was used as justification to kill and maim...and Bin Laden himself used it as justification to agitate, recruit and attack us....it's much more Dugg
dugg we gave them $180 just the last half of this year adn that wall you talk of is for protection from suicide bombers
who do you trust Hamas or Abbas?
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/27 @ 09:14 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 01:09 PM — (Reply)
Comment by Dugg— 2007/12/27 @ 02:33 PM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/27 @ 04:08 PM — (Reply)
Native country? Most of them were born in the PA, not any other country. What is their native country then? "Go back to where they came from" only applies to those who actually "came" from somewhere themselves. Most people who call themselves Palestinians, whereever their parents and grandparents "came from," were born in the PA, and therefore, have nowhere to "go back" to.
Comment by Dora— 2007/12/28 @ 07:12 AM — (Reply)
it's hard to feel for those people, especially when they raise their children to hate, poor kids, it's not their fault.
Great post, FJ is right, this will hardly be covered.
Comment by Joe Gringo— 2007/12/28 @ 06:55 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Dugg— 2007/12/28 @ 06:59 AM — (Reply)
see any Jews blowing up Christians there dugg?
do I need to remind you of our little Talmud discussion we had awhile back?
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 01:08 PM — (Reply)
Comment by Dugg— 2007/12/28 @ 07:01 AM — (Reply)
But this article is an op-ed, not a news article. You know this, don't you?
The Jerusalem Post, in a news article, the paper writes:
"The footage shown in court, however, was inconclusive. Toward the end, the tape appeared to show Dura briefly putting his hand to his forehead to check what was happening around him, and moving his leg.
The footage also featured his father shouting out, "Muhammad is dead! Muhammad is dead!" "
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1195036613140
Comment by Dora— 2007/12/28 @ 07:04 AM — (Reply)
That the death of Muhammad al-Dura was the real emotional pretext for the ensuing avalanche of Palestinian violence—and a far more potent trigger than Sharon’s “provocative” visit to the Temple Mount—is attested by the immediate and widespread dissemination of his story and of the pietà-like image of his body lying at his father’s feet. Streets, squares, and schools have since been named for the young Islamic shahid. His death scene has been replicated on murals, posters, and postage stamps, even making an iconic appearance in the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading. His story, perhaps the single most powerful force behind the Palestinian cult of child sacrifice over the last years, has been dramatized in spots on Palestinian television urging others to follow in his path, retold in a recruitment video for al Qaeda, and immortalized in epic verse by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
But is it true? Although serious doubts were immediately raised about the veracity of the France-2 news report, they were swept aside by the emotions it provoked and by the flare of violence in the last months of 2000. France-2 indignantly turned down all requests to investigate or even to help others investigate by releasing outtakes. To this day, many people believe that even to raise a doubt about the authenticity of the report is tantamount to denying the reality of the 9/11 attacks on New York City.
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 11:44 AM — (Reply)
Up until 1967 the original Palestinians were always referred to as the Jews...Arafat was an Egyptian and Jordan is over 50% paloswinians by population.
For many hundreds of years Palestine was sparsely populated. In the late 1800's (1880) the American consul concluded that Jerusalem was continuing its historic decline
So where did the Pseudostinians come from?
The first British Governor, Herbert Samuel writing in the Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nations, June 1921, entitled "On the Condition of Palestine after the War" relates that "There are now in the whole of Palestine [what is today the State of Israel and the State of Jordan] hardly 700,000 people".
Today there are 6 million Jews and 4.5 million Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza alone, not counting Jordan.
There was massive Jewish and Arab immigration into Israel: The Jewish refugees fleeing religious and ethnic persecution from European and Arab States, and Arabs immigrants from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq. These were not native "Palestinians" as they are called today, rather Arab migrant workers looking for a better standard of living.
The regeneration of Palestine, and the growth of its population, came only after Jews returned in massive numbers. The Jewish population increased by 470,000 between World War I and World War II while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000. In fact, the permanent Arab population increased 120 percent between 1922 and 1947.
This rapid growth was a result of several factors. One was immigration from neighboring states — constituting 37 percent of the total immigration to pre-state Israel — by Arabs who wanted to take advantage of the higher standard of living the Jews had made possible. The Arab population also grew because of the improved living conditions created by the Jews as they drained malarial swamps and brought improved sanitation and health care to the region. Thus, for example, the Muslim infant mortality rate fell from 201 per thousand in 1925 to 94 per thousand in 1945 and life expectancy rose from 37 years in 1926 to 49 in 1943.
The Arab population increased the most in cities with large Jewish populations that had created new economic opportunities. From 19221947, the non-Jewish population increased 290 percent in Haifa, 131 percent in Jerusalem and 158 percent in Jaffa. The growth in Arab towns was more modest: 42 percent in Nablus, 78 percent in Jenin and 37 percent in Bethlehem.
Even at the height of the Arab revolt in 1938, the British High Commissioner to Palestine believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews to drive up prices for lands they wished to sell. Many Arab landowners had been so terrorized by Arab rebels they decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the Jews.
there are no ethnic Palestinians...few of the so called "refugees" have roots in the land longer than the Jews. Many of the Pseudostinians are Egyptian, Bosnian, Sudanese, Yemenites and others moved around by the Ottomans. Moreover, Jews have been recognized as a nation for 4000 years and are indigenous to Israel.
Moreover Arabs were terrorizing the Jews long before the excuse that the land belonged to them.
The Pseudostinian leaders have kept their people in squalor because they are a political football...exploited as means to destroy Israel.
Are Palestinians native to the land of Palestine?
Palestinian leaders claim that Israel is built on Arab land, when the truth is that eyewitnesses such as Mark Twain and Rev. Manning of England who visited the Holy Land in the last century wrote that the land was barren and empty. The population then was less that 5% of today's population.
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 11:25 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 11:34 AM — (Reply)
I've also read many articles that say the current "jews" have zero relation to the historic jews of the Bible - but are instead russian khazars who changed their collective identity in order to get a homeland.
Comment by Dugg— 2007/12/28 @ 12:17 PM — (Reply)
Comment by jim— 2007/12/28 @ 12:25 PM — (Reply)
...but are instead russian khazars who changed their collective identity in order to get a homeland
so you're choosing to ignore history and the testimony of those who were present at the time?
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 12:27 PM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 12:28 PM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 01:01 PM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2007/12/28 @ 01:17 PM — (Reply)