Email This to a Friend
An ‘Independent’ Al-Dura Commission in France?
Incredibly, the leading French Jewish group is working on a "compromise" that would effectively sweep the Mohammed al-Dura hoax under the rug.
At times Prasquier sounded positively apologetic about even bringing up the issue. “A child was killed in Gaza,” he said, “probably by the Israelis, I have no idea.” The allusion was to the young boy whose body was turned over to a Palestinian hospital on the same day as the filming of the al-Dura episode.
The diplomatic pirouettes in Prasquier’s opening and closing remarks contrasted sharply with the nuts-and-bolts presentation of the al-Dura dossier by journalist Guy Mihaely that formed the centerpiece of the press conference. Mihaely is a contributor to the recently launched French website Causeur: one of the rare entries in the “new” French media that seems genuinely determined to break with the habits and complicities that have come to define the old. With the aid of video and slides, Mihaely methodically walked the assembled reporters through the many grounds for concluding that there is, as he put it, an “intolerable gap” between the “narrative” of the al-Dura scene — viz. as provided by Charles Enderlin on September 30, 2000, and Enderlin, Rahma, and other representatives of France 2 on numerous occasions since — and what one actually sees in the images.
These points will be well known to those who have followed the affair via the “new” American media or to French speakers who have followed it via media “outsiders” like Karsenty or the Israel-based Metula News Agency. But they have thus far received virtually no hearing in the established French media. (As evidence of this continuing obliviousness, consider that Le Figaro chose to accompany the enormous still of Jamal and Mohammed al-Dura in its Tuesday edition with the following caption: “The report broadcast by France 2 on September 30, 2000, showed the death of the 12-year-old Mohammed, cut down by a burst of fire from an automatic weapon while in the arms of his father.”)
There is, for instance, the matter of the missing “death throes” of the boy, which Enderlin claimed on no less than three occasions to have cut from the raw footage, but which was nowhere to be found in the footage France 2 was finally compelled to turn over to the French court. Or the constant diminution in the amount of time Rahma filmed the scene: first 27 minutes according to a sworn statement, then 6 minutes according to his statements to German journalist Esther Schapira, and finally just 40 seconds in the footage France 2 provided to the court. Or the lack of visual evidence of the hail of gunfire to which the man and boy were supposed to have been exposed for some 45 minutes. Or the lack of any trace in the video of the terrible wounds that the man and boy were supposed to have suffered. Or the famous red cloth, which a blown-up frame of the video clearly reveals the child clutching in his hand, apparently to simulate blood. Or the revelation by the Israeli doctor Yehuda David that scars that Jamal al-Dura would later display to journalists as “proof” of the shooting were in fact the result of a much earlier incident and the surgery he performed on the man.
The evidence presented by Mihaely is so overwhelming that after hearing his presentation, one could well wonder why there is any need for an ostensibly “independent” investigative commission — other than to furnish a pretext perhaps for plausibly denying the obvious. The evidence of a conscious will to deceive is, moreover, patent in many of the examples: not only on the part of Rahma and Jamal al-Dura, but also on that of Enderlin and France 2. As Mihaely pointed out, whereas Charles Enderlin repeatedly claimed to have edited the scene of the boy’s “death throes” from the raw footage, the only images of the boy and his father that he in fact cut are precisely those that show that the boy has not been killed at all: namely, those in which he calmly raises his arm from his face and then slowly roles over onto his stomach.
The role of France 2’s al-Dura report in the incitement of hatred against not only Israel and Israelis, but indeed against Jews around the world, has been well documented. Less than two weeks after the broadcast of the report, two Israeli soldiers would be lynched in Ramallah. Fall 2000 would see a massive spike in anti-Semitic violence in France: an “unsurprising” reaction to Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians according to then-French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine. And, of course, the same iconic image of Mohammed and Jamal al-Dura used in Tuesday’s edition of Le Figaro would repeatedly be shown in the Islamist propaganda video of the “confession” and then decapitation of Daniel Pearl.
If it should be established both that the al-Dura report was a fake and that Charles Enderlin and his colleagues knew or had strong reason to believe that it was fake, but broadcast it nonetheless, then this would clearly constitute a crime under Article 24 of France’s law on press freedoms. Article 24 expressly prohibits the use of the press to “provoke discrimination or hatred or violence with respect to a person or a group of persons by virtue of their origin or their belonging or not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or a particular religion.” Those violating this provision of the law are susceptible to a punishment of one year in prison or a fine of 45,000 euros or both.
If France is a country respectful of its own laws, the clarification of this issue would appear to be more properly a matter for the courts than for an “independent” commission.
<- Prev Page 2 of 2
John Rosenthal’s writings on European politics and transatlantic relations have appeared in English, French, and German in such leading publications as Policy Review, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He holds a PhD in philosophy and he taught political philosophy and classical German philosophy before turning to journalism. More of his work can be found at Transatlantic Intelligencer.
 |
 |
 |
Podcasts |  PJM Home |
Pajamas Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
The clause regarding "hate speech" has been deleted because readers criticized it as being too loosely defined. We agreed.
These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that Pajamas Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pajamasmedia.com.
16 Comments
1. Benson:I wonder what the Jews of France — individuals, rather than faceless numbers somehow “represented” by CRIF — think of this. It seems that the political consequences of the truth are universally considered to be so potentially catastrophic that the facts must now be negotiated. Do all French citizens believe that if Enderlin and France 2 were brought down, that would do intolerable harm to the nation? Are the French really that crazy?
Jul 5, 2008 - 5:08 am 2. Smarty:More Jewicide. More Sonderkommandos. The very few public Jews that would not betray their own people (and their Christian friends) need to put those two words out in public and shame the new generation of SonderKommandos into silence, if not to proper action.
Jul 5, 2008 - 7:08 am 3. Dan Friedman:My understanding is that the CRIF acts like a French government toady, and in fact was silent and uncooperative with Karsenty’s heroic efforts to expose the French media’s hoax. It was only after Karsenty won his victory in court did France’s Jewish organization types finally surface. And then only to place another hurdle in the path of the truth, as if it has not already been established.
Jul 5, 2008 - 7:12 am 4. Chip:L’Affair Al-D(reyfus)ura — some things never change. In the creative Blood Libel game, France won’t come in second to anyone but Russia.
Jul 5, 2008 - 7:24 am 5. Fidel, MD:More BS from the ‘professional joos’, those who live at the public teat by saying exactly what the powers that be want said.
Like the Jews who served the German and Soviet empires in their foundings, such toadys will achieve the same end.
I’ve managed to get a lot of my family members to immigrate from that pestilential hell-hole, Paris. They come to America (legally, mind you) and start contributing (via rather high) income taxes right away.
The rest of the family there, unfortunately, are the rather slow ones.
Jul 5, 2008 - 9:27 am 6. JK:I live in Paris (I’m an American expat) and was recently amazed to see a television ‘documentary’ purporting to present the history of Zionism. The more I watched, the more the subtext of this little gem became clear: Zionism and the Jews are the root of the problems in the Middle East.
The author?
Yep, none other than the same Charles Enderlin who brought you the al-Dura affair.
I understand that Enderlin himself is Jewish. After seeing his film, I can only conclude that there’s something seriously wrong with him: only an enormous amount of self-hatred could explain his deformation of history and established fact – in short, what’s normally called the truth.
The amount of damage an individual like Enderlin is capable of doing is also enormous, and I have to ask myself why he’s being allowed to do it.
Jul 5, 2008 - 1:52 pm 7. Smarty:Enderlin does it because he is mentally ill. I suspect most Jews are. I don’t know if it is chronic Jewish guilt Syndrome ™, or some sort of cultural inbreeding, or what, but the sad fact is evgey time we turn around there is some Jew playing Sonderkommando to the Muslims playing of the SS.
He is allowed to do it because he suits the Muslims’s purpose, he suits the Euro-Leftist anti-semite’s purpose, and he suits the purposes of the “Jewish Elites” who are just as suicidal as he is.
Jul 5, 2008 - 2:55 pm 8. JK:“Enderlin does it because he is mentally ill. I suspect most Jews are.”
With people like you making generalizations like that, Enderlin suddenly seems like small potatos.
Other than yourself, who’s acceptable in your book?
Jul 5, 2008 - 4:54 pm 9. Smarty:We have defined suicidal tendencies as a mental illness or pathology, right?
So what else do you call a group of people who are so unified in their suicidal tendencies? When Jews suck up to Muslims, do the propaganda work for anti-semitic socialist it is nothing short of an expression of mental illness.
Jul 5, 2008 - 7:51 pm 10. Javelin:Or would it have been normal for Christians to raise funds for treating sick Roman lions, or for blacks to argue for why slavery really wasn’t such a bad deal, and should be tried again? Perhaps Indians should make PSAs for how small pox blankets actually help the environment by cutting down on the numbers of pesky natives?
Smarty, you ain’t!
Jul 5, 2008 - 9:56 pm 11. JK:Sweeping generalizations based on race or religion (Enderlin mentally ill = most Jews are) are the substitute for thought and the justification for the very attitudes you seem to condemn.
These are difficult times: it’s not always easy to distinguish one’s friend and ally from the person taking advantage of the breaches in sanity and civilization opened by an Enderlin and those of his ilk to advance even more perverted agendas.
In your case, I’ll presume that such is not the case and that I’ve simply misinterpreted what you’re really trying to say.
Jul 5, 2008 - 10:32 pm 12. Benson:Sheesh — it begins to look to me as if the Jews DON’T control the media, set international banking policies, mandate poverty and wealth, and dicate to governments. They can’t even agree on something as simple and important as the (crude, obvious) Al Dura hoax.
But I still don’t understand the French.
Jul 6, 2008 - 12:13 am 13. Evelyn:Smarty was just getting exasperated with some crazy people I think — The Jewish Council of Germany is suffering from the same malaise, they are bending over backwards in order to look reasonable, often when no-one expects them too, but when getting angry would be a normal and healthy reaction they appease and handwave like demented hippies. And when you hear that the Jewish leadership is swapping dead bodies of war crime victims for prisoners who have killed and will kill again; when you see them faff around with Shalit’s freedom, you begin to despair.
If the Jews were as ‘evil’ as everyone says, the Palestinian problem would no exist. It does and the reason appears to be that being too ethical is a recipe for eternal hubris and slow suicide.
Jul 6, 2008 - 5:36 am 14. JK:@evelyn:
Bravo; well said, well put.
Being a Jew myself makes me fiercely protective of the very idea of Isreal and of Jews in general.
The truth of your analysis – as tragic as it is, or perhaps because of its innate element of tragedy – touches me profoundly…
Jul 6, 2008 - 6:32 am 15. Azores:I am no Jew, at least as far as I know, but the following sequence of events always puzzles me.
Jul 6, 2008 - 3:44 pm 16. Al-Dura Affair « Harry Rock:1) A Palestinian suicide bomber blows a bus full of schoolchildren.
2) Palestinians in the streets commemorate this “victory” dancing, singing and firing Kalashnikovs.
3) Two Israeli helicopters come and gun the celebrating Palestinians.
Why does 3) never happens?
To placate the international public opinion? But anti-Semitism is and will be rampant almost everywhere.
The show the humanitarian side of Israelis? But who cares?
I really cannot understand and I would happy to get some explanation for a type of behaviour that we find rather often. For example, a group of so-called rightwing French attacked Jewish shop owners in a street of Paris; we know that some retaliation, some broken heads, would bring wonders, but we never see this happening
[...] story which won’t go away however is the ‘al-Dura affair’. A classic case of an attempt to manipulate the [...]
Jul 8, 2008 - 7:50 am