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Subject:
The Muhamad el-Dura affair: end of the story.
Shirrush
11/3/2004 5:38:29 PM
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When the Camp David negotiations broke down in 2000, Arafat bolted and ran directly to Paris, where he had a night time meeting with Chirac.
Nothing has ever been published on what these two talked about.
A few weeks later, the war began in earnest, and a state-owned TV channel, France 2, soon had footage of the killing of a 12 years old Palestinian child by Israeli machine-gunners near Netzarim in the Gaza strip. Muhammad el-Dura became a symbol of Palestinian victimhood.
An independant French-language press agency, Metula News Agency (Ména), has been inquiring extensively into this propaganda fabrication since then.
They've had their final report translated to English, duly copyrighted but I'll copy-paste it anyway:
Metula News
Agency ©
English
La Mena is a press agency offering strategic analyses, proximity reports,
and media watch articles Copyright © 2003 Metula News Agency ? News at the
top of the page ? Practical Information at the end of the article. Share
your comments and reactions with everyone on the Mena forum
link
The Al-Dura case : a dramatic conclusion (info # 010311/4EV) [scoop]
By Stéphane Juffa © Metula News Agency
Translated by Llewellyn Brown
A Summary of the facts
After three years of research, more than 150 inquiries, interviews and
analyses devoted to the France 2 report of 30 September 2000 at the
Netzarim Junction, in the Gaza strip, the Ména has published a long series
of articles revealing the following elements:
The news report produced by Talal Abu-Rahma and Charles Enderlin,
asserting that a Palestinian child had been assassinated by Israeli
soldiers, and distributed free of charge by a French public television
channel around the world is a gross staging, aimed at demonizing Israel and
the Israeli army. The soldiers accused by the commentary of the permanent
correspondent of FR2 at Jerusalem did not fire a single projectile in the
direction of the adult Jamal Al-Dura and the child at his side, as they
were completely unaware of their presence on the scene.
The supposed authenticity of the report, defended until now by the
channel's management, was based on the sole testimony of its reporter Talal
Abu-Rahma and principally on the declaration written, filed and ratified by
the latter, 3 October 2000, in the presence of the lawyer of the
Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), Raji Sourani at Gaza. In this
declaration, published in its entirety, with sketches of the events to
corroborate it, on the Center's web site, Abu-Rahma notably declares :
I, the undersigned, Talal Hassan Abu Rahma, resident of the Gaza
Strip and who bears ID no. 959852849, give my statement under oath and
after having been given legal warning and choice by Lawyer Raji Sourani, on
the killing of Mohammed Jamal Al-Durreh and the injuring of his father
Jamal Al-Durreh both shot at by the Israeli Occupying Forces.[?]
Then, I focused my camera on the child Mohammed Jamal Al-Durreh who
was shot in his right leg. His father tried to calm, protect and cover his
son with his hands and body. Sometimes, the father Jamal was raising his
hands asking for help. Other details of the incident are as they were
apparently shown at the film. I spent approximately 27 minutes
photographing the incident which took place for 45 minutes. [?]
The Metula News Agency, confirming the conclusions of the inquiry appointed
by the commander of the southern front of the Israeli army, led by the
physicist Nahum Shahaf, has constantly asserted that Abu-Rahma's
declaration was a false testimony and that the 27 minutes of film of the
incident ? that is to say the filmed documents showing the Israeli soldiers
firing in the direction of Jamal Al-Dura and leading to the death of the
"child" ? did not exist.
Until Friday 22 October, the numerous official appeals made by our agency
to FR2 to view the 27 minutes of Abu-Rahma's rushes, as well as our
reiterated proposals to compare our respective materials met with a
refusal. Furthermore, our agency, supported by the conclusions of our
inquiry, has constantly assert that Charles Enderlin's numerous
declarations, evoking the existence of this footage of pictures showing the
child's death, that the permanent correspondent of FR2 says he edited in
order to spare the television spectators, are a fabrication, serving to
confer an appearance of authenticity to a fictional event that it
contributes to transform into an event reputed to be real.
We find a sample of this sort of declaration by Enderlin in the issue 2650,
page 10, of the publication Télérama, 25 October :
"I edited the death of the child. It was too unbearable. The story
was told, the news delivered. It would not have added anything more."
This untruth covers up the absence of images showing the moment when the
child was supposedly hit by Israeli projectiles, that are missing ? and for
reason ? from the fiction filmed by Talal Abu-Rahma. Enderlin alludes to it
in the same issue of Télérama :
"As for the moment when the child received the bullets, it was not even
filmed."
Structurally, the theory of the assassination of the child by Israeli
soldiers was not supported by pictures, the entire staging was based on a
suggestion of the facts provided by the commentary, the possession of image
of the death by Enderlin and, in the same way, the judicial department of
France 2 became the other key element, albeit invisible, guaranteeing the
veracity of the monstrous act attributed to the Israelis. If the images
existed?
Friday 22 October, the abscess bursts
In circumstances that it is too early to relate but that result from the
presentation of evidence gathered by the Ména and summarized in the film we
have devoted to the case, the president of France Télévision, Marc Tessier,
invited Ms Arlette Chabot, the news editor of France 2, to present the 27
minutes of rushes in France 2's possession to Luc Rosenzweig, a former
journalist of Le Monde, a contributor to the Ména and a columnist at RCJ,
one of Paris' Jewish radios.
The meeting was set for 3:00 pm. Rosenzweig was accompanied, for the
occasion, by two eminent figures of the French media who, while being most
interested in this case, do not wish for the moment to appear in the public
debate it raises. One is an ex-great reporter of France 2, an Albert
Londres Prize winner, the second is an editorialist who is unanimously
respected in Paris.
Meeting at the reception with Arlette Chabot, cordial greetings. The little
troop then headed for their host's office near the top of the FR2 building,
that has a magnificent view over the Seine, according to the consecrated
but still beautiful expression. Didier Epelbaum, counselor to the channel's
president, former member of the Francophone department of Qol Israel [an
Israeli radio, Translator's note] and former mediator of France 2, is
waiting for them, holding a file entitled "Who killed Mohammed Al-Dura?",
as well as a representative of the judicial department of the "image
analysis" section.
The atmosphere was clearly more tense. Epelbaum asked : "Shall we discuss
first?"
To which Rosenzweig replied : "We came to see the 27 minutes of rushes
showing the Israeli soldiers shooting the child that Talal Abu-Rahma quotes
in his statement under oath?"
The representative of the juridical department interrupted our colleague :
"It won't tell you much!"
That is obviously what we feared? all the more so as Didier Epelbaum
immediately followed with an eminently surprising argument : "You know full
well that Talal went back on his testimony, that he retracted it. He was
acting under pressure, he was caught unawares?"
Caught unawares? Three days after the events, in a comfortable lawyer's
office? Abu-Rahma is thus the author of a false testimony : the suspense
did not last long. It was, at the same time, the end of the enquiry. With
the retraction of the only France 2 witness of the assassination of
Mohammed Al-Dura, nothing is left of this case, nothing but a bit of bad
fiction that is no longer worth a kopek.
But no, the three great journalists "did not know" that the Palestinian
reporter of the public channel had retracted, no one in the world is aware,
since France 2 had dissimulated this crucial information. France 2, that
has had the famous rushes at its disposal for four years and that knows
that the 27 minutes of the incident, the sole evidence of the almost ritual
crime of Israel, never existed.
And the public television remained silent, letting the imposture it had
distributed, that had become the incontestable symbol of the Palestinians'
revolt against the Jewish barbarians, sweep over the world, spawning
Mohammed Al-Dura street names like rain, postage stamps, books teaching
hatred, guides to shahyda [martyrdom, translator's note]. Begetting
violence, a lot of violence, lynchings out of revenge, like a little later
at Ramallah, deadly riots at the beginning of October. 12 dead. And above
all, this counterfeit dug a chasm of insurmountable hatred between Israelis
and Palestinians but also between Jews and Arabs, condemning for many long
years any hope of reconciliation.
The air became hot in the office of Chabot, who did not take sides, but
whose legendary poker face tends to crack. And Epelbaum, the architect of
the channel's ethical charter [For the charter, consult:
link had just trampled on dozens of clauses in
section 2.4 dealing with Honesty and Pluralism. I just read it, before
writing this paper and I cannot get away from the sub-chapter "2.4.1.8.
Deepening and follow-up of news" :
When events that have been related on the channel undergo
developments that change or contradict elements previously provided by the
channel, it is important to go back over them. [?]
Is such schizophrenia conceivable?
The people from this channel told the journalists that Abu-Rahma was in
Paris to undergo treatment. Straight away, the three great witnesses
suggested meeting him. Three times. Three times, the other feigned they did
not hear. Epelbaum took Rozenzweig aside and whispered : "You know, he does
not speak French and he speak English badly, you will not be able to
understand each other!" The editorialist who heard this strange whispering
suggested paying for the services of an Arab translator.
Silence and blanched faces. I remember hearing Talal Hassan Abu-Rahma
expressing himself in very good English, live on CNN for ten minutes, at
the time of doctor Rantissi's elimination. So it is hard to fall any lower
than Epelbaum's falsehood.
They watched the 27 minutes anyway and, of course, they did not contain the
slightest picture of the incident that had not already been broadcasted by
FR2 and reproduced in the Ména's film. Not one. Not the slightest picture
of the most Lilliputian of Tsahal's [the Israeli Defense Forces,
translator's note] soldiers. Not another picture of Jamal, of the child but
two interviews, without any direct relationship to the incident and
pictures of skirmishes between solders and demonstrators. Several times, in
Abu-Rahma's rushes, children pretended to be hit by Israelis, which maked
Epelbaum exclaim : "You see, they always do that, these kids".
I am astounded !
The journalists notice another of Charles Enderlin's lies, who said he had
given the rushes, intact, to the Israeli authorities. On Friday, they saw
the child moving after having been killed on the spot by the Israelis. On
the report broadcasted by France 2, these pictures were replaced by stills,
to give the impression that the actor playing Mohammed Al-Dura's role was
actually dead. In the context, this further mystification that would be
crucial in other circumstances, suddenly appeared trivial.
Luc spoke of scenes that were "unbearable" for the spectators. Scenes of
dying ?
Silence and blanched faces again. In the rushes, there is no picture that
could be considered, even with the most open of minds, as a death scene,
nothing that is in any way more unbearable that what France 2 had already
shown.
Not yet aware that his bunker had already fallen, Didier Epelbaum asked if
the journalists had tangible proof that it was an imposture. He did not
grasp that with a single witness caught out red-handed providing a false
testimony and a star reporter lying, the hypothesis of the death of
Mohammed Al-Dura, September 30 2000 at Netzarim, did not even need to be
criticized. It no longer existed. But Rosenzweig, in a dramatic gesture in
the manner of Colombo, drew out of his jacket a USB key and plugged it into
the office computer. Then appeared the picture of the small boy that died
the same day at Shifa hospital at Gaza and that the authors of the
imposture wanted people to believe was Mohammed. "It seems", announced very
serenely the man from Upper Savoie, "that there is a small problem; that
the face of this corpse is not exactly the same as the one we make out on
your film."
It is almost a knock-out. Arlette Chabot suddenly envisages the strange
hypothesis that the men of France 2 may have "been deceived". She suggests
having the scientific police undertake a comparison of the two faces.
Why not? At Metula we have already had the analysis done: the two children
are not at all of the same age and the traces of wounds on the corpse do
not at all correspond to those announced for Mohammed Al-Dura?
A conclusion, certainly, but the epilogue is missing
As of this evening, the Al-Dura case, as a factual event of the Intifada,
no longer exists. Enderlin may certainly pursue his line of defense,
trumpeting that even the officers of the Israeli army fell into his trap ?
which is rigorously exact ? or that "if it were an imposture, the state of
Israel would certainly have engaged proceedings", they are simply incidents
of no causal significance in the objective analysis of the case. Moreover,
and even before knowing the revelations of France 2, the Israeli
government, through the voices of the head of the Government Press Office
Danial Seaman and that of the Prime Minister's counselor and spokesman,
Ra'anan Gissin, had already publicly stated that the French public
television's report was a media imposture and that they had adopted all the
conclusion of the Shahaf Commission and those of the Ména. Seaman informed
us that after a long meeting at the Ministry of Justice, it was decided
that it was unfitting for the government of a democratic state to sue the
accredited correspondents of foreign media. It was also decided that this
decision in no way altered or attenuated the content of Seaman's and
Gissin's declarations. And who knows, following the stinging revelations of
this article, even the state of Israel may revise its principles ?
The hypothesis of the assassination of Mohammed Al-Dura by the Israeli
soldiers has thus been deconstructed, obliging its distributor France 2 to
admit to its failings. But the dramatic end of this deceit immediately
raises a host of questions concerning the interference of the media in a
foreign conflict. France 2 deceived television spectators for four long
years, dissimulating the fact that the rushes they possessed did not show
Jewish soldiers assassinating a small Arab boy. The channel thus largely
participated in resurrecting the intolerable Middle Age rumor, associating
Israelites with racial characteristics of satanic origin. Since one would
have to be extremely deranged, devoid of humanity, to single out a child in
a numerous crowd and to aim at him for forty-five minutes until one
succeeded in taking his life.
However the media deceit concocted by Abu-Rahma and Enderlin worked beyond
its authors' hopes. So that today, and since Mohammed's assassination, this
picture constructed around the so-called ferocity of the Israelis clings to
us and has practically ended up persuading the greater part of Francophone
opinion. The task of reparation that befalls France Television is colossal.
It starts tomorrow with the exercise of a work of explanation to television
spectators and victims, of uncompromising recognition of the facts and a
calling into question of the methods of the men who instigated the greatest
and particularly the most serious imposture in audio-visual history. And
then, reason will not suffer the accomplices to this immense incitement to
ethnic hatred, after having corrupted every item of our deontology, to
continue claiming they inform France on the events of the Israel-Arab
conflict, nor that they continue to practice any media activity of any
nature. Likewise, reason cannot allow us to imagine that they could be
awarded professional prizes that they won through the execution of their
crime.
Needless to say, at the Ména, we will follow further developments with an
extremely open eye.
Metula News
Agency © |
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