Three PM. Everything has begun to degenerate near the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have fired with live ammunition. The Israelis respond. Ambulance teams, journalists and simple passers-by are caught in the cross-fire. Here Jamal and his son Mohammed are the target of fire coming from the Israeli position. Mohammed is twelve years old. His father tries to protect him. He signals. But there is a new burst of fire. Mohammed is dead and his father is badly wounded.

Charles Enderlin,
France 2 Middle East correspondent improvising news
September 30, 2000 (Fr2/World Politcs Watch)

When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.

Joseph Goebbels,
Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda
January 12, 1941 (Die Zeit ohne Beispiel)

FRENCH TV STATION WINS 'FAKE FILM' CASE

October 20, 2006 (Scotsman) - A French television company [France 2, Fr2] yesterday won a libel case over accusations that it faked a report into the killing of a Palestinian boy whose death in 2000 became a symbol of the uprising known as the second intifada.

A court in Paris ordered Philippe Karsenty, the director of the Media Ratings website, to pay France 2 and its Israel correspondent, Charles Enderlin, symbolic damages of 1 each.

BACKGROUND: On September 30, 2000 Fr2 Middle East correspondent Charles Enderlin reported the above story based on footage shot by Fr2 cameraman Talal Abu Rahma. M. Rahma was the sole witness to the incident. The video appears to show a Palestinian father and his son, Mohammed Al Durah, caught in the middle of a firefight between Palestinian irregulars and the IDF. The boy takes cover behind his father, himself behind a small concrete barrel. The end shots show the boy lying still.

The 55 second broadcast can be seen here in its entirety.

Palestinian sources said the boy was shot in the stomach and bled for 15-20 minutes as gunfire prevented evacuation. The video is discontinuous and the boy is never shown being shot or bleeding or dying. Out of decency M. Enderlin claimed to have edited out the death throes.

"It was intolerable. ... It would not have added anything."

It will later be discovered no such edits were made because no such footage exists.

Fr2 provided the broadcast footage free of charge to international networks. It was instrumental in kicking off the early Al-Aqsa Intifada (the Second Intifada) and -- the Palestinians believing their own mise-en-scène when broadcast and reported by the international press -- incited great outrage and greater violence.

Following investigations, the broadcast quickly became suspect. Fr2 refused anyone access to the unused footage -- 27 minutes was shot, 6 minutes of which purportedly recorded the death of the boy. Still under pressure several years later, Fr2 allowed selected supervised viewings of the raw footage. The privileged few either contested or failed to endorse the Fr2 evidential claims about the footage. Fr2 let it be known anyone questioning the integrity of the broadcast would be sued. Mr. Karsenty's organization, Media-Ratings, declared the broadcast fake. Fr2 sued. Against the advice of the floor (scil., the Procureur), who recommended dropping the charges, Mr. Karsenty was convicted of "public defamation".

John Rosenthal picks apart the court ruling and remarks on the implications for a free press in France. (We have drawn extensively from his article for our backgrounder.)

FRANCE: THE AL-DURA DEFAMATION CASE AND THE END OF FREE SPEECH
November 3, 2006 (World Politcs Watch)

The most curious thing -- the typically French tic -- about the ruling is that it hashes and rehashes the opinions about the broadcast but it does not make recourse to the video evidence, the indisputable record of what happened in front of the camera.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE
Fr2 Is Sticking To It

Richard Landes was one of the privileged few to view the raw footage.

HOW FRENCH TV FUDGED THE DEATH OF MOHAMMED AL DURAH.
CAMERA OBSCURA

October 18, 2006 (TNR/theaugeanstables.com) - On October 31, 2003, at the studios of France2 in Jerusalem in the company of Charles Enderlin and his Israeli cameraman, I saw the raw footage of Talal, the only Palestinian cameraman who actually captured the Al Durahs on film – footage France2 still refuses to release for public examination.

I was floored. The tapes feature a long succession of obviously faked injuries; brutal, hasty evacuation scenes; people ducking for cover while others stand around. One fellow grabbed his leg in agony, then seeing that no one came to carry him away, walked away without a limp. Having already seen Talal caught by [German 3sat interviewer] Esther Schapira in a most revealing lie, I should not have been surprised. But I was. It was stunning. It was more than Talal. It was everyone… a public secret to which we, news consumers, had no clue.

But the real shock came when I mentioned this to Charles Enderlin, the man who completely trusted this cameraman. “Oh, they do that all the time,” he said. “It’s a cultural style.” So why not fake al Durah? “They’re not good enough,” he said. A year later, the higher-ups at France2 made the same remark to three French journalists who also noted the pervasive staging: « mais oui, tu sais bien que c’est toujours comme ça » [But of course, you know very well that it’s always like that].

For an in-depth look at the physical evidence correlated to the video, view his The Birth of an Icon.

Mr. Landes also remarks how this one broadcast has incited, not just the Palestinians, but Islamites worldwide to violence.

Al Durah became the icon not only of the Intifada, but of global jihad. Within months of the incident, bin Laden came out with a recruiting video that featured extensive Pallywood footage and highlighted Al Durah. Months later, Pakistani jihadis killed Daniel Pearl, interweaving Al Durah’s image into the execution.

PFFT (What is this?): Facts through the alembic of French notions 4¾ | Rayonnement français 0