Richard Landes: YNET Weighs in: Al-Dura Footage to Air

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http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2007/09/20/ynet-weighs-in/

Filed under: Pallywood, Media, al Durah Affair – Richard Landes @ 1:40 pm – Print This Post

Ynet reporter Yaakov Lappin has a piece on the Al Durah Affair’s latest turn. Comments and corrections added.

Al-Dura footage to air

French judge orders television network to screen withheld footage of killing of young Palestinian boy in Gaza in 2000

Yaakov Lappin
Published: 09.20.07, 18:18 / Israel News

A French judge has ordered the France 2 television network to screen in court previously withheld footage of the shooting of Muhammad al-Dura, the Palestinian boy shot dead in his father’s arms in Netzarim in 2000 during a battle between Palestinian gunmen and IDF soldiers.

The army was blamed around the world for the boy’s fatal shooting although an IDF investigation in January 2001 into the incident failed to find conclusive evidence as to whether it was an IDF or Palestinian bullet that killed the child.

The screening has been tentatively set for November 14, Ynetnews has learned, though it is not yet clear whether members of the public will be allowed to view the film.

Wednesday’s landmark ruling is set to reignite the explosive debate surrounding the footage. After the images of the young boy’s death were first aired seven years ago, the video ignited widespread rage across the Muslim world, and several failed suicide bombers cited the incident as their motivation to carry out a terrorist attack.

Since then, sources in Israel and a number of independent analysts have maintained that Palestinian forces were likely responsible for the killing, and a German documentary aired in 2002 suggested that a Palestinian bullet was the cause of al-Dura’s death. Recently, the IDF submitted a formal request to have the footage made available for analysis.

Phillipe Karsenty, head of the French media watchdog Media Ratings, is behind the legal petition calling on France 2 to release the raw footage from that day.

‘I hope that this will end smear campaign’

Speaking to Ynetnews, Karsenty said the ruling was “a first step towards a final victory which will lead French authorities to admit they broadcast a huge, anti-Semitic lie, used to justify the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

“This film has been seen all over the Arab world. Schools carry the name of al-Dura, and children are taught that Israelis kill for no reason. So while you cannot resurrect people who died because of this lie, you can avoid more people dying,” Karesenty said.

The media analyst added, however, that “judges and myself will not change this story,” and called on French President Nicholas Sarkozy to order a full-scale investigation into the footage.

“France 2 is owned by the French state, which is headed by Sarkozy. He has the power to ask for those images, and have them scrutinized by experts around the world. I now call on Sarkozy to ask for the footage… it’s time for French president to tell the truth,” Karsenty declared.

Charles Enderlin, Jerusalem bureau chief of France 2, provided rolling commentary on the footage back in 2000. “Here Jamal and his son Muhammad are the targets of gunshots that have come from the Israeli position…. A new burst of gunfire, Muhammad is dead and his father seriously wounded,” he said during a broadcast of the footage.

Reacting to Wednesday’s court ruling Enderlin told Ynetnews he welcomed the decision. “I am very happy about this decision. From the start, our position has been that we will not release raw footage except through a judicial process. We will not release the footage to militants or private individuals,” he said.

“I’m very happy that it will be seen in court. I hope that this is the end of a smear campaign which has gone on for seven years, and which has been difficult for me and my family,” he added.

“People have accused us of staging an event which is an absolute lie. I am very happy at last to have the possibility (to show it),” Enderlin said.

This is fascinating. Either he’s bluffing or he’s an idiot. Come to think of it, he’s an idiot to try and bluff on this one. So either he plans to pull a fast one, or he genuinely doesn’t realize how damning the tapes are. As I’ve said before, in this matter, Enderlin redefines cognitive dissonance.

As for accusiing France2 of staging, that’s not the accusation – should it be? The accusation is being dupe to a staging, that he was “had” by Talal, whom he inappropriately trusted. The accusation is not that Enderlin is a lying son of gun, but that he’s a dupe, and not a dupe by stupidity but by arrogance. “Talal couldn’t even have conceived of staging this,” he told me, “because in order to do so, he would have had to imagine that he could get it past me, and he would have known that was impossible.” Meantime, Talal was laughing his head off.

Raw footage ‘contains clear hoaxes’

At the center of the court battle are several minutes of footage shot by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma. During testimony before the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in 2000, Rahma said: “I spent about 27 minutes photographing the incident which took place for 45 minutes…. I can confirm that the child was intentionally and in cold blood shot dead, and his father injured, by the Israeli army.”

According to Karsenty, however, the cameraman’s sole purpose is to further Palestinian propaganda causes. “This guy told an American newspaper that he chose to be a journalist so to serve the Palestinian cause,” Karsenty said.

According to Professor Richard Landes, who told Ynetnews he had seen the full raw footage, the film contains damning evidence of faked scenes staged for the purpose of making Israel look bad.

Landes has become heavily involved in the battle to make the film available, and produced a film, “Pallywood,” based on the shooting.

He has expressed concern that France 2 will attempt to tamper with the original footage, and cut out embarrassing scenes, resulting in a screening of an edited version of the film.

“I saw the tapes three times with Enderlin in Jerusalem,” Landes told Ynetnews.

Actually, I only saw them once with Enderlin. The other times I saw them with an assistant.

“One scene in particular stands out, in which a guy grabs his leg as if he’s been shot, but blood cannot be seen. He starts to limp really seriously. He is picked up by young kids and taken to an ambulance. He looks around and sees no one is looking, and then walks away without a limp,” Landes said.

No. This doesn’t make sense. He is surrounded by little kids who can’t pick him up. He chases them away, looks around, sees no one who can carry him in front of the cameras, and walks away without a limp.

Describing the court ruling as “spectacular,” Landes said he hoped it would draw attention to what he described as “an industry” of anti-Israel media propaganda.

“The western media, instead of saying this isn’t journalism, says, what can I use?” Landes said. He added that another scene in the withheld footage shows a Palestinian child with makeup made to resemble a gunshot injury in the head running into a crowd of Palestinians, who proceed to rush the uninjured child into an ambulance.

This is not part of the France2 rushes, but of the Reuter’s rushes that I used in Pallywood and you can see here. And he’s not a child but a young adult.

“Yes, terrible damage has been done,” Landes said, adding, however, that the world has become “much more receptive” to acknowledging hoaxes “like Kfar Qanna and Gaza beach.”

“This can also potentially play a critical role in Muslim world, by providing a weapon to Muslims who realize that the global jihad is a catastrophe for them,” Landes added. “If this image is proven fake, it will be a blow against the jihad,” he said.

The point I tried to make was that there are an increasing number of Muslims who might have cheered 9-11 because it gave the US a black eye and restored Muslim honor, are now beginning to realize that global Jihad is a catastrophe for Islam. This can be a powerful tool in their effort to fight back.

Richard Landes: YNET Weighs in: Al-Dura Footage to Air

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AUTHOR

Richard Landes

Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He retired from teaching history at Boston University in the Spring of 2015. He currently serves as the Chair of the Council of Scholars at SPME.

His work focuses on the role of religion in shaping and transforming the relationships between elites and commoners in various cultures. He has coined the expression "demotic religiosity," an orientation that prizes 1) equality before the law, 2) dignity of manual labor, 3) access to sacred texts and divinity for all believers, and 4) a prizing of moral integrity over social honor. Trained as a medievalist, his early work focused on the period around 1000 CE, a moment, in his opinion, of both cultural mutation (origins of the modern West), and intense apocalyptic and millennial expectations.

From 1995-2004, he directed the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University which held annual conferences and published an online journal, Journal of Millennial Studies. This involvement refocused his work on millennialism the world over and in different time periods, and has resulted in the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, (Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge, NY, 2000); Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford U. Press, 2011), and The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (NYU Press, 2011).

His work on the apocalyptic currents that built up during the approach to 2000 has led him to focus on Global Jihad as an apocalyptic millennial movement, whose relationship to the internet may parallel that of Protestantism to printing, and whose active cataclysmic apocalyptic scenario (Destroy the world to save it), makes it potentially one of the most dangerous apocalyptic movements on record.

In addition to his courses on medieval history, he offered courses on

Europe and the Millennium,

Communications Revolutions from Language to Cyberspace

Honor-shame culture Middle Ages, Middle East

The Biblical origins of the Democracy.

In 2011, he is a fellow at the International Consortium on Research in the Humanities at Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany. There he is working on the study with which his medieval work first began, the history of the “sabbatical millennium” with its expectation of the messianic kingdom in the year 6000 from the creation of the world: While God Tarried: Demotic Millennialism from Jesus to the Peace of God, 33-1033.

In 2005 he launched a media-oversight project called The Second Draft in order to look at what the news media calls their “first draft of history.” Since January 2005 he has been blogging at The Augean Stables, a name chosen to describe the current condition of the Mainstream News Media (MSNM) in the West.

As a result of this work on the MSNM, he has come to understand the role of cognitive warfare in the campaign of apocalyptic Jihad against the West in the 21st century, and the abysmal record of the West in defending itself in this critical theater of War. He plans a book addressing these issues tentatively entitled They’re so Smart cause We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century. 

Books

  • Landes, Richard A.; Head, Thomas J. (eds.) (1987). Essays on the Peace of God : the church and the people in eleventh-century France. Waterloo, Ontario: Waterloo University. OCLC18039359.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Paupert, Catherine (trans.) (1991). Naissance d'Apôtre: Les origines de la Vita prolixior de Saint Martial de Limoges au XIe siècle. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. 9782503500454.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Head, Thomas J. (eds.) (1992). The Peace of God: social violence and religious response in France around the year 1000. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. ISBN 080142741X.
  • Landes, Richard A. (1995). Relics, apocalypse, and the deceits of history: Ademar of Chabannes, 989-1034. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674755308.
  • Landes, Richard A. (ed.) (2000). Encyclopedia of millennialism and millennial movements. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415922461.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Van Meter, David C.; Gow, Andrew Sydenham Farrar (2003). The apocalyptic year 1000: religious expectation and social change, 950-1050. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195111915.
  • Landes, Richard A. (2011). Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Katz, Stephen (eds.). The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: New York University Press.


Read all stories by Richard Landes