I wrote a great deal about the topic, and the subsequent defamation trials in France (one of which I attended), back in the early days of this blog. You can find the posts here.

From No Pasaran on the anniversary:

Tuesday marks the quarter-century anniversary of the beginning of one of the biggest scandals of the past 50 years, the Mohammed al-Dura affair, which saw French television video and photos of a 12-year-old Palestenian and his father being supposedly felled by Israeli bullets in Gaza, and which led to the creation of a new word — Pallywood. …

Before we take a look at the Philippe Karsenty interview, a must-read is the piece that Richard Landes penned in The Jerusalem Post five years ago — as the Abrahamic accords were being signed — about the twentieth (20th) anniversary of “one of the most disastrous events in the year 2000”. It’s a hard, indeed a mind-boggling, read — check out RL’s blog, The Augean Stables — especially coming three years before the October 7th massacre.

It was Landes who coined the phrase “Pallywood” and Karsanty who was one of the defendants in the defamation trials. I know both of them, although we haven’t been in touch in several years. Both are brilliant and courageous.

From Landes’ article on the 20th anniversary:

The image of Muhammad al-Dura via the narrative that the IDF had targeted him became the global symbol of Palestinian suffering at the hand of Israeli cruelty. It rapidly became an “icon of hatred” that had a greater immediate and long-term effect on the new century than any other such vehicle of incitement.

A cry arose, for some of pain, for some of rage, but for all a clear sign that the Infidel, led by the twin Satans Israel and USA, were making war on Muslims. Indeed, no single event so far has done more to arouse the spirit of jihad against the West than this footage, which, as Bin Laden quickly pointed out in his recruiting video for global jihad, demanded vengeance against al Yahud and their allies. …

Instead of Christians or Muslims replacing Israel as the true Chosen People, it was the former chosen people replacing the Nazis, and the poor Palestinian victim suffering the fate of the Jews. The progressive refrain, “Israel has lost the moral high ground.” …

… Al-Dura justified terrorist attacks on Israel in the minds of both Muslims and non-Jews, especially Europeans. “What choice do they have?” progressives responded when Palestinians targeted Israel civilians. They were merely resisting …

… … The icon of al-Dura was the first successful blood libel in the West since the Nazis rode their ecumenical Jew-hatred to mega-death for all in 1930s and ‘40s. …

… Whether we know it or not, those of us entering this very grim-looking third decade of the 21st century are the inheritors of this al-Durah-triggered new wave of Jew-hatred and its accompaniments: fake news, conspiracy theories and violence.

… As some honest Arab journalists point out, #FakeNews is something of an Arab specialty, and for far too long public opinion has been manipulated by dishonest and malevolent actors masquerading as journalists.

Not only did Osama bin Laden explicitly cite the al Durah incident as motive, but he also cited the Daniel Pearl murder as revenge for it. Not only that, but it helped launch the bloody Second Intifada by the Palestinians. And it was all a fake. As Karsanty says:

It’s crucial to understand that we moved from the notion of “deicide” to “genocide.” In Christian tradition, Jews were stigmatized as “Christ-killers.” With the Al-Dura case, the Jews were recast as child-killers, genocidal by nature. This image of Mohammed Al-Dura, supposedly shot by Israeli soldiers in 2000, became the ultimate weapon of demonization against the Jewish people.

And that lie didn’t just get halfway round the world, it’s taken over most of the world.

Please read the whole thing.

The post Today is the 25th anniversary of the Palestinians finding the perfect formula for the modern revival of the blood libel appeared first on The New Neo.

On June 26, the Paris Court of Appeals found me guilty of defamation against television station France 2 and broadcaster Charles Enderlin.

After waiting one long week following the verdict, I was finally able to get the written arguments of the judges. The arguments state that ”” despite the hoax eventually becoming obvious to all who looked at the case ”” I was found guilty for having said that the al-Dura news report was a hoax ”¦ too early, in November 2004.

Had I published that exact same article today now that the facts are clear, I would not have been found guilty…

This verdict confirmed that France 2 still doesn’t have a single piece of evidence to substantiate their al-Dura report. The judges had to reverse the burden of the evidence ”” using the extremely restrictive French defamation laws ”” to prevent France 2 from having to produce any evidence to confirm the report’s authenticity, and to temporarily block the recognition of the hoax.

French taxpayer money has been used to silence legitimate and necessary criticism of France 2’s disinformation.

The significance of France 2’s report on the tape and the supposed killing of the boy by Israeli soldiers cannot be overestimated, as well as the significance of this case in showing how little free speech or even truth matters in France. The damage goes on.

[NOTE: You can read my many previous posts on earlier aspects of this case and related ones here. I especially refer you to this post, which explains the very large differences between French and US libel laws, and this one, about the facade of French justice.]

The post Karsenty explains the verdict in the France2/al-Dura case appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve been following this case for many years as it drags through the French court system with its libel laws, which are very different from ours (I refer you to these posts).

Justice has not been served here, to say the least. This verdict is shocking in the sense of dreadful, but it is not shocking in the sense of surprising, because the French courts are dedicated to protecting the reputation of the renowned and esteemed and honored journalist Charles Enderlin as well as the government-supported France2. It has an interest in hiding the fact that Enderlin and France2 colluded in and orchestrated a piece of misleading propaganda that led to enormous anti-Semitism and retaliatory hatred and murder around the world. It would have taken a great deal of moral courage and an interest in justice—two things the French court lacks—to have found for Karsenty.

The post And in another court decision… appeared first on The New Neo.

The post France2 libel case update appeared first on The New Neo.

The post More on Enderlin/France2 appeared first on The New Neo.

Even so, I’ve learned something new, fascinating, and disturbing from Anne-Elisabeth Moutet’s remarkable piece on “L’Affaire Enderlin.”

Although Enderlin lost the Karsenty appeal case, and was revealed in the process to be remarkably slipshod in his journalistic practices as well as an outright liar in the resulting coverup, this hardly seemed to matter to the 300-plus journalists who signed a petition defending him and trotting out the old and utterly disproven charge that the Israelis were responsible for the shots that allegedly killed al Durah.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a French journalist herself, and is quite familiar with the way that country works. She knows that reputation and status are almost everything, and that many journalists are inordinately full of themselves (perhaps this is not limited to France).

But even she was shocked by the utter disregard of these signers for the truth. After all, these people are journalists, and are supposed to be interested in the idea that veracity matters.

But it seems that all that matters to the signers is reputation, reputation, reputation. Enderlin has—or used to have—an exemplary one, as do many of the signers, and so the wagons were circled to protect both his and, by implication, theirs:

[The petition] expressed rank astonishment at a legal ruling “granting equal credibility to a journalist renowned for his rigorous work, and to willful deniers ignorant of the local realities and with no journalistic experience.” It professed concern about a jurisprudence that would—shock! horror!—allow “anyone, in the name of good faith and of a supposed right to criticize and so-called freedom of speech, to smear with impunity the honor and the reputation of news professionals.”

Ah, there’s that word “smear” again, which apparently means “when someone you support is criticized” and has nothing to do with the veracity of the accusation. Truth is apparently no defense, and perhaps it even makes the offense worse because it’s especially outrageous to be bested in such matters by underlings.

Moutet, a French journalist herself for several decades, looked at the list of signatures with mounting horror:

There were the names of people from every magazine or newspaper I’d ever worked at; people I’d trained with; people I’d been great pals with before life packed us off in different directions; and people I’d last seen only the week before. It was, to tell the truth, Stepford-like scary.

But Moutet’s shock was nothing compared to the shock the signatories received when she decided to call some of them for an interview. All went well at first, chatting and reminiscing, till she brought up the subject of the petition and why they’d signed it, and revealed her own point of view that Enderlin might in fact have been guilty of journalistic wrongdoing:

As I started explaining that I was writing a piece on the al-Dura affair and was wondering why they had signed the petition, I learned to recognize the telltale pause, the “Good Lord, she’s caught Scientology! She’s gone over to the crazies!” moment, after which the whole object of the exercise would become to hang up on me as fast as possible.

Some gave answers, however, and their explanations are stomach-churning to read. Much of it boils down to the sentence “I did it for Charles.” Charles Enderlin, the “grand reporter” (that’s not a description, that’s a title he earned; France seems to bestow ranks on its media journalists), couldn’t have done anything wrong. And even if he did, he needed protection, not condemnation, for it.

Forget the little fact that his shoddy reportage was at least partly responsible for inspiring a wave of murders during the Second Intifada, and has become priceless propaganda for terrorists around the world. But hey, what difference does that make, when such a “grand reporter” is under the (metaphorical) gun himself?

Read the entire piece to get the full flavor of the self-serving, amoral position taken by many of the French journalists Moutet interviewed. One of my favorites quotes is from Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist and expert on radical Islam who went on the record saying that despite Enderlin’s error:

…you can’t own up one, two years after the fact. It’s too late, it would mean you abdicate. It’s a nice job Charles [Enderlin] has, he’s nearing retirement age. I don’t think he wanted to rock the boat. You know Charles, he’s always been status-conscious; he likes being the France 2 man in Israel. Plus, these people behind their computers, they’re not real journalists, are they? You can’t come from your day job and blog at night and imagine you’ve become a reporter. It doesn’t work like that. There are standards.”

Standards, indeed. Camus ignores the fact that it’s exactly because of Enderlin’s violation of journalistic standards that he got into trouble in the first place.

But journalistic standards don’t seem to translate that well to French, if we can take the word of elderly lawyer Theo Klein, who mentioned that things had gotten so bad that Enderlin and his wife had actually thought of (sacre bleu!) emigrating to America. Moutet responded that Americans were actually rather big on correcting reporters’ mistakes.

Klein’s answer? “Surely not after so much time?”

The post 300+ French journalists can be very, very wrong: in al Durah/France2 trial, it’s the reputation, stupid appeared first on The New Neo.

Enderlin certainly can’t be happy about this one. Good.

The post Translation of the Karsenty decision appeared first on The New Neo.

And here, Karsenty adds that if France2 and Enderlin continue to assert their innocence, that “we will have victims of terror attacks that directly resulted from the [al-Dura] footage sue France 2.”

Good. I’d like to see some accountability for the purposeful (cameraman Talal) and/or the recklessly negligent (newsman Enderlin) promulgation of lies.

Remember that this suit was started by France2 and Enderlin, in an effort to clear their names. Now, as with the case of David Irving, their hubris may come back to haunt them.

And wouldn’t it be nice if this case could get the publicity the original footage of al Durah did?

The post More on the Karsenty win appeared first on The New Neo.

In addition, the three interviews at the PJ link, which contained the information about yesterday’s trial on which I based this entire post, are no longer there. I don’t know whether this has any significance or not, but, as I said, I’ll make any corrections as soon as I get new information. I’d be only too happy to learn that things are brighter than I had originally thought.]

Philippe Karsenty’s appeal in the defamation case against him launched by media giant France2 continued in Paris yesterday, with the stalwart Richard Landes reporting on the proceedings.

The issue is freedom of speech, which hardly seems to exist in France. And of course there is also the issue of the veracity of the press in the al Durah affair, since Karsenty had accused the government-controlled France2 and its correspondent Charles Enderlin of presenting falsehoods in their coverage of the story (please see Landes’ website Second Draft and his blog Augean Stables for more about the controversy regarding al Durah, and its significance).

It comes as absolutely no surprise that the Alice in Wonderland quality of the oxymoronic French justice system, with its wacky disregard for what we would consider basic rules of evidence and logic, continues unabated (if you want to look at more of my posts on the earlier trials in Paris, scroll down and click on them here).

Landes, who speaks French fluently, was in the courtroom for many hours yesterday listening to the arguments on both sides. He reports that the final remarks of the Avocat Générale, a court official who has no equivalent in this country but who functions as a supposedly independent quasi-judge who sums up the case and makes recommendations to the court, were not in Karsenty’s favor.

To recap what I learned last year when I visited France and attended an earlier trial on the same subject: the strong presumption of innocence is in favor of the journalist Enderlin and France2 itself. Although Karsenty is the defendant, accused of defaming Enderlin and France2 by saying they presented falsehoods in their coverage of al Durah, he is required to prove his innocence.

That means proving beyond a reasonable doubt that his charges are correct. This is nearly an impossibility, especially when the “narrative” on the subject has already been controlled by that very media coverage he has been attempting to refute.

Defamation law in this country is not only different, it is almost the opposite (details here). Especially when the allegedly defamed person is a public figure, the standard of proof required of the plaintiff (not the defendant, as in France) is almost impossibly high.

According to my observations and to Landes’ report, the French legal system appears to turn on very different principles than ours, and to emphasize such issues as a person’s reputation and standing in the community rather than the details of the case itself—what has been alleged, and whether it can be challenged by facts and evidence. And so the court proceedings are relatively short compared to the lengthier trials in this country, and testimony is not challenged with the depth and detail that would be considered standard in this country.

As Landes reports in his audio interviews at PJ, the France2 lawyer made heavy use of sarcasm and ridicule in his closing arguments, which seemed to be heavily loaded with ad hominem attacks on Karsenty. Although no one had mounted a serious challenge to the substance of what Karsenty had alleged about Enderlin and the al Durah tape, the France2 lawyer nevertheless compared Karsenty to a cross between a Holocaust denier and Thierry Meyssan, the author of the French book debunking the 9/11 attacks.

So the al Durah affair, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Enderlin and France2, has now taken on an aura of truth tantamount to the Holocaust, and any attempt to cast doubt on it makes one a David Irving.

Landes reports that the judge seemed to misunderstand the statements for which Karsenty was on trial, suggesting that Karsenty had alleged a knowing lie and broad conspiracy on the part of Enderlin, France2, and many others. Karsenty actually had never said Enderlin was knowlingly perpetrating a lie in his original coverage, just that he had been duped by his cameraman, who had fudged the tape and misrepresented what he saw (this is why the videotape has been such important evidence, since it vindicated Karsenty). Landes reports that the judge kept erroneously assuming Karsenty had made the absurd accusation that virtually everyone inolved in the al Durah story was in on the conspiracy; for example, the King of Jordan, who visited al Durah’s father in the hospital. Karsenty had never suggested such a thing, but this did not stop the court from thinking he had.

A lie gets more than halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, especially when that lie has been perpetrated by the official press of a major European country. And once that happens, it is canonized as truth, particularly if it is congruent when the politics of the day: poor suffering Palestinians at the hands of vicious racist Israelis.

It would be nice if we could rely on the veracity and integrity of the media. Unfortunately, we sometimes cannot; we must rely on the forum of public opinion to evaluate the truth of such news reports. To do so, it is necessary that they can be challenged by the public, and the arguments heard, without the chilling effect of such lawsuits. The legal system of the United States recognizes these basic facts; that of France does not.

My sense is that this difference reflects a deep cultural divergence that goes back a long way. Is it really any surprise that in France, protection of entrenched institutions such as France2 is considered more important than getting at the truth, or allowing officials of those institutions to be criticized? After all, France has a tradition of aristocracy, snobbery, and class that is quite different from ours.

People came to this country in part to get away from the stuffy rigidity of European society and its respect for those in power; to breathe the fresh air of freedom and to judge each other for what we do—not what we are, or what our ancestors were, or our stations in life. Of course, human nature being what it is, we have not been able to totally escape those things. Our legal system struggles mightily to counter them, however, and to level the playing field by its adherence to strict rules of evidence, and its act-oriented rather than person-oriented approach to justice and procedure.

Yes, there are inequities here, some of them caused by the fact that richer people can hire better lawyers. But the inequities are small compared to those of a country such as France. There, the deck is meant to be stacked in favor of entrenched, traditional, institutional interests rather than the individual, and freedom of speech is jettisoned in favor of protection of reputation.

The big loser is not Karsenty, or any other defendant in his position. It is truth. And when truth loses, we all lose.

The post Things don’t look good for Karsenty, French justice—or truth appeared first on The New Neo.

Landes’ post makes for sobering reading. It also contains the interesting tidbit that Enderlin casually mentioned that those famous photos of Arafat giving blood after 9/11 were staged, and that Enderlin and the press were well aware of that fact.

Enderlin doesn’t seem to be the least bit apologetic, or even aware that there might be something wrong with this. So much for journalistic ethics—“higher truth” and all that, you know.

Enderlin is a distinguished newsman, somewhat the equivalent of Dan Rather—only worse. He rivals Rather for pomposity and muddy thinking, but his shoddy reporting of the al Durah affair has caused harm far greater than anything Rather managed to perpetrate.

Landes has devoted a great deal of his considerable intelligence and energy to exposing the damage Enderlin has done through his promulgation of falsehoods connected with the al Durah story (see Landes’ website Second Draft and his blog Augean Stables). My guess is that Enderlin must regard Landes, his nemesis, as a sort of Inspector Javert (to use a French literary metaphor), a pitiless fanatic pursuing the well-meaning Enderlin to the ends of the earth in a cold-blooded effort at a false and ultimately doomed “justice.”

But to my way of thinking a more appropriate literary metaphor comes from Russian literature: Porfiry Petrovich, the psychologically astute investigator in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment, who:

…has a shrewd understanding of criminal psychology and is exquisitely aware of Raskolnikov’s [the perpetrator’s] mental state at every step along the way from the crime to the confession. He is Raskolnikov’s primary antagonist, and, though he appears only occasionally in the novel, his presence is constantly felt.

Yes. Although Enderlin has had only a few face-to-face encounters with Landes, no doubt Landes’ “presence is constantly felt.”

And that’s as it should be.

The post Landes confronts Enderlin at Harvard appeared first on The New Neo.