Is anyone else wondering where the media is? No, I know the newspapers are still grinding out the daily sausage and the anchor people are still hailing out to the reporters “at the scene”. I am talking about how deserted The Mohammed al Dura Affair that, once enticing and popular swimming pool of the media, has become. Where reporters, anchor people and foreign correspondents used to frolic, splash and gaily hold the gasping reputations of Israel and the Jewish people under water for hours at a time- and pull their bathing suits down and stab them repeatedly and mutilate their corpses? Now that the French courts have cleared Israel’s name and shown the whole thing to be a hoax, it is as quiet and desolate around the al Dura pool it is almost as though someone had floated a big ole economy sized Oh Henry bar out into the water.
Where are the defamers and slanderers now? How do they feel when they look back on that frenzy, when they were fairly quivering with orgiastic glee as they clattered out calumny on their keyboards or yodeled their voice-overs into the rising chorus of the media lynching of Israel in September and October of 2000.
This first and paradigmatic blood libel of the twenty-first century, the Muhammad al Dura affair was launched by the arch media megalomaniac and soulless dupe Charles Enderlin, but it was sustained and propagated by a legion of other egomaniacal progressive ax-grinders, a stampede of sincere but addled multiculturalists and a diverse assortment of media whores with a wider variety of unwholesome agendas than a naked antiwar street parade in Berkeley.
I’ve been going back to see what they were saying at the time and I will compile it here. Maybe some of the perpetrators will consider what they have done and take at least some of it back.
The byline-less article on the BBC website from October2, 2000 is where everyone else starts. You can always count of the BBC for the gold standard in snide, superior, “butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths” anti-Semitism/Zionism.
It’s pathetic enough that the article uncritically uses the wildest accusations and the most damning language taken from Enderlin’s report. For instance they repeat his allegation that the gunfire was so unremitting for 45 minutes that all the father (Jamal) could do was try to shelter Mohammed, implying that in 45 minutes there was never an opportunity to get out of the line of fire. Forty-five minutes is an eternity when you are firing high-powered military rifles, never mind trying to weather the fusillade. Then they call the boy, “a new martyr for the Palestinian cause”.
The most telling stuff, though, is the two quotes from the boy’s parents.
Little Mohammed’s Mom is quoted as saying, and the BBC quotes the father (allegedly lying in the hospital with life-threatening wounds) as saying his son died for "the sake of Al-Aqsa Mosque" The BBC is not this stupid.
Did an actual BBC reporter hear them say those things? Or was is a Palestinian official that passed on the thoughts of the faux-bereft mother and father?
You cannot tell me that the pointy-headed dupes at BBC saw nothing about these two quotes that would arouse suspicions that there was something odd, some kind of stage-managing, and manipulation going on here. Mere hours after her son goes off for the day on errands with his father and is allegedly cut down unexpectedly but intentionally by Israeli gunfire the mother says, “This was his sacrifice for our homeland, for Palestine”? What exactly does she mean, “his sacrifice”? Only if they did something heroic to save others, has anyone ever spoken of any of the office workers on 9/11 as having made “a sacrifice”. The firefighters and policemen made sacrifices. Surely, people in the towers who stayed to help others made sacrifices. The passengers on flight 93 made a sacrifice in their courageous uprising because, even though they would have died anyway, there is no question that they traded the last few minutes of their lives to protect the safety of others on the ground.
No, but they probably did feel OK about ignoring that suspicion. How do they rationalize it? First of all, they are in a very competitive business. This stuff is big news and the world wants to see it.
Then there is the fact that they know that if they say anything that The Palestinians do not like, they will find their sources of news dry up very quickly. They can’t even send their most supine toadies for the “Palestinian Cause” there anymore without them being attacked, kidnapped and otherwise intimidated. So they, like Charles Enderlin, have become dependant on Palestinian and other Islamist operatives masquerading as journalists. They know that the honest, democratic Israelis are boring and not a source for sensational news so they are stuck with being tools of the Fatah and Hamas propaganda machines.
How do they disguise pathetic gaffes and inconsistencies for their Palestinian controllers? Well, look at this story. For one thing, if you went to the link above, you will notice that they isolated the two quotes out of the mainstream of the story. They do not comment or elaborate. They certainly do not tell you how they got the quotes. There is no phrase like “His mother told BBC’s Alan Johnston” or “Sources at the hospital told BBC that the father said,” as you would expect to see in a story that was giving you all the information you need to understand the situation.
Then too, they can always fall back on the soft-racism of lowered expectations. That is to say the filthy, ragged back edge of the multicultural sword is that minorities and other cultures are held to reduced standards of humanity- always low enough so that they cannot fail the test. Do they intentionally kill innocent civilians? Do they endanger their own children by putting them in front of gunmen and hiding their missile launchers in their elementary schools? Oh, ah, that’s understandable. Do they publicly and vehemently call for the death of everyone else in the world that they don’t agree with? Yes, well, I’m sure that’s just a “cultural” thing I’m sure they don’t mean it the way it sounds. Do they teach their children that everyone that does not worship the exact same God in the exact same way is not human- a pig- a monkey- a dog? Hmmm, okay, that’s not ideal but they have a history of treating their slaves and sub-humans with mercy- most of the time, uh well a lot of the time, well, alright… sometimes.
At any rate, it does not seem likely to me that the BBC got the quote directly from the parents. If they did, all the sadder for the parents. Clearly, if a mother and father say the exact same insensitive crap about the (faked and/or staged) death of their son with identical political bravado, it rings no alarm in the minds of anyone and the very politically correct and even more venal BBC.
Coming next: Cynthia Cotts- the least accurate sentence I have yet discovered in a written article about al Dura.
Showing posts with label mohamed al dura. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mohamed al dura. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Yellow Press is Alive and Well and Living in France
Growing up in Liberal Massachusetts, I had been taught that Yellow Press was a right wing device that was invented for arousal and exploitation of the basest emotions in the populace. As I was helping Richard Landes prepare the France2/Enderlin petition (if you have not signed it and forwarded it to everyone you know, please do so!) I made a very interesting discovery.
As the petition (see the preceding two posts) sails past thirty six hundred signatures this morning, I have been thinking about something Charles Enderlin wrote in a January 27, 2005 letter to the French newspaper Le Figaro. He was writing in response to an editorial, written by Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte that had appeared in the paper two days before. Jeambar and Leconte were among the hand-picked group of journalists that had been allowed to seen the imprisoned rushes. In their editorial they had debunked Enderlin’s implication that he was protecting the world from seeing the boy’s “unbearable” death agony when he edited the footage for broadcast. In fact, Jeambar and Leconte wrote that there was no such “unbearable” footage and that there was not even any clear proof that the boy was dead or, even shot.
Enderlin replied by reiterating his claim that the scenes he had cut were unbearable and that they showed that the boy was dead. Then he says something very odd and revealingly irrelevant. He writes, “Furthermore, for me, the image corresponded not only to the reality of the situation in Gaza but also to that in the West Bank. The Israeli army responded to the Palestinian uprising with massive firing of live bullets.”
This remark is a tip-off that even Enderlin himself is aware that his false accusation that the IDF shot the boy in cold blooded murder is indefensible (even though he is trying his best to defend it by hiding the evidence, stonewalling and rationalization). More importantly, though, it revels the prototypical attitude of Yellow Journalism.
I remember studying the Spanish American War when I was in High School and learning about how the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers used the explosion on the battleship Maine to inflame the passions of the nation. I remember too having it drummed into me that it was the tone of the headlines, the nationalism and the strident calls for revenge that made that episode a shameful exercise in jingoism and propaganda. It is only now, contemplating all of that in the light of the al Durah affair and, specifically, in reading Enderlin’s fatuous justification for his accusations that the real shame of Yellow Journalism has become plain to me. Ringing prose, loyalty to one’s country and defiant headlines are not Yellow Press. Yellow press is the subtle, decadent mixture of self-importance and prejudice that leads a journalist to decide that he knows what facts people need to know and what facts are unimportant- even if it means that he reports incorrect facts and hides actual ones.
Yellow Press was born as an outgrowth of Joseph Pulitzer’s vision as a publisher that, in contrast to the generally accepted ideal of impartial journalistic integrity, journalism should be used to as a vehicle of social change. As Wikipedia has it “Pulitzer believed that newspapers were public institutions with a duty to improve society, and he put (his newspaper) The World in the service of social reform.” Of course social reform is one of the early code words for what we today call progressivism and which is, in reality prototypical socialism. Pulitzer was then, as the newspaper establishment in the U.S. is still (with some exceptions) a left-leaning, self-righteous band of socialistic sympathisers.
The New York Times expressed this "social reform at the cost of truth" doctrine of activist journalism best when, in an editorial about the use of faked documents by Dan Rather, that, "Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate". Of course the Times was writing in support of Rather and his fatwah asserting the "accuracy" of the faked memos. Americans proved, once again, that we have the freest and most resilient people and government on earth when the blogosphere exposed this travesty and the outcry resulted in the sacking of Rather. Dan Rather was a far more potent media icon here than Enderlin ever was in France so one is left to conclude that it must be an indication of the endemic anti-Semitism and residual leftist western self-hatred that Enderlin and France2 are allowed to hide within and even take aggressive action (as in the law suit against Philippe Karsenty) under the protection of the French government and legal system.
The problem, then, with Yellow Journalism is not the strength of the prose but the intent of the writer. The yellow tinge comes from its purposeful (mis)use of evidence to make points and to influence opinions. It was not the headlines that were the root of the problem, it was the underlying assumptions that led to their being used to elevate lies and misrepresentations to the status of Assumed Truths.
So, it turns out that the last little “justification” that he “tosses off” betrays the corrosive bigotry and prejudice that underlies the blood libel he still defends. Enderlin still believes that he is the sole judge and jury of what Israel was doing in response to the gathering Intifada, that from the comfort of his hotel room and Bureau Chief’s office in Jerusalem, he was entitled to pronounce that, even if this instance was a fake, the accusation against the IDF was deserved because of other, even more imaginary incidents of which he had even less evidence and information. He has, in this simple rationalization, revealed that he is not a journalist but a propagandist of the most corrupt and insidious kind.
For the damage he has done to the profession of journalism alone he deserves to be exposed and the management of France2 must be asked to account for their dereliction in allowing their reputation and facilities to be used and depleted in this way. The release of the rushes in question will begin that process of exposure and accountability.
If you add to the damage Enderlin and France2 have done to journalistic standards, the spurious law suit against Karsenty, the terrible toll of lives lost, terror inspired and savagery rationalized by those false accusations, it is imperative that they be held responsible for, at the very least, an apology and an attempt to reverse some of the effects of this malfeasance.
Once the rushes are released and evaluated, if they show what Jeambar and Leconte say they show and assuming that France has laws against the incitement to violence and libel, there should be legal steps taken to punish Enderlin and France2. The maximum punishment (The incitement to violence, bigotry and terror that Enderlin and France2 have engaged in bear a very strong resemblance to Hate Crimes as defined by French Law. This is from Wikipedia: “In 2003, France enacted penalty-enhancement hate crime laws for crimes motivated by bias against the victim's actual or perceived ethnicity, nation, race, religion, or sexual orientation.”) should be sought, not just because of the grievous results of the al Durah blood libel but also to serve as an example and a deterrent to warn all other journalists that changing facts and fabricating stories to achieve political ends cannot and will not be tolerated.
As the petition (see the preceding two posts) sails past thirty six hundred signatures this morning, I have been thinking about something Charles Enderlin wrote in a January 27, 2005 letter to the French newspaper Le Figaro. He was writing in response to an editorial, written by Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte that had appeared in the paper two days before. Jeambar and Leconte were among the hand-picked group of journalists that had been allowed to seen the imprisoned rushes. In their editorial they had debunked Enderlin’s implication that he was protecting the world from seeing the boy’s “unbearable” death agony when he edited the footage for broadcast. In fact, Jeambar and Leconte wrote that there was no such “unbearable” footage and that there was not even any clear proof that the boy was dead or, even shot.
Enderlin replied by reiterating his claim that the scenes he had cut were unbearable and that they showed that the boy was dead. Then he says something very odd and revealingly irrelevant. He writes, “Furthermore, for me, the image corresponded not only to the reality of the situation in Gaza but also to that in the West Bank. The Israeli army responded to the Palestinian uprising with massive firing of live bullets.”
This remark is a tip-off that even Enderlin himself is aware that his false accusation that the IDF shot the boy in cold blooded murder is indefensible (even though he is trying his best to defend it by hiding the evidence, stonewalling and rationalization). More importantly, though, it revels the prototypical attitude of Yellow Journalism.
I remember studying the Spanish American War when I was in High School and learning about how the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers used the explosion on the battleship Maine to inflame the passions of the nation. I remember too having it drummed into me that it was the tone of the headlines, the nationalism and the strident calls for revenge that made that episode a shameful exercise in jingoism and propaganda. It is only now, contemplating all of that in the light of the al Durah affair and, specifically, in reading Enderlin’s fatuous justification for his accusations that the real shame of Yellow Journalism has become plain to me. Ringing prose, loyalty to one’s country and defiant headlines are not Yellow Press. Yellow press is the subtle, decadent mixture of self-importance and prejudice that leads a journalist to decide that he knows what facts people need to know and what facts are unimportant- even if it means that he reports incorrect facts and hides actual ones.
Yellow Press was born as an outgrowth of Joseph Pulitzer’s vision as a publisher that, in contrast to the generally accepted ideal of impartial journalistic integrity, journalism should be used to as a vehicle of social change. As Wikipedia has it “Pulitzer believed that newspapers were public institutions with a duty to improve society, and he put (his newspaper) The World in the service of social reform.” Of course social reform is one of the early code words for what we today call progressivism and which is, in reality prototypical socialism. Pulitzer was then, as the newspaper establishment in the U.S. is still (with some exceptions) a left-leaning, self-righteous band of socialistic sympathisers.
The New York Times expressed this "social reform at the cost of truth" doctrine of activist journalism best when, in an editorial about the use of faked documents by Dan Rather, that, "Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate". Of course the Times was writing in support of Rather and his fatwah asserting the "accuracy" of the faked memos. Americans proved, once again, that we have the freest and most resilient people and government on earth when the blogosphere exposed this travesty and the outcry resulted in the sacking of Rather. Dan Rather was a far more potent media icon here than Enderlin ever was in France so one is left to conclude that it must be an indication of the endemic anti-Semitism and residual leftist western self-hatred that Enderlin and France2 are allowed to hide within and even take aggressive action (as in the law suit against Philippe Karsenty) under the protection of the French government and legal system.
The problem, then, with Yellow Journalism is not the strength of the prose but the intent of the writer. The yellow tinge comes from its purposeful (mis)use of evidence to make points and to influence opinions. It was not the headlines that were the root of the problem, it was the underlying assumptions that led to their being used to elevate lies and misrepresentations to the status of Assumed Truths.
So, it turns out that the last little “justification” that he “tosses off” betrays the corrosive bigotry and prejudice that underlies the blood libel he still defends. Enderlin still believes that he is the sole judge and jury of what Israel was doing in response to the gathering Intifada, that from the comfort of his hotel room and Bureau Chief’s office in Jerusalem, he was entitled to pronounce that, even if this instance was a fake, the accusation against the IDF was deserved because of other, even more imaginary incidents of which he had even less evidence and information. He has, in this simple rationalization, revealed that he is not a journalist but a propagandist of the most corrupt and insidious kind.
For the damage he has done to the profession of journalism alone he deserves to be exposed and the management of France2 must be asked to account for their dereliction in allowing their reputation and facilities to be used and depleted in this way. The release of the rushes in question will begin that process of exposure and accountability.
If you add to the damage Enderlin and France2 have done to journalistic standards, the spurious law suit against Karsenty, the terrible toll of lives lost, terror inspired and savagery rationalized by those false accusations, it is imperative that they be held responsible for, at the very least, an apology and an attempt to reverse some of the effects of this malfeasance.
Once the rushes are released and evaluated, if they show what Jeambar and Leconte say they show and assuming that France has laws against the incitement to violence and libel, there should be legal steps taken to punish Enderlin and France2. The maximum punishment (The incitement to violence, bigotry and terror that Enderlin and France2 have engaged in bear a very strong resemblance to Hate Crimes as defined by French Law. This is from Wikipedia: “In 2003, France enacted penalty-enhancement hate crime laws for crimes motivated by bias against the victim's actual or perceived ethnicity, nation, race, religion, or sexual orientation.”) should be sought, not just because of the grievous results of the al Durah blood libel but also to serve as an example and a deterrent to warn all other journalists that changing facts and fabricating stories to achieve political ends cannot and will not be tolerated.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
The Hammy Awards- A Proposal
Here is an idea I have been toying with for some time- I posted as a comment at Augean Stables yesterday. What do you think?
The “Hammy” Awards
The name of the awards derives from MoHAMed the first name of the 9-year-old boy whose faked death scene was the defining image that led up to the "Al Aqsa" intifada. It also has the added implication that comes along with the practice of calling hack actors "Hams".
It is high time we step back and admit that we have to hand it to the the Islamists, the left and, in particular, the Palestinians. When the staged film clip of Mohamed al-Dura’s faked death was allowed to burn itself into the consciousness of the world, it was the crowning triumph of many long years of an increasingly bold-faced effort that uses the mainstream news media to slander and libel the Jewish State. It should have then been apparent to Jews all over the world that we are losing the media war. The more we are confronted with lies and rage from the “Arab Street” the more we stiffen up and try to be reasonable. The result is that we look like the poor dumb kid in the schoolyard whose only answers are “I didn’t do it” or “He hit me first”. It doesn’t matter that we are telling the truth- those answers don’t fly in the schoolyard and they don’t fly in the mass media either.
As American Jews and Israelis we have to admit that we are not “good copy. We Jews in general and Israelis in particular, grimly pursue ethics and truthfulness. We are dogged researchers and careful about our language. We have a touching but boring faith that being right and dignified will “win out”. We have been repeatedly dumbfounded that we are ignored and even ridiculed.
Its not just Jews who don’t get it. Michael Moore has been able to get away with all kinds of fraud disguised as documentary for decades. He is just beginning to get a little of his own treatment.
We just don’t get it. Most westerners and, especially, Jews don’t think intimidation and deception are the way to win arguments. We despise those who threaten people’s lives (let alone kill them) or riot in the streets when someone says something we don’t like, we answer them with reason, logic and a sincere expectation that if we do a good enough job at investigating and explaining the situation, the truth will win out. Dull, dull, dull. It just doesn’t play well for the news cameras. Apparently, while we weren’t paying attention, the court of world opinion has become the equivalent of the audience of the Jerry Springer Show where the crowd cheers most for the loudest, most obscene threats, the most violent lunges and the wildest haymakers.
That’s why we need to take a moment to recognize how out-classed we have been in the battle for world opinion. It’s not that we are going to abandon our love of truth and the pursuit of justice, it’s just that we have to find a way to make our side of the story both appealing and understandable. We need to repackage it in a “sound bite”.
By acknowledging the success of the other side’s tactics by instituting the Hammy Awards we:
1. Condense our message into a bumper sticker that is more attractive and eloquent than “they are liars and fakers”.
2. Put them on the defensive- for once the will not be “taking credit” for attacks on civilians or accusing anybody of anything.
3. Put aside our serious faces and our dogged pursuit of justice aside for one day and showcase the Jewish sense of humor that the world has loved in so many Jewish comedians, artists and writers. This is a lot more appealing than the usual humorless Israeli generals and politicians who are the traditional spokespeople. It would be great if we could get some well-known Jewish comedians to host the presentations- that would assure media coverage.
4. Embarrass the News Agencies and Media outlets and put them on notice that we can do more than just complain. We can convincingly impugn their reputations in a way the world will pay attention to if they allow the propaganda machine to use them.
5. Raise the indignation of the intelligent News Consumer who will, no matter what their feelings about Israel will be angry at having been fooled by the media’s carelessness and propagation of such transparent fakery.
The awards could be given in various categories of false news. Possible categories might include: Spurious Massacres, Faked Civilian Target Damage, Photoshop Tampering and “Trick Photography”, Untrue War Crime Accusations and Stage Managed Media Events.
Each award could be given to recipients in two divisions one for the originators (be they Islamic agents or biased Nongovernmental Agencies) and one for the complicit media stooges. So, for instance, in the Spurious Massacre category there will be two recipients, one for the fabricator or Non-Governmental Organization official who did the most to create the impression that it existed and the other for the Mainstream Media stooge who was most responsible for it becoming a reality in the eyes of World Opinion.
How about it? Anybody out there have any muscle or lucre to put behind this idea?
The “Hammy” Awards
The name of the awards derives from MoHAMed the first name of the 9-year-old boy whose faked death scene was the defining image that led up to the "Al Aqsa" intifada. It also has the added implication that comes along with the practice of calling hack actors "Hams".
It is high time we step back and admit that we have to hand it to the the Islamists, the left and, in particular, the Palestinians. When the staged film clip of Mohamed al-Dura’s faked death was allowed to burn itself into the consciousness of the world, it was the crowning triumph of many long years of an increasingly bold-faced effort that uses the mainstream news media to slander and libel the Jewish State. It should have then been apparent to Jews all over the world that we are losing the media war. The more we are confronted with lies and rage from the “Arab Street” the more we stiffen up and try to be reasonable. The result is that we look like the poor dumb kid in the schoolyard whose only answers are “I didn’t do it” or “He hit me first”. It doesn’t matter that we are telling the truth- those answers don’t fly in the schoolyard and they don’t fly in the mass media either.
As American Jews and Israelis we have to admit that we are not “good copy. We Jews in general and Israelis in particular, grimly pursue ethics and truthfulness. We are dogged researchers and careful about our language. We have a touching but boring faith that being right and dignified will “win out”. We have been repeatedly dumbfounded that we are ignored and even ridiculed.
Its not just Jews who don’t get it. Michael Moore has been able to get away with all kinds of fraud disguised as documentary for decades. He is just beginning to get a little of his own treatment.
We just don’t get it. Most westerners and, especially, Jews don’t think intimidation and deception are the way to win arguments. We despise those who threaten people’s lives (let alone kill them) or riot in the streets when someone says something we don’t like, we answer them with reason, logic and a sincere expectation that if we do a good enough job at investigating and explaining the situation, the truth will win out. Dull, dull, dull. It just doesn’t play well for the news cameras. Apparently, while we weren’t paying attention, the court of world opinion has become the equivalent of the audience of the Jerry Springer Show where the crowd cheers most for the loudest, most obscene threats, the most violent lunges and the wildest haymakers.
That’s why we need to take a moment to recognize how out-classed we have been in the battle for world opinion. It’s not that we are going to abandon our love of truth and the pursuit of justice, it’s just that we have to find a way to make our side of the story both appealing and understandable. We need to repackage it in a “sound bite”.
By acknowledging the success of the other side’s tactics by instituting the Hammy Awards we:
1. Condense our message into a bumper sticker that is more attractive and eloquent than “they are liars and fakers”.
2. Put them on the defensive- for once the will not be “taking credit” for attacks on civilians or accusing anybody of anything.
3. Put aside our serious faces and our dogged pursuit of justice aside for one day and showcase the Jewish sense of humor that the world has loved in so many Jewish comedians, artists and writers. This is a lot more appealing than the usual humorless Israeli generals and politicians who are the traditional spokespeople. It would be great if we could get some well-known Jewish comedians to host the presentations- that would assure media coverage.
4. Embarrass the News Agencies and Media outlets and put them on notice that we can do more than just complain. We can convincingly impugn their reputations in a way the world will pay attention to if they allow the propaganda machine to use them.
5. Raise the indignation of the intelligent News Consumer who will, no matter what their feelings about Israel will be angry at having been fooled by the media’s carelessness and propagation of such transparent fakery.
The awards could be given in various categories of false news. Possible categories might include: Spurious Massacres, Faked Civilian Target Damage, Photoshop Tampering and “Trick Photography”, Untrue War Crime Accusations and Stage Managed Media Events.
Each award could be given to recipients in two divisions one for the originators (be they Islamic agents or biased Nongovernmental Agencies) and one for the complicit media stooges. So, for instance, in the Spurious Massacre category there will be two recipients, one for the fabricator or Non-Governmental Organization official who did the most to create the impression that it existed and the other for the Mainstream Media stooge who was most responsible for it becoming a reality in the eyes of World Opinion.
How about it? Anybody out there have any muscle or lucre to put behind this idea?
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