L'affaire Al-dura

I want to tell you about a forgery. The forgers intended to incite hatred against Jews and the state of Israel and to a great extent, they have succeeded. The forgery is a 55-second film clip that purports to show the shooting death of a 12-year-old boy at a Gaza crossroads after a Palestinian irregular attack on an Israeli blockhouse. The clip was broadcast on France's TV 2 on Sept. 30, 2000, and narrated by one of France's best known television journalists, Charles Enderlin.

The boy--his name given as Mohammad al-Dura--immediately became a global symbol of Israeli brutality, a Palestinian pieta. When a Palestinian mob ripped apart the bodies of two Israeli reservists in October, 2000, they did so to chants of "Revenge for the blood of al-Dura!" In the Islamic world, the shooting of al-Dura has become the archetypical Israeli atrocity, for which no reprisal can be too horrific. Al-Dura's prone body appears in rock videos, in television sermons, even on an Egyptian postage stamp.

Yet evidence has been gathering for years that the al-Dura shooting was entirely staged.

¥ The 55-seconds are not a continuous sequence, but are made up of six distinct pieces, crudely spliced together.

¥ There is no shot of the boy actually being hit, nor is there any sign of blood. Nor does the father make any move toward his son.

¥ The crowd in the background cries out that the boy is dead before he falls over. Although the boy was supposed to have been hit in the stomach, his hands are shown covering his eyes.

¥ Video of the incident taken by other photographers shows passersby walking unconcernedly between the crouching al-Duras and the Israeli post from which the bullets were supposedly fired.

¥ Video taken by other photographers shows a cameraman crouching behind the man and boy.

¥ Although TV2 claims to have 27 minutes of raw footage of the shooting, it has persistently refused to make that footage available to the public. Even now, with the matter in litigation, TV2 has failed to provide the courts with the raw material from which its broadcast clip was assembled.

An American academic, Richard Landes, a professor of medieval history at Boston University, has worked for years to expose the fraud. He has collected his documentary evidence at the two sites: print material at TheAugeanStables.com and video critique at www.seconddraft.org. I urge you to visit his site and watch his evidence: it is, as the lawyers say, dispositive. Yet perhaps the most scathing critic of the Enderlin clip is Charles Enderlin himself.

Although Enderlin narrated and vouched for the Dura clip, he himself was nowhere near the action. He was in Ramallah that day, reporting from the West Bank. The sequence was produced by a freelance Palestinian cameraman, Talal Abu-Rahma.

In 2003, Landes persuaded Enderlin to show him some of the raw footage recorded by Abu-Rahma on the fatal day.

An Israeli cameraman working for France2 who was watching the film with me and Enderlin at the time, snickered at one point. When I asked him why, he said, "because it looks so fake." To which Enderlin responded, "Oh, they do that all the time. It's their cultural style. They exaggerate."

But Rahma was not exaggerating. He knew exactly what he was doing. Accepting an award in Morocco in 2001 for his work, he told a reporter: "I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people." Perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps out of laziness, perhaps out of vanity, Enderlin has put his credibility at the service of Rahma's forgery.

Last year, when a French media critic named Serge Karsenty publicly condemned the broadcast, Enderlin sued him for defamation. Enderlin won, in large part because French president Jacques Chirac directly intervened in the case to testify to Enderlin's character.

The case was appealed, and last week the new proceedings opened in a Paris courtroom.

It is important to remember that Enderlin is the plaintiff here. It is Enderlin who is trying to use the courts to silence his critics. And behind Enderlin is France's state broadcaster--and a former French president.

It is hard not to see parallels to another famous forgery case that also implicated much of the upper reaches of the French government--the Dreyfus Affair. Then too, much of the French government connived in an anti-Semitic forgery. Then too, the forgers used the law of defamation to try to silence their leading critic, Emile Zola.

Of course, some things have changed in the past century. Enderlin is himself Jewish.

You have to give contemporary anti-Semitism credit at least for this. It is an equal-opportunity employer, willing to employ people of all races and backgrounds to defame Jews and the Jewish state.