NIDRA POLLER ON CHARLES ENDERLIN AND THE AL DURA LIBEL
Enderlin, Charles. Un enfant est mort [a child is dead] / Netzarim, 30 September 2000. Paris: Don Quichotte éditions [1] , October 2010. 200 pages, 18€
On the tenth anniversary of the dramatic al Dura news broadcast, Charles Enderlin, Jerusalem correspondent of state-owned France 2 TV, has published his defense of the controversial video broadcast hours after the alleged shooting “from the Israeli position” of a Palestinian child and his father at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000. “The boy is dead,” announced Enderlin in voice-over, “and his father is critically wounded.” Mohamed al Dura instantly became the poster boy of the “Al Aqsa Intifada” and, simultaneously, the focus of controversy. Enderlin is blamed by some for hastily relaying the unfounded accusation that Israeli soldiers intentionally shot a Palestinian child. Others maintain that the French-Israeli journalist passed off a crudely staged Palestinian fabrication as a piece of legitimate journalism.
Presenting himself as the victim of a growing number of believers in a “Palestinian conspiracy theory,” monsieur Enderlin has unwittingly crafted a springboard text that exposes his own twisted arguments and questionable motives. The tone is petty, petulant, and disingenuous. He usurps the nobility of his adversaries by citing, in an epigraph, Jean Jaurès in praise of the search for the truth and the courage to tell it. Blithely declining responsibility for the exploitation of the al Dura “murder” by extremists (e.g. the beheading of Daniel Pearl), the France 2 journalist blames his critics for everything from affronts and persecution-for example, the unfair treatment of his daughter when she passed her baccalauréat orals– to death threats against him and his family.
The argument can be summarized as follows:
The al Dura broadcast is impeccable news reporting. The two eyewitnesses–France 2 cameraman Talal Abu Rahma and the aggrieved father, Jamal al Dura-are above suspicion. Minor contradictions in their testimony or in the video report should be attributed to the grueling conditions of armed conflict. There is no legitimate reason to criticize the report. Consequently, anyone who expresses doubts about its authenticity is guilty of disgraceful partisan motivations or stupid belief in conspiracy theories. Talal, Jamal, Palestinian authorities and medical personnel have always told the truth about the incident. The Israeli army–systematically guilty of bungled operations and disproportionate violence against Palestinian protestors–issues cynical communiqués to cover up its misdeeds. Yasser Arafat was unjustly blamed for the failure of the July 2000 Camp David negotiations. The Intifada was a spontaneous popular uprising, not a premeditated coordinated PA attack against Israel. Media that publish articles sympathetic to the “conspiracy theory” are right-wing, neo-conservative, opposed to peace, and sympathetic to the “colonization movement.” Doubts about the al Dura video are deliberately fabricated by “communitarian” Jews to undermine the reputation of Charles Enderlin whose objective reporting challenges their one-sided parochial view of the conflict. These Jews want to prove the Palestinians are not partners for peace, so they claim the al Dura scene was staged to incite Palestinian violence. None of the experts cited by critics of the al Dura report are qualified; only the specialists cited by Charles Enderlin are worthy of the title. Many analysts have reached conclusions about the controversial report without giving Enderlin, Abu Rahma, or Jamal al Dura the last word. Accusations of media bias against Israel are unfounded. Israel has only itself to blame for its ever worsening image.
As the bodies of Palestinian victims of “disproportionate Israeli force,” pile up from page to page, Charles Enderlin shoots down his critics with a barrage of insults. Lesser known targets of his ire are dismissed as crackpots spewing nonsense on “communitarian” websites of ill repute, while high profile intellectuals, diplomats, scientists, and journalists are roundly scolded for swallowing the conspiracy theory. Commentary, Atlantic Monthly, Jeune Afrique, the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Weekly Standard, and Fox News are thrown onto the garbage heap along with online outlets such as Metula News Agency, Guysen Israel News, AtlasShrugs, FrontPage Magazine … And there’s the rub!
Charles Enderlin doesn’t seem to realize that the names, numbers, and prestige are stacking up against him. And if there’s a conspiracy theorist in the lot, it is monsieur Enderlin himself. The writers, thinkers, and officials he discredits are not united in an ignoble campaign to destroy Charles Enderlin’s reputation; they are inspired by the honest conviction, based on ample evidence, that the al Dura news report is flawed or an outright fabrication. He dismisses us (I am proud to be included) as naïvely misled by material we can’t understand (raw footage shot by other cameramen on that fateful day) misinterpreted by dubious sources and analyzed with ulterior motives. But his own fragile arguments are built on shaky testimony from two sources-Talal Abu Rahma and Jamal al Dura-contradicted by doctors at Shifa Hospital, and undermined by ludicrous statements from three or four journalists allegedly present at Netzarim Junction that day.
Un enfant est mort is the work of a nose-to-the-grindstone journalist who lacks the inner voice of a writer who hears his own words, revises, refines, and shapes a coherent whole. Monsieur Enderlin, who pretends he has [p. 123-4]: “… no problem with critics who wonder what happened that day at Netzarim. But we have been insulted, we’ve been called liars,” insults everyone who dares to disagree with him.
Repeatedly showing himself to be an intellectual lightweight, he throws verbal rocks at his critics, haughtily discredits their experts, and then gives another hoax, the June 2006 Gaza Beach “massacre,” as an example of Israeli trickery. The army investigation that concluded Israel was not responsible for the attack, he says, was invalidated by an-unnamed– Human Rights Watch expert… who happens to be Mark Galasco, recently unmasked as an expert collector of Nazi memorabilia. The France 2 journalist, borrowing from a shoddy Canal + (French pay to view channel) “documentary,” gives the “elders of Zion” treatment to a symposium on the theme of blood libel organized by a distinguished academic.
Unable to explain away the facts attested by Dr Yehuda David, who operated on Jamal in 1994, monsieur Enderlin scolds the surgeon for revealing private medical records. Are we, then, to swallow garbled explanations from doctors at Shifa Hospital and conclude that Dr. David is lying when he testifies that Jamal al Dura’s scars were inflicted when he was slashed and stabbed attacked in Gaza in 1992 and not, as he now claims, by Israeli gunfire in September 2000?
Un enfant est mort is the latest in a series of retellings of an al Dura tale elaborated to accompany the incident and repeatedly revised over the years. Here, as in earlier attempts, the pseudo-elucidation of the facts chokes on two bones: duration and intention. Jamal and Talal repeatedly insist on a 45-minute duration for the alleged ordeal, whereas the total al Dura footage runs for approximately 52 seconds. This leaves a credibility deficit of approximately 2648 seconds between the 45 minutes that measure the cruelty of Israeli soldiers relentlessly firing on a sitting target and the 52 seconds of furtive images of the man and the boy. Here is how Enderlin explains the curious absence of raw footage of the actual al Dura scene:
[p.55] “During the 45-minute crossfire [sic]…Talal did not film continuously; as a good news cameraman he filmed Jamal and Mohamed al Dura in 5 takes of nine to twenty-nine seconds, at intervals impossible to determine. He was at the end of a tape and his battery was wearing out.”
The astute cameraman, who knew from the instant he spotted the man and boy cringing against a wall that he had to make his battery last until the end of a long sequence, missed every bullet that allegedly hit the victims, including the final fatal shot. He could not film the twenty-minute (or, in another version, one-hour) agonizing wait before an ambulance could evacuate the wounded…because he was changing the battery. Is this why he felt the necessity to testify under oath, three days after the incident, to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights? Israeli soldiers, he declared, murdered the boy and wounded the father intentionally, in cold blood. After the five-minute crossfire, Israelis fired directly at the boy and man for 45 minutes without interruption, says Abu Rahma, specifying that he filmed 27 minutes of the fusillade. As an experienced war photographer he could attest the Israeli outpost was the only position from which the boy and the man could be hit.
For years Charles Enderlin and his hierarchy have been trying to smudge this troublesome testimony. Monsieur Enderlin has no qualms today about omitting the “intentional, in cold blood” parts and pretending the cameraman simply said he thought the gunfire came from the Israeli position. How often do experienced war photographers supplement their reports with testimony under oath?
Having swept a mountain of incongruities under the rug, Charles Enderlin explains [p.197] that certain people are trying to “sink” him because he contradicts official propaganda that demonizes Yasser Arafat and blames him for refusing Ehud Barak’s so-called generous offer of a Palestinian State at Camp David in July 2000. Israeli officials, he claims–against all evidence–try to discredit the al Dura report because it shows them as they are: trigger happy, dishonest, and careless with Palestinian lives. Partisan Jews, he says, embarrassed by the misdeeds of the Israeli army, moan and groan about so-called biased media coverage of the conflict, and raise the specter of “blood libel” in order to accuse Europe and its media of anti-Semitism.
Why, after the exposure of so many manipulative media fakes-Lebanese fauxtography, the Jenin massacre, the Gaza blackout-would a seasoned journalist, backed by his hierarchy, colleagues, and government (Charles Enderlin was awarded the Légion d’honneur this summer) persist in defending a flawed news report that should never have been broadcast? Why do so many people still believe the report is authentic, while still others, half-heartedly admitting the scene is a fake, defend it “because Israeli soldiers killed so many children off camera?”
“This factual sober narrative is written in the style of the major investigations that have earned Charles Enderlin, here both actor and witness, a reputation as an internationally acclaimed specialist of the Israel-Palestine conflict.” This is how the book jacket packages the muddle of discrepancies, loose ends, ad hominem attacks, and distortions of a self-serving document that unwittingly reveals the key to the al Dura hoax.
The first clue is in the title: Un enfant est mort, a child is dead, the unmitigated pathos of a generic universal tragedy divorced from circumstances. A child is dead. Don’t ask questions. React with emotion to the emotional blow. How do we know Mohamed al Dura was shot by Israeli soldiers that day? We know because his death is so terrible. Is his father telling the truth? How could he not be trustworthy? Look at his terror, his desperation, his grief. Did Charles Enderlin, perhaps…maybe…it does happen…make a mistake? Was he fooled by his cameraman? Impossible. He’s internationally acclaimed.
The “cold-blooded murder of Mohamed al Dura” is the flimsiest and, at the same time, the most damning indictment of Israel and the Jews since the Shoah. Charles Enderlin claims that we want to demolish the al Dura news report because it illustrates and confirms an objective analysis of Israel’s responsibility for prolonging and intensifying the conflict. The opposite is true. The overarching narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict is elaborated along the same principles as the al Dura blood libel. The Oslo Peace Process, the 2006 Hizbullah war, the Cast Lead operation, the Mavi Marmara incident, the construction of homes for Jewish residents of disputed territories, all the clashes, incidents, decisions, and background are reported with the same disregard for facts and appeal to emotion that marks the al Dura “death scene.”
Recognition that the al Dura news report does not respect the minimum standards of free-world journalism could be the first step in restoring rational, factual, enlightened analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its connection to a worldwide conflict with Islamic jihad. This is why some of us are devoted to exposing the hoax, and others cannot relinquish it.
[1] Don Quichotte is a small publisher integrated into the prestigious éditions du Seuil
Nidra Poller (BA U of Wisconsin, MA Johns Hopkins University), a former member of the SPME board, has published numerous articles on the al Dura affair. Further publications on this subject are in preparation, for publication in JPSR, the Middle East Quarterly, and other outlets in the coming months.
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