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Trying to convince Zionists’ critics that Israel’s conflict with her neighbors is not about land, borders, refugees or the status of Jerusalem, but, rather about the immutable malice, and annihilationist antisemitism, of Islamist terrorist groups’ which seek the Jewish state’s destruction is often a fool’s errand.
Many in the West are convinced that such a suggestion – that the malice of a group, people or nation can be endemic and not dictated by the action of the target of such enmity – denotes a form of racism on behalf of those making the accusations.
Such folks are therefore not going to be convinced by even the most irrefutable evidence that there are some in the world who don’t share their liberal assumptions and good will.
This dynamic – what Richard Landes refers to as Liberal Cognitive Egocentricsm – is certainly the most serious intellectual challenge Israel faces in seeking Western support to fight back hard against movements such as Hamas.
As such, I was wondering how Israel’s Western presumably liberal critics (yet alone their not so liberal critics) would respond to Hamas’s recent boasting about the effectiveness of their attacks against “Zionists” over the years, in the context of a celebration in Gaza marking their 24th anniversary.
From the Hamas website:
Al Qassam website- Gaza- Ezzedeen Al Qassam Brigades (E.Q.B), the armed wing of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas released on Wednesday morning a new military stats on the occasion of the 24th anniversary of Hamas founding.
The brigades (E.Q.B) said in an official stat released by its Information Office that it has mourned 1848 martyrs from its militants during the past 24 years, since Hamas foundation.
E.Q.B said in its military statement that it has targeted the Zionist occupation entity with 11093 homemade projectiles and mortars, while it has managed to kill 1365 Zionist soldiers and injuring 6411 others since the foundation of the Hamas movement.
The brigades added that total number of the Jihadist operations conducted by its militants since the establishment of the movement reached to 1117, 87 were martyrdom operations, however, the number of the Zionist soldiers who were killed and injured by the hands of the Qassam Brigades mentioned in the stat as (7776).
Relating the abduction operations, the brigades announced that it has implemented 24 abduction attempts against Zionist occupation soldiers since the inception of the movement in 1987.
The brigades said that it has succeeded in releasing 1050 male and female prisoners from Zionist jails in an honorable exchange deal with the Zionist occupation forces, most were from long term and life sentences .
Here’s the graphic which accompanied their story.
I blog every day about the Guardian’s breathtaking moral indifference in the face of such egregious examples of modern antisemitism, such blind hatred towards “Zionists”, and I’m certainly not the most eloquent writer who ever put pen to paper.
But, just perhaps, my one asset as a pro-Israel commentator is that I’m still not morally numb to such a profound injustice, and am still outraged at such an excruciating and piercing lack of empathy towards my people and my nation.
While the Guardian often rhetorically distinguishes between Jewish victims of terrorist attacks who live outside or within pre-June 1967 borders (“Settlers vs. Israelis), our enemies, as the Hamas headline above indicates, are not burdened by such moral categories.
We’re all just “Zionists”, and, they want us dead.
Related articles
- How the Guardian downplays terrorist attack on innocent Israelis (cifwatch.com)
- What the Guardian won’t report: Pro-Palestinian activists in London – “Israel must be destroyed!” (cifwatch.com)
- How many of your nation’s citizens live in fear of enemy rocket fire? Context the Guardian won’t provide (cifwatch.com)
This is cross posted at Augean Stables by Richard Landes. His latest book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, was published by Oxford University Press.
In an article in Ha-Aretz, where he argues a stylish pomo-poco case that the prisoner exchange reveals Israel’s racism, Alon Idan makes a number of statements that reveal the counter-empirical assertions that necessarily underly his argument:
Yet behind this feeling of superiority [at how much Israelis value life more than Palestinians] lurked a murky, inverted truth. The fact is, the release of one Israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners is not normal; certainly it does not represent an inferior love felt by a Palestinian mother for her son compared to an Israeli mother…. This equation derives from the way we, not Hamas, view reality: 1,027 Palestinians are worth one Jewish life not because the Palestinians minimize the importance of their own lives, but because we diminish the value of their lives.
Certainly. I remember hearing the same from Ted Koppel at the outbreak of the intifada. Hosting a program in which he had to have the Israelis separated from the Palestinians – on the insistence of the Palestinians – he responded to one Israeli claiming that the Palestinians wanted war: “I don’t believe that for a minute. A Palestinian mother cares about her children every bit as much as an Israeli mother.”
It was indeed these dogmatic kinds of politically correct statements that led me to formulate the expression “liberal cognitive egocentrism.” This kind of thinking, which Edward Saïd insisted we – not the Arabs – adopt, is a major element in the cognitive war that Islam wages against us, and creates an extensive epistemological confusion in which we cannot identify the problems or analyze how to resolve them. The editors of the NYT, and their major columnists like Friedman, Kristof, and Cohen, all participate in this liberal, PC dogma, and accordingly, find themselves constantly ignoring reality and coming up with ludicrous solutions. (As Pierre Taguieff pointed out long ago, when all the fishes swim in the same direction it’s because they’re dead.”)
Indeed, as long as you believe that the Palestinians are “just like us” and all they want is a state of their own, and their terror is a sign of the desperation at not getting what everyone else has (rather than aspiration to destroy someone else’s), then obviously, Bibi (and any other Israeli leader who doesn’t retreat to the 67 boundaries) is responsible for the impass which – everyone knows – could be resolved, in the words of one BBC commentator, by email. Never mind that in the real world, people who pursue these satisfying if fantastic solution end up looking – at best – like keystone cops.
Elder of Ziyon catches the latest of the depressingly long list of examples that say something radically different about Palestinian culture.
The Islamic Jihad website Saraya has an article about Khansa Fatima Sheikh Khalil, a Gaza mother who has had five of her terrorist sons killed “in martyrdom.” She is looking forward to joining her sons in paradise. The article says that she did not cry for more than five minutes upon news of her son Ahmad’s death on Saturday. She expressed joy and praised Allah for what happened, and expressed hope that her sons are all accepted into Paradise where they would be, presumably, happily screwing a bunch of virgins for eternity. Khalil also expressed her fervent wish that Islamic Jihad continue to create Jewish widows and orphans. She called on Allah to grant success to the “resistance” and to defeat the Jews for “our land.” She has two more sons left, as well as two daughters. Ahmed also leaves behind three wives. One of Ahmad’s remaining brothers said “we always expected him to be killed.”
Khansa Fatima Sheikh Khalil and her dead sons (in heaven, for sure)
Now will someone please show me a mother in Israel today (cf. 2 Maccabees, 7) who would be proud about not crying for her dead children, and eager to send more to their death if only she could create widows and orphans among the Arabs? Even if some mother felt so, she would not express such emotions openly: for Israelis such overriding desire for revenge is shameful.
And if you wish to argue that this mother doesn’t really feel these things, she’s just responding to social pressures, from a moral point of view you’ve jumped from the frying pan into the fire: what culture demands that its mothers not mourn their dead children, indeed, that in some cases, mothers kill their own daughters?
Amira Qaoud who killed her daughter (raped by two of her sons) so that the community would accept the family.
The problem here runs deep. Ever since I debated some ISMers in 2002, I’ve become familiar refrain that if you talk about what’s wrong with the Palestinians you’re a racist. But I’ve come to realize that it’s the liberals who don’t think Palestinians (or Arabs, or Muslims) can handle serious criticism, who are the racists, and they defend themselves by pretending that “they’re just like us” and demonizing anyone who disagrees. In the words of Simon Deng, a freed Sudanese slave, it’s not only “absurd, it’s immoral.”
We need a spatial term to correspond to the chronological term anachronism. Just as we tend to project our contemporary experience and attitudes on people who lived in the past, so we do that to people who live in other cultures. It may make us feel good for not passing judgments on others, for cleaving to moral equality, but one has to wonder at what price we are willing to indulge. It makes us easy marks for demopaths.
Better dead than [considered a] racist?
How… honor-shame, and how utterly wasteful!
In an exchange with Paul Halsall at Facebook, he encouraged me to make the following clarification.
Paul wrote: “I think your problem is that that you have got into some sort of circular thought pattern, and are now not showing that you are able to see the common humanity of actual individual Palestinians.”
I respond: I have no problem seeing the common humanity of actual individual Palestinians. I’m all for those kinds of friendships, and it’s clear that a real friendship with Arabs is not a dull affair. My problem is with Palestinian culture right now, with what’s permitted and encouraged in the public sphere. Are there mothers who secretly grieve? I’ll bet many, most. But they can’t show it because of a dominating, disgusting political culture that runs right down from the religious and secular tyrants to the alpha males who dominate their women – daughters and wives – with death threats in the service of their honor. That’s what we should be criticizing as progressives, not reinforcing that predatory patriarchal elite by buying into their scapegoating of Israel to distract from their terrible deeds (eg the Palestinian refugees).
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This is cross posted by Richard Landes, who blogs at Augean Stables. Landes is the author of: “Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience“.
One of the supreme ironies among the European moral stances has to do with their discourse on the “death penalty.” It’s a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations. At least when it comes to the death penalty, America is still in the 20th century. “Moral Europe,” on the other hand, stands at the vanguard of the global community of nations and its appreciation of the value of human life undergirds its horror at the execution of criminals, no matter what their deeds.
And yet when that same moral entity turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies.
Normally, this would not be even worth mentioning. Most people would just roll their eyes while others complain about Zionist imperialists trying to divert attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. But if you want to understand the “hostage-for-prisoner-exchange” that just took place in Israel and the Western media’s coverage of the event, then you need to pay attention to the issue.
Israel first outlawed the death in 1954, thus reversing the Mandate Law, which, in most other instances, Israel took over from the British. They based themselves both on rabbinic precedent (concerns for both respecting the image of God in man and the unattainable burden of proof) and modern liberal sentiment (Robespierre initially opposed the death penalty). In doing so, they became the first modern Western democracy after Germany (1949) to ban the death penalty, followed a decade later by Britain (1965), Sweden (1972), Canada (1976) and France (1981).
Note that Israel passed this law five years after the creation of a polity dedicated to equality before the law for all its citizens, a move that earned them the ferocious hostility of their neighbors in the Arab Muslim world. Normally, when countries attempt these egalitarian revolutions and find themselves surrounded by hostile enemies, they have, by year five, descended into mass executions of their own citizens (French Revolution in their fourth year, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, almost immediately). Israel, on the other hand, outlawed the death penalty even for Arab terrorists who were captured while killing Israeli civilians. Israel has only executed one person, Adolph Eichmann, held responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.
If the Israelis had hundreds of terrorists in their prisons, in some cases serving multiple life sentences, available to trade for Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped from Israeli soil by Hamas combatants five years ago, it’s because of this attitude towards human life, both their own and those of the Palestinians. And that attitude was on full display throughout this exchange, with people agonizing over endangering future Israelis from releasing these men, and the profound commitment to getting Gilad Shalit back. Some Arabs recognized the unflattering light this shed on their own culture, while others reveled in it.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, represent almost the polar opposite. This is a culture in which killing daughters and wives and homosexuals for shaming the family with (even suspected and loosely interpreted) inappropriate sexual behavior is a regular feature of society, where “collaborators” are summarily executed, where official statistics for executions put the PA at a rate of formal, legal execution that cedes only to China, Iran, N. Korea, Yemen and Libya.
The trade of over a thousand Palestinians for one Israeli highlights the radical differences between the cultures, themselves outlined often in a triumphalist statement of superiority by the Palestinians (and others in the name of Islam):
“In as much as you love life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom.”
As Hizbullah’s Nasrullah put it after a prison exchange in 2004:
“We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”
These are not mere abstractions or rhetorical verbiage. Palestinian culture inculcates a culture of hatred, murder of enemies, contempt for life. In a chilling exchange at the height of the intifada, one sweet 12 year old girl told an approving TV interviewer:
“Shahada [martyrdom through suicide bombing] is a very, very, beautiful thing. Everyone yearns for Shahada. What can be more beautiful than going to heaven.”
As one Israeli observer noted in commenting on a op-ed by Palestinian Bassem Nasser complaining that it’s inappropriate to depict those released as convicted “terrorist murderers” because they are heroes in Gaza.
The picture Nasser so proudly paints of Palestinian society, glaringly clarifies to all that the leaders of Gaza and its citizenry as a whole comprise one of the most despicable and detestable societies in the history of Man. No Hollywood studio has ever created a villain as evil as the likes of Khaled Mashaal, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or Hassan Nassrallah.
No Hollywood writer has ever written a script about an entire society of evil, millions of devout clones of a murderous, deviant ideology and eschatology.
The reality of Gaza today, and most of the Arab world, is too strange for fiction.
If a European, concerned about the nature of the aggressive Islam that has begun to crop up in and around his or her cities, claiming for example Sharia-zones, wanted to understand the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he might spend a moment visiting the sites of Palestinian anti-Zionists, where this profoundly perverse culture teems.
But of course, that would be politically incorrect. To spend any time pointing out the problems here constitutes the highest level of politically-incorrect Islamophobia. How dare one essentialize an entire culture as morally repugnant? How demeaning to Palestinians, how insulting to Islam. Little matter that they openly embrace these values. After all, “who are we to judge?”
So instead of helping Europeans understand what’s at stake here, most of the media and the NGO community (like Amnesty International) have done their best to spin this story as one of violations of human rights on “both sides” with a heavy focus on Israeli misdeeds. The prisoners were considered as “equal,” and Israeli primarily held accountable by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of enemy combatants when, in reality, the only one protected under these conditions was Shalit, a uniformed soldier kidnapped on his own soil in non-combat situation, and the thousand Palestinian prisoners where convicted in a court, primarily of crimes related to terror attacks on civilians (an, alas, necessary redundancy in these days of sophism).
Thus, the NYT’s Robert Mackee could speak glibly about the “joy of parents on both sides” at the return of prisoners, and the UN could voice its concern that the prisoners Israel released might be subject to illegal forced transfer.
“Returning people to places other than their habitual places of residence is in contradiction to international humanitarian law.”
The UN’s exquisite concern for the full exercise of free will by convicted mass murderers illustrates the problem. Humanitarian discourse has been turned on its head to protect the ugliest players in this particular game, threatened by ugly forces within their own society, all the while implying that Israel, in its haste to get its own soldier back, trampled their rights and violated humanitarian law. Not surprisingly this led Ban Ki Moon to a moment of moral vertigo where he denounced the violation of everyone’s rights.
Of course, in order to present the moral equivalence (if not inversion) of all the “prisoners” in the swap, one has to play down the heinous nature of the crimes and personalities of the Palestinian prisoners released. BBC Correspondent Jon Donnison showed the extent of ignorance and laziness among the supposedly professional news media by interviewing a man in prison for organizing and abetting several suicide bombings. (Because the attacks only injured but did not kill, he did not receive life sentences.)
“You are 31 years old, 10 years in prison, serving a life sentence for being a member of Hamas, I mean, how do you feel today?”
BBC viewers could be excused for sympathizing with a political prisoner, inhumanly incarcerated for belonging to an opposition party, free at last.
A still more disgusting example concerns the Sbarro Pizza bombing, one of the most revolting of all the suicide attacks because it explicitly sought to kill as many little children as possible (and succeeded). Palestinian students celebrated its anniversary with an astonishing exhibition, recreating in papier mache the moment of detonation so viewers could savor their Schadenfreude.
The parents of one of the girls killed in the attack, Malki Roth, objected to the release of Ahlam Tamimi, who not only planned the attack meticulously as an attack on religious children, but, in prison, showed not only no remorse, but real pleasure at the news that she had killed 8, not just 3 children. Many in the media preferred “driver of the suicide bomber,” thus making the Roths look petty for objecting to her freedom. Meantime, the “moderate” Jordanians celebrated her release with a ceremony at the Family Court in Amann.
So, if one might ask the question, “Will the world ask: ‘Why do Palestinians celebrate murder?’” the answer is, “no.” Even those who know that’s what they’re doing, will have had any moral indignation bleached out of their awareness long before they’ve had a chance to ponder the variables.
In acquiescing with a Palestinian narrative in which hatred and child mass murder are considered legitimate expressions of “resistance” to “occupation,” Western human rights activists – including too many journalists – have degraded humanitarian language at the same time as they have allowed into the public sphere a discourse of genocidal hatred, they have excluded any sympathy for Israelis who defend themselves from the onslaught they have shut out from their, and their audiences’ consciousness. As Leon Wieseltier put it in a different context, this all reflects “the new heartlessness toward Israel. A whole country and a whole people have been expelled from the realm of imaginative sympathy.”
It may seem cost-free to Westerners who, for one reason or another, don’t like pushy Jewish overachievers, but it’s not. In misreading the nature of the threat Israel faces, in adopting a degraded language of human rights to protect the greatest enemies of human rights on the planet, in adopting a that masquerades as empirically accurate, they embrace all the kinds of techniques that put them in danger when faced with the same enemy.
Related articles
- Jewish supremacism revisited: And, Deborah Orr’s faulty memory (cifwatch.com)
- On the explicit antisemitism of the Guardian’s Deborah Orr (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian readers view release of Shalit for 1027 terrorists as evidence of Israeli racism! (cifwatch.com)
- When white faces at the Guardian refuse to treat non-white faces as moral equals (cifwatch.com)
The most important battle in the second half of the 20th century was the West’s ideological war against Communist totalitarianism.
While Hitler and fascism have rightly earned its place among the most evil ideologies of the past century, Communist inspired regimes – The Soviet Union, Cambodia, China and many others – were actually responsible for a greater total number of civilians killed in order to advance its political aims.
As I’ve noted previously, Communism’s death count approaches 100 million – a staggering 45-72 million (depending on various historical accounts) of which are attributed to China under the leadership of Mao Zedong – which include various political purges of undesirable classes, mass starvation due to his “Great Leap Forward”, and the millions killed in his labor camps. Mao, like Stalin, can reasonably be compared to Hitler in terms of his record of mass murder.
Yet, strolling back to the Guardian’s obituary upon Mao’s death in 1976, you find this:
The “Great Helmsman”, as the Guardian put it, was characterized in the story as follows:
“Mao has left his mark on China. He shattered traditional restraints and urged Chinese to stand up and struggle for Socialism.”
It further referred to Mao’s “cultural revolution” without even hinting at the tens of millions killed along the way to the “Helmsman’s” Communist Utopia.
Then there was this:
“Mao was a complex man behind simple slogans. He led China on a difficult but successful path, particularly in the latest years of Cultural Revolution. He has commanded admiration more than love. Respect as much as affection.”
“Mao’s general line of economic development with its emphasis on agriculture as the base for industrialization is widely accepted despite arguments over ways and means.”
The article concluded:
“‘So many deeds cry out to be done….‘ Mao wrote in his most famous poem, ‘Ten Thousands Years are too long. Seize the day, Seize the hour!‘ Much of the strength of the China which Mao has left behind lies in this confident assertion for the future.”
In contextualizing the Guardian’s continuing assault on Israel’s legitimacy, and its propensity to tolerate and often advance anti-Semitic narratives, it’s necessary, in addition to monitoring such commentary each day, to see their polemics as part of a broader ideological orientation.
The Cold War was the moral test of a generation and it is important to note that, just as many today posit a false moral equivalence between radical Islam and the West and, closer to home, Hamas and Israel, there were those during the post WWII years – till the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – who, often only implicitly, but sometimes more explicitly, advanced a similar equivalence between Communism and the West – a dangerous intellectual tick by some on the left which Jean Kirkpatrick so adeptly characterized in her landmark essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.“
Richard Landes summarized Kirkpatrick’s principle, as:
“Refusing to accept a wild moral equivalence between the misdeeds of civil [democratic] societies committed, however imperfectly, to defending human rights, with the behavior of totalitarian regimes.”
It is the Guardian’s stunning failure at this urgent moral requirement which lies at the root of their antipathy towards the Jewish state, and their failure to condemn, without qualifications, terrorist movements which seek her destruction. This dynamic at the Guardian may not have started with the their 1976 hagiography of the Chinese mass murderer, but the obituary does allow us to gleam some insights into the trajectory of their stunning moral decline.
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This is a guest post by Mitnaged
44 Ways to Support Jihad, by Anwar Al Awlaki
Prof Richard Landes lists some of the characteristics of demopaths and, under the heading “Demopathic Discourse”, sets out the fundamental being-in-the-world of Anwar al-Awlaki: “…In order for me to prevent you from dominating me, I must dominate you first…” In most Muslim societies this is the status quo and the domination is literal and physical, but Al-Awlaki, as we are seeing, takes it to a new and hideous level by means of psychological manipulation and mind games. Al-Awlaki, of course, dresses up his need to dominate in fundamentalist religious clothing, but at base level this need to dominate – not the rights of Palestinians, not world domination by Islam – is his main driver.
The dupes of Islamist demopaths such as Al-Awlaki may not be Islamists themselves but the Muslim imperative of loyalty towards other Muslims, coupled with a lack of any sense of efficacy and a phobic injunction against being different in ideas or behaviour, add to the belligerent self-pity which can always be cranked up and all of these form a particularly toxic mix which Al-Awlaki takes advantage of and uses.
Nussaibah Younis is the latest in the Guardian/CiF’s stable of empty-headed apologists for Islamism, given her fifteen minutes of fame on CiF because she became besotted with this Islamist instigator of terrorism.
She still basks shamelessly in the reflected infamy of Anwar Al-Awlaki, whose groupie she unselfconsciously admits she was when she was seventeen years old, when Al-Awlaki was a “minor celebrity.” She admits that she was “thrilled” to be “mesmerised” by him. It seems that she still is.
Younis’ article is the usual shallow, selective and ill-informed nonsense designed to appeal to an audience who cannot cope with complexity and which questions very little In the cloyingly self-pitying, “woe is me” fashion so beloved of Islamists, their fellow-travellers and apologists for their excesses, she tries to excuse Al-Awlaki’s descent into infamy. Apparently, and according to her, Al-Awlaki was “deeply hurt” by the US response to 9/11* and that he began to believe that maybe American “freedom” was a charade. Missing from her account, of course, is any awareness of context of the US response, and any awareness or understanding at all on her part of how Americans perceived the murders of thousands of their fellow-countrymen and women on 9/11 in the name of Islam. Of course demopath Al-Awlaki did not care about that – demopath that he is he was almost certainly more concerned about how to make use of it to boost his power base – and of course neither does she, because it would certainly interfere in a major way with the rosy picture that she tries to paint of the “rather literalist” (her words) Al-Awlaki’s behaviour and his motives.
*(Curiously, Younis makes no mention either of the fact that Al-Awlaki’s sermons were attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers from 1999. He reportedly met privately with at least two of them, Nawaf Alhamzi and Khalid Almihdhar, in San Diego, and one moved from there to Falls Church, Virginia, when al-Awlaki moved. Investigators suspect al-Awlaki may have known about the 9/11 attacks in advance. This strongly suggests that Al-Awlaki’s “hurt” had him beginning to manipulate others to commit terrorist acts years before 9/11 took place).
This is cross posted by David Solway at Front Page Magazine: (For more background on the al-Dura hoax, see Richard Landes’s blog, Augean Stables.)
Philippe Karsenty
In 1839, the Russian novelist Mikhail Lermontov published A Hero of our Time, the tale of a melancholy romantic by the name of Grigory Pechorin. In the preface to the book, Lermontov explains that his protagonist is “a portrait, but not of one man. It is a portrait built up of our own generation’s vices.” Pechorin is presented as a self-indulgent cynic, prone to bouts of dejection, world-weariness and pre-Existential nihilism. “What do I expect from the future?” he asks, and replies, “nothing at all.”
It was my great privilege to meet recently another kind of “hero of our time,” one who has nothing in common with Pechorin with whom he differs in two crucial ways. To begin with, he most certainly is not a representative figure of our pusillanimous epoch but a singular presence, very much in the courageous mold of Geert Wilders, who holds the era to account. And secondly, there is nothing of the cynic about him; on the contrary, he is a man notable for his sense of justice, crusading energy, and his belief in the eventual triumph of the truth—a man who expects everything from the future.
I’m speaking of Philippe Karsenty, who delivered a talk in Montreal on October 13 of this year dealing with the infamous Mohammad al-Dura hoax perpetrated by France 2 TV. Karsenty, deputy mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine and director of the Paris-based analysis firm Media-Ratings, has become justly celebrated as the man who single-handedly defied the entire French media, political establishment and intellectual synod which closed ranks to defend the official version of what happened on September 30, 2000 at the Netzarim junction in Gaza. The episode and its aftermath are by this time widely known, but a brief recapitulation would not be out of place.
Jamal al-Dura, a native of Gaza, and his 12-year-old son Mohammad, were filmed supposedly caught in a crossfire between Palestinian operatives and Israeli soldiers at the Netzarim junction, approximately five kilometers from Gaza City. According to Israeli-French journalist Charles Enderlin, France 2 TV’s Jerusalem correspondent who edited and narrated the clip, and his cameraman Talal Abu Rhama who bore witness to the event, the Israelis deliberately targeted the two victims for a full forty-five minutes, wounding the father and killing the son. An expurgated version of the film circulated around the globe, and the international media, with scarcely an exception, condemned the Israelis as child killers. With the collusion of the Western press, the Palestinians had invented yet another martyr to grace their faux hagiography.
Indeed, it did not take long before Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish published his Requiem for Muhammad al-Dura, a piece of versified hogwash which became an instant hit and continues to this day to resonate. “Mohammad,” Darwish writes, “hunters are gunning down angels, and the only witness/is a camera’s eye…” Postage stamps commemorating the event were issued throughout the Islamic world, monuments were erected, the Second Intifada which had only just begun took on a second wind, journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded in revenge and Israeli citizens were murdered in the streets by Palestinian suicide bombers. No one doubted the official story of Israeli barbarism and Palestinian innocence. Even the Israeli political and military establishment did not contest world opinion and issued a hurried apology. But there was a serious problem with the universally accepted transcript of the “firefight.” The only significant “shooting” was done by the camera crew.
This is cross posted from Phyllis Chesler at NewsRealBlog
The first conference I ever attended about global anti-Semitism took place in New York City in early 2003 at the Center for the Study of Jewish History; my son accompanied me. The more I heard, the unhappier I grew. My son could not understand why. He asked: “Mom, why are you groaning? They are saying exactly what you’ve written in your manuscript.” My book, The New Anti-Semitism, was about to be published early that summer.
I explained: “But they are the world’s experts on this subject. I am only the new kid on the block. If they haven’t taken it further than I have, then we’re all in terrible trouble.”
I have lived long enough to have this eerie, humbling experience any number of times since then.
I am not saying that others have not analyzed the matter as well as I have; on the contrary. Many others are far more scholarly: they are genuine experts who have devoted their entire careers to this subject. There are so many names that I hesitate to single out only a few—and more and more books are being published on this subject almost every day. Here’s what I’m saying:
It is not enough. By itself, all our documentation of the impending Holocaust of Jewish Israel, of the ongoing Islamic jihad against the world is not enough either to stop these calamities or to change brainwashed minds which are closed to reason and fact.
Yes, it is a good thing that more and more scholars, sober and serious people, have taken up the cause of Truth. This is especially important given how rapidly the Big Liars and those who fund them have escalated and seized the moment. For now, the wind is at their back.
A bare six weeks ago, I had a fairly heavenly time working with a group of feminists at theconference on global anti-Semitism which was sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, and which took place, of course, at Yale. Aviva Raz-Schechter, Israel’s Director for Combating Antisemitism, joined Harvard’s Ruth Wisse, and Daniel Goldhagen, McGill University’s Irwin Cotler, Emory University’s Deborah Lipstadt, University of Goettingen’s Bassam Tibi, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires’ Alberto Nisman, BostonUniversity’s Richard Landes, and Indiana University’s Alvin Rosenfeld as plenary and keynote speakers. I chaired one session but was there primarily to discuss women and anti-Semitism on an all-feminist plenary panel. (Thank you Dr. Charles Small.)
Yesterday in New York City, I was part of another important conference about Muslim anti-Semitism which was sponsored by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism. I both spoke and chaired a panel with my esteemed colleagues, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen of Harvard and Mark Weitzman of the Simon Weisenthal Center. At the end of our presentations, before the assembled could raise their hands, I asked them to allow me to ask the first question—and of the audience.
“What must we do, what must be done to stop this very specific genocidal threat to the Jewish state—and the overwhelming jihadic threat against civilians everywhere? I do not think that all our documentation will be enough. I do not think we have enough time to reason with the brainwashed, one by one. Only a military victory will do it. But in the 21stcentury, military victories may look different, they may look like Stuxnet, and may include targeted assassinations that we never get to hear about.”
This is a guest post by Mitnaged
YouTube is a splendid invention. It brings people in the world closer together, it makes the world smaller. Hopelessly inept musicians can torture famous and beautiful music and post videos of themselves doing that to YouTube. There are glorious scenes from operas which the ordinary person might never be able to afford to see. There are bands, choirs, kazoo players, performing animals, scenes from films, indeed almost anything you might think of.
It is difficult to believe that within such a rich variety, theoretically free to all and for all, there is nevertheless a malign political twist which actively supports the distortion of news accounts and current events. This led to the withdrawal from YouTube of Latma’s production of “We con the World” (although it has now been reinstated) as well as some of the IDF footage of the flotilla incident. Still available throughout that time, however, were videos of antisemitic Muslim preachers (see also here) as well as other YouTube videos peddling antisemitism to name but a few.
The IDF filmed the flotilla incident, including the polite invitation from the Israeli navy to the Marmara to allow itself to be escorted into Ashdod. Also on record is the inveterate antisemitic rejoinder from these “peace” activists for the officer issuing the invitation to “go back to Auschwitz.” We are left in no doubt as to what motivates them.
Also included in the IDF’s final dossier were films from the Marmara’s own CCTV cameras, which showed these brave fighters tooling up beforehand and yet still the terminally cognitively dissonant refuse to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears. Why is this?
Chris McGreal is back on the Guardian’s pages already and with a vengeance, in more ways than one. In his May 31st article he provides readers with a list of Israeli “‘errors of judgment’ and civilian deaths “ in which, presumably as a result of being unable to contain his anti-Israeli sentiments in a shockingly unprofessional manner, he crosses the very dangerous line of invoking the Al Dura case.
“One of the greatest PR disasters was in 2000, on the second day of the second intifada (Palestinian uprising), when Muhammad al-Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, was caught in Israeli fire and killed as he cowered in terror against a wall. The shooting and the child’s evident distress were filmed and broadcast around the world. At the end, Dura is seen slumped over his father’s legs.
The Arab world hailed the boy as a martyr. His image appeared on stamps and streets were named after him. The Israeli army initially apologised for the killing, but then backtracked after conducting a controversial investigation in which it cleared itself.
Despite a campaign by some pro-Israel groups to claim that the child is still alive and the incident was staged by the Palestinians, Dura’s death remains an abiding symbol in the Arab world and beyond.”
The fact that the French legal system is apparently a ‘pro-Israel group’ is certainly news to me. As we know, the Al Dura hoax was exposed for all its cynical propaganda over two years ago. It is worth reminding oneself of the details of the case as set out here in an interview with Phillipe Karsenty and of the court’s verdict as documented here by Richard Landes.
McGreal, however, manages to willfully ignore all these court hours because he is a man on a mission. His point seems to be to raise the recent events aboard the Mavi Marmara to the status of yet another iconic hoax to be used against Israel, just as the Al Dura one was and still is. The sad fact is that it is this style of dishonest and irresponsible reporting which brings sales and hits to the Guardian with its following of the chronically Israel-obsessed.
That in itself is bad enough, but McGreal’s irresponsibility and dishonesty is also dangerous. Had he, or whoever approved this piece for publication, paused for a minute before surrendering to their apparently uncontrollable urge to play to their baying crowd they would have remembered that the Al Dura affair had far-reaching results way beyond the revelation that a lazy Western journalist co-operated with the dissemination of terrorist propaganda. As Phillipe Karsenty points out above, it not only stoked the preparatory fires of 9/11, but was cited by the murderers of Daniel Pearl as the motive for their horrific crime. The Al Dura hoax also added considerable amounts of flammable material to the newly-lit second Intifada which had just commenced and as a result of which thousands of Israelis and Palestinians lost their lives. Like many another blood-libel the Al Dura hoax resulted in mobs seeking medieval-style vengeance for a non-existent crime.
By resurrecting the old Al Dura hoax as though it were fact and by implying that is somehow indicative of an Israeli policy which is based on disregard for civilian deaths in the theatre of war which supposedly also applies in the case of the recent unfortunate deaths of those aboard the Mavi Marmara, McGreal is deliberately engaging in the whipping up of anti-Israeli fervor. This choice of action carries a responsibility far beyond the journalistic type. It more importantly carries a basic human responsibility for the incitement to violence, hatred and terrorism. Just as Charles Enderlin no doubt did not waste a moment’s thought on the possible repercussions of his fictional report -it was just another job for him – so McGreal obviously cares nothing for the potential consequences of the resurrection of an old lie and the propagation of a new one.
There are many elements at work in the Middle East which would like nothing more than to see the eruption of a third Intifada. They need little or no reason to set such a process in motion, but they are in need of financial and ideological support from gullible Westerners for their nihilistic agenda. If Chris McGreal and the Guardian’s editors have even a smattering of concern for human life within them they need to urgently learn from Enderlin’s mistake, not emulate it. But in order to do that, they need to first tame their vengeance.
This is a cross-post by Professor Richard Landes of Augean Stables
SELF-CRITICISM AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Self-criticism stands at the heart of any experiment in civil society.
Only when we can acknowledge errors and commit to avoiding making them again, can we have a learning curve. Only when scholars can express their criticism of academic colleagues, and those criticized are able to acknowledge error, can scientific and social thinking develop. Only when religious believers can entertain the possibility that they may not have a monopoly on truth (no matter how convinced they might be of their “Truth”), can various religions live in peace and express their beliefs without fear of violence. Only when political elites are willing to accept negative feedback from people who do not have their power, only when the press can oppose those who control public decision-making, can a government reasonably claim to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
But self-criticism is difficult, especially if it takes place in public. Public admission of fault can provoke a powerful sense of humiliation, and involves an obligation to cease the erroneous behavior and attitudes. Most people actively dislike admitting error, fault, or failure, and will go to great lengths to avoid public concessions. We all develop elaborate means to protect ourselves from such public shame and obligation, by rationalizing or finger-pointing at some other party whom we try to coerce to take responsibility for the problem, either by manipulating public opinion or using force. The extreme expressions of such efforts to avoid responsibility involve scape-goating and demonizing, in which the sacrifice of the assigned “guilty party” is necessary to cover our own refusal to admit any fault.
And yet, self-criticism can become a valuable acquired taste. All positive-sum outcomes depend on some degree of willingness, if only implicitly, to admit fault, to share the blame, and to make concessions to the other side. Without self-criticism and its accompanying learning curve, there is little progress. Hence progressives rightly emphasize self-criticism.
MASOCHISTIC OMNIPOTENCE SYNDROME (MOS) AND THE PATHOLOGIES OF SELF-CRITICISM
In some cases, however, self-critical progressives can take this strategy so far that they fall into the trap of taking most or all of the responsibility for something when it is not primarily of their doing. To some extent, this unusual generosity reflects the notion that it takes a “big man” to admit fault, and that if we progressives are stronger, we should make the first, second and even third moves of concession and apology, in order to encourage those with whom we find ourselves in dispute.” Combining inflated rhetoric with a therapeutic notion that the disadvantaged should not be held to the same exacting standards (moral equivalence) leads one to fall into self-critical pathologies.
In the most extreme cases, we encounter Masochistic Omnipotence Syndrome (MOS): “it is all our fault; and if we can only be better, we can fix anything/everything.” This hyper-critical attitude can be seen with particular clarity in the response of some progressives and radicals to both the 9-11 attack in 2001 in the US, and the 7-7 attack in 2005 in London. For many, “What did we do to make them hate us?” trumped “What are they telling themselves that makes them hate us so?” In a sense, the very preference for the former question underlines our desire to be in control. Maybe we can fix what it is that we do to them, so they’ll not hate us so. Maybe even, they’ll like us.
At some level, this hyper-self criticism operates as a kind of prophetic rhetoric: by inflating the sins, by self-flagellating, one hopes to whip the offending Western party into changing their behavior, a kind of public shaming designed to provoke so much outrage and guilt as to change the situation. When the head of Amnesty International compared Gitmo to the Gulag, the comparison was of course grotesque in its moral equation of Gitmo with one of the most repressive and murderous regimes on the historical record, but Irene Zubaida Khan justified the comparison on rhetorical grounds:
- “What we wanted to do was to send a strong message that … this sort of network of detention centers that has been created as part of this war on terrorism is actually undermining human rights in a dramatic way which can only evoke some of the worst features of human rights scandals of the past,” she said. “I don’t think people have got off the hook yet.”
While one can debate the value of such rhetorical moves designed to create a sense of drama, one must at least become aware of the significant distortions in perception it can lead to. The tendency to hyper-self-criticize leads to a kind of moral self-absorption in which one loses any sense of the other side of any conflict as moral agent. Any attempt to put matters in perspective by comparing gets dismissed: “I refuse to judge myself (us) by their standards.” This kind of thinking undergirds both PCP1 and PCP2, indeed one can gauge the passage from the more moderate to the more extreme thinking precisely in terms of the degree to which self-criticism becomes, like Freud’s tyrannical super-ego, vindictive and destructive.
But the real tragedy here comes with the unconscious racism involved in such a moral argument. The proponents of such thinking fail to grant the “other side” any moral agency. “Their behavior is entirely reactive, a response to our bad deeds. If only we would stop, they would stop.” This approach, which gives us, among other things, the current policy of appeasement in the West, also operates on assumptions that the “other” — in this case, the global Jihadis and the Muslim cultures from which they draw their recruits — are not autonomous moral agents. In other words, they, like animals, can’t help themselves. Hence, we make no moral demands on them, indeed, we lower ourselves to their moral level with our equivalences.
THE DISTORTIONS OF NOT FACTORING FOR SELF-CRITICISM
However one feels about this hyper-self-critical discourse, one should at least acknowledge the role of a therapeutic inflation that makes for extremely bad history. When one looks at all the forms of imprisonment that cultures have designed for people they identify as enemies, Gitmo is not the Gulag, not even in the same league, not on the same planet. Similarly, the only traits that Israel and the Nazis share, every other sovereign culture in the recorded history of mankind also shares… indeed, when viewed in the context of history, Israel is unquestionably the least Nazi-like state in the long history of cultural conflicts resolved by violence. As a result, the last thing that a sober analyst — as opposed to an enthused activist — wants to do, is read the situation in the light of this rhetoric of therapeutic inflation.
Observers trying to resolve matters to everyone’s advantage, should, when examining evidence from the Middle East, always consider the source. They should never forget how much, normally, people dislike self-criticism and how much they will do everything to avoid it. All zero-sum outcomes depend to some degree on the ability of one side to impose its blame on the other (they deserve to lose). In tribal warrior cultures, there is no need for such arguments since the basic understanding of all the tribes is “my tribe is right or wrong,” and “plunder or be plundered.” But even the most educated, evolved, and enlightened people can fall into the game. No one likes criticism, a fortiori, public criticism.
This purely human reluctance to self-criticize highlights an element of Jewish culture that most outsiders do not really understand, and that leads to a marked misreading of the Middle East conflict. In the comparative history of self-criticism, Jewish culture is probably the most self-critical. Jews are commanded to rebuke each other and to listen to that rebuke. Jews invented prophetic rhetoric. The Ethics of the Fathers (compiled ca. 200 CE) invoke as one of the traits of a great Torah scholar, “lover of rebukes” (6:6).
The ability to both give and take criticism — admittedly one of the most difficult acts of dialogue in the human repertory — constitutes one of the keys to Jewish survival through millennia of oppression, to Jewish self-deprecating humor, and to the dramatic success of Jews once modern civil societies adopt fair rules: equality before the law. One might even argue that Jews, unlike any other culture, so thrive on their ability to self-criticize that some Jews actually can become addicted to self-criticism.
And so, not surprisingly, among nations, the Jewish nation — Israel — has produced among the most self-critical sovereign cultures on record, certainly when one takes into account the behavior and attitude of its neighbors. Under conditions that lead other sovereign entitites to shut down dissent and move to “martial” law, Israel has maintained an extraordinarily vibrant discourse of self-criticism. Post Zionist historiography is impossible to understand without this framework.
Nothing contrasts more with Israel’s culture of self-criticism than its belligerent neighbors, especially the Palestinians. Here we find one of the most aggressive zero-sum political cultures on record. They accept no responsibility for the war they wage, and justify all their behavior — including how they treat their own people — as a response to the Zionists. They demonize the Zionists with conspiracy theories and blood libels drawn from the most delirious of European anti-Semitic fears to inspire their victimized people to take arms against this malevolent enemy. Who could self-criticize when being assaulted by such merciless and powerful forces? Self-criticism under such conditions is unthinkable, and dissent is treachery. The exceptional number of Palestinians killed by Palestinians suggests a culture in which intimidating dissenters and eliminating traitors is the norm.
Our understanding of the Middle East conflict suffers from a peculiar twisting of the dynamics of self-criticism. As a result, many people do not understand the nature of the rhetoric they hear and, assuming it all comes from the same “place” — no one likes to self-criticize — mis-interpret the information they get. In the case of the information coming from Israel and the Palestinian or Arab media, for example, much “even-handedness” has insisted that the Arab media is every bit as reliable as the Israeli, and vice-versa, that Israeli media can be as dishonest and propagandistic. From one perspective it would seem obvious and straightforward to distinguish between the unusually self-critical Israeli press willing to air its disagreements publicly and the exceptional reluctance of the Palestinian press to express serious criticism of their own side, to allow any dirty laundry to go public. And yet, a wide range of highly intelligent and well-informed people tell us the exact opposite.
Even-handedness demands that we give both sides a hearing. If the Palestinians start shouting about tunnels under al Aqsa and rioting, and the Israelis deny that there are any tunnels, the media presents this in terms of what each side claims. No mention of the ridiculous nature of the accusations — that would be to judge! — nor of the violent contempt with which Muslim building projects in Solomon’s Stables violated every norm of civilized behavior and destroyed precious sites of knowledge.
As a result, for uninformed observers, the Middle East conflict may seem bewildering. If one presents the “refugee problem” in terms of “both sides,” and you get your typical self-critical Israeli to speak, you get Israelis taking 50% of the responsibility, while the Palestinian spokespeople will put 98% of the responsibility on the Israelis, largely using and citing the self-critical Israelis to make their points. The uninformed comes out thinking, “Okay, so Israel’s about 75% responsible/guilty.”
In order to understand this problem, one must understand a critical cultural issue: civil societies thrive on self-criticism, and authoritarian ones thrive on scape-goating and demonizing. To take the “narratives” from both sides as equally legitimate (or worse, to primarily trust the demonizing narrative from the authoritarian side because they are “losing” the battle with civil society), is to make critical category errors. In the battle between a totalitarian society and a democracy, “even-handed” approaches will always favor the totalitarian state. Rather than appreciate the value and difficulty of self-criticism, reward it, and encourage it on the other side, it punishes the self-critical and rewards the demonizers.
Instead, one needs to factor in the role of demonizing and refusal to self-criticize not only in producing the narratives we hear about the problem, but also in the creation and exacerbation of the problem itself. In the history of nations and ethnic disputes, normal response of a culture faced with the behavior of Arab elites and their genocidal discourse and war plans in 1948, would have been massive return massacres by the victorious enemy against whom they had declared so merciless a war. Thus, if one places the Palestinian refugee problem on the vast the panorama of such ethnic disputes — even ones contemporary to it (like India and Pakistan, 1948) and ones contemporary to us (Balkans, Rwanda, Sudan) — the blame for its insolubility seems to reside primarily, overwhelmingly, with the Arab elites.
By not holding them responsible, by approving their lethal narratives, by affirming their boundless sense of entitlement, by justifying their rage and violence, the West has nurtured a monster… Global Jihad. Only by understanding the dangers of their hyper-self-criticism will Westerners at once learn to respect themselves, and show respect for Arab and Muslim culture by demanding minimal levels of self-criticism from them. Only then will the destructive combination of demopaths and their dupes be broken.
_____________
To explore this subject of Masochistic Omnipotence Syndrome further Professor Landes has a highly recommended post here.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
One more devastating blow against propagandists still advancing the Al-Durrah Hoax
February 16, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Charles Enderlin, Delegitimization, Guest Post, Hamas, Jamal Al Durrah, Richard Landes, Second Intifada, Yehuda David | by Guest/Cross Post | 9 comments
A guest post by AKUS
Al-Durrah Stamp in Iran
If there was one event that made the Second Intifada more deadly than it might otherwise have been, it was the apparent shooting of Mohammed Al Durrah (Al Dura/al Durah) on September 30th, 2000 that was filmed by Arab cameraman Talal abu Rahmah on behalf of France 2 TV producer Charles Enderlin. This was the few seconds of video that showed the boy cowering with his father behind a barrel at the Nitzanim junction in Gaza in a video and an image that have become infamous.
The accusation to this day surfaces constantly on the internet and doubtless in Islamic media even though it has been conclusively shown to have been impossible for Israeli soldiers to have shot the boy or his father from their position.
See, for example, James Fallow’s report in the Atlantic Monthly in 2003 Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura? .
In fact, it has never been proven that al Durrah was actually killed (there was never a body produced).
If al Durrah was shot it has been conclusively shown to have been done by Palestinians firing at the two from virtually point-blank range behind the cameraman abu Rahmah.
The two were completely shielded from Israeli bullets by the barrel behind which they were cowering and exposed to bullets from the Palestinian position. However, even the boy’s death is disputed since he is shown moving after he is supposedly killed and there is a strong suspicion that the whole thing was a Pallywood production in which the father had agreed to act due to a previous encounter with Hamas (and this is where the latest news surfaces – see below).
Abu Rahmah was brought in to do the filming, and Enderlin was only too happy to get the results and edit them for maximum effect. There is an excellent video reconstruction of the events on YouTube, if you can ignore the disgusting comments below the video by those who either will not accept the truth or want to continue to use the event to libel Israel, at Birth of an Icon.
France 2, Abu Rahma and Enderlin consistently denied faking the scene by selectively filming then editing the few seconds of the action that they showed. Their version is widely available on the Internet to this day.
As more doubts about the events that day surfaced (even the IDF accepted the initial reports), the father, Jamal al Durrah, paraded scars he claimed were the results of the Israeli bullets that hit him in an effort to persuade the public of his and the France2’s version of events. In fact, he became something of a cause célèbre, trotted out routinely at anti-Israeli events and in anti-Israeli media.
As it happened, an Israel orthopedic surgeon, Dr. David Yehuda of Tel Hashomer Hospital became aware of these claims, and the case rang a bell with him. When he checked his records, he found that he had treated Jamal Al Durrah for wounds inflicted upon him by Hamas in 1994 when they suspected him of collaborating with Israel! The scars al Durrah paraded were from the wounds inflicted by Hamas and the subsequent surgery. (There is some confusion in the press as to the doctor’s correct name as both names – “Yehuda” and “David” – could be first or last names. In Israel people are sometimes addressed by last name first, rather than the usual way. He appears in the media as both Yehuda David and David Yehuda).
In fact, the suspicion has been raised that Jamal al Durrah agreed to act in the Pallywood production to “repay his debt”, so to speak, to Hamas, for his previous actions.
Jamal al Durrah then sued Dr. Yehuda and a French magazine that published his story for libel in France in 2008. Of course, it is rather unclear how a semi-illiterate Gazan could have done this. It appears he was funded by an unknown source. Like Enderlin in the Karsenty libel case (see additional material below), on April 29th, 2011 al Durrah won his suit despite the evidence of Dr. Yehuda’s medical records! Dr. Yehuda was ordered to pay thousands of Euros in damages.
Dr. Yehuda vowed to fight back, and on Wednesday, February 15th 2012 the French Supreme Court acquitted him of slandering al Durrah. Another of the lies has been exposed, and it is now even less clear that either al-Durrah – son or father – was actually wounded or killed that day.
Another brick has been torn down from the wall of lies, falsehoods, edited film, and propaganda that has been erected around this patently falsified event in order to demonize Israel. Nevertheless, until a French court forces Enderlin to release the entire film clip, and rules on the actual complaint that the footage was doctored to create a false impression, this affair will continue to damage Israel’s image.
——-
Additional background:
Richard Landes is probably the most important voice tracking the whole affair (see this page on his blog, Al Durah Affair: The Dossier). There also is a chronology of events at Landes’ site.
Here’s an interview with Landes at The Muhammad Al-Dura Blood Libel: A Case Analysis where he recounts what made him take such an interest in the case:
Philippe Karsenty took up the issue in France and was fined 1 Euro and costs in 2006 when he was sued by France 2 for disputing their presentation and the judge awarded the libel case to France 2.
On appeal, Karsenty had the judgment reversed in 2008.
In 2002, Landes notes that:
Not to be outdone by France 2, as Landes notes, Suzanne Goldenberg, of the Guardian (UK) and the primary source of another outrageous libel, the so-called “Jenin Massacre”, “ published a lengthy article titled ‘The Making of a Martyr,’ in which Mohammed is eulogized and Israelis demonized”.
Being a useful Jewish reporter no doubt increased the impact of both her reports. Other networks, notably CNN, did much the same. Given the Guardian’s wide circulation among the left and Islamists who wish to delegitimize Israel, Goldenberg’s article was one that had great impact among the many reports on this affair and is still frequently referenced and has never been corrected or retracted by the Guardian.
Ha’aretz no longer claims that Israeli soldiers shot Mohammed Al Durrah, (See their report from Jan. 2011: Mohammed al-Dura’s father wins slander case against Israeli in French court), while their earlier coverage implied that Israeli soldiers had indeed shot the boy.
Nidra Poller examines the al Durrah hoax here: The Muhammad al-Dura Hoax and Other Myths Revived.
One of the most powerful descriptions of the miscarriage of justice in France in the Karsenty trial and the way the French media establishment tried to protect Enderlin as one of their own even when they knew the facts is “L’affaire Enderlin” written by Anne-Elizabeth Moutet at The Weekly Standard:
CiF Watch has commented on the issue several times, and cross-posted a very compelling essay by David Solway about Karsenty.
Finally, here’s a great video about L’Affair Al-Durrah by Richard Landes.
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