Our World: The media and its enduring narrative
Jul. 8, 2008 Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
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Last Wednesday's terror attack in Jerusalem was unique. Due to the fact that
Husam Taysir Dwayat bulldozed his victims outside of Jerusalem Capitol
Studios where many of the foreign television networks have their offices,
his was one of only two attacks to have been caught live on camera.

The only other attack which was filmed was the lynching of IDF reservists
Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche at a Palestinian police station in
Ramallah on October 12, 2000. That attack, which showed the mob basking in
the blood of the two men, was filmed by an Italian camerawoman from the
privately owned Mediaset television station. The attack last Wednesday was
filmed by the BBC whose correspondent Tim Franks witnessed the carnage from
the outset through his office window.

Their film documentation is not the only thing those two attacks share. The
lynch in Ramallah and the attack last Wednesday are also the only attacks
that elicited abject apologies by otherwise arrogant media giants. In the
aftermath of the lynch, Riccardo Cristiano, Italy's state-owned RAI
network's correspondent in Israel, wrote a groveling apology to the
Palestinian Authority in which he went to painstaking lengths to explain
that it was not his network, but his competitor that published the footage.

In the letter which the PA published in its Al Hayat al Jadida daily,
Cristiano fawned, "We always respect the journalistic procedures with the
Palestinian Authority for [journalistic] work in Palestine and we are
credible in our precise work. We thank you for your trust, and you can be
sure that this is not our way of acting. We will not do such a thing."

ON FRIDAY, the BBC published an apology for broadcasting the footage of
Wednesday's carnage. The film showed an unarmed, furloughed IDF commando
climb onto Dwayat's bulldozer just after Dwayat murdered Batsheva Unterman
by crushing her car. It showed the soldier grabbing a gun belonging to a
security guard who was unsuccessfully trying to restrain Dwayat and shooting
Dwayat three times in the head. The film did not show Dwayat or any of his
victims dying. What it showed was the terror of the wounded, Dwayat's
murderousness and the soldier's heroism.

Yet, the network declared, "It's not normally the BBC's policy to show the
moment of death on screen. These are always extremely difficult decisions to
make. However, on reflection, we felt that the pictures featured on
Wednesday's News at Ten did not strike the right editorial balance between
the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's audience."

At first glance, it is not at all clear what the BBC was talking about. Its
film was a journalistic achievement. Through it, tens of millions of people
worldwide were able to see for themselves what a terror attack against
innocents looks like from a fairly sterile angle. What did the BBC have to
apologize for?

In this case, as in the case of the lynching eight years ago, the reason the
BBC apologized is not because the film's images were too gruesome, but
because it strayed from the accepted narratives of the Palestinian war
against Israel. To maintain the narratives, "the right editorial balance
between the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's
audience," is one that engenders the belief that Israel is either morally
indistinguishable from the Palestinians, or that Israel is morally inferior
to the Palestinians.

The metaphor for the first narrative is the so-called "cycle of violence."
The BBC itself spelled out this narrative in the aftermath of the lynching
in Ramallah. In a program called, "When Peace Died," broadcast in November
2000, the BBC explained, "Two images captured the hatred that has destroyed
the peace process in the Middle East. Mohammed al-Dura, the boy from Gaza,
shielded by his father but still dying under a hail of bullets fired by
Israeli soldiers and the lynching and brutal murder of two Israeli
reservists by a Palestinian mob."

The metaphor for the second narrative is the Holocaust. It was used most
explicitly early on by Catherine Nay, a well-known news anchor from Europe1
network. In late 2000 Nay declared, "The death of Muhammad [al-Dura] cancels
out, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air from the SS in
the Warsaw Ghetto."

THE STORY of Muhammad al-Dura plays a central role for both narratives. On
September 30, 2000, France 2 public television network's bureau chief in
Israel Charles Enderlin aired a 57-second, heavily edited film which he
proclaimed portrayed then 12-year-old al-Dura being killed by IDF forces at
Netzarim Junction in Gaza. France 2 distributed the film for free to the
global media and al-Dura's image became the icon of the Palestinian war
against Israel. It directly incited anti-Jewish violence in Israel and
throughout the world.

Questions about the veracity of the France 2 account arose immediately. An
IDF investigation launched by then OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov
Samia proved through ballistic evidence that it was physically impossible
for IDF forces to have shot - much less killed - al-Dura. Over the ensuing
years, a handful of journalists and researchers produced a wealth of
evidence demonstrating that Enderlin's story was false.

One of the researchers was a media critic named Philippe Karsenty. He
asserted that the film was a hoax on his Web site Media Ratings and dared
Enderlin and France 2 to sue him for libel while demanding that they release
the 27 minutes of film they claimed they had of the September 30, 2000
incident at Netzarim Junction.

While refusing to release the footage, Enderlin and France 2 did sue
Karsenty for libel. In late 2006, after receiving a letter of recommendation
for Enderlin from then French president Jacques Chirac, and in spite of the
reams of evidence supporting his claim that Karsenty presented at the trial,
the court convicted Karsenty. Karsenty appealed the ruling.

The appellate court ordered Enderlin and France 2 to produce the unedited
footage. Although he refused to show the footage in its entirety, from the
19 minutes of rushes that Enderlin did present, three things became obvious.
First, the IDF could not have killed al-Dura. Second, the footage showed
Palestinians staging scenes of fighting with imaginary IDF forces. And
third, the footage showed no evidence that al-Dura had been shot or that he
died that day at Netzarim Junction. On May 22, the appellate court
overturned Karsenty's conviction.

IT MIGHT have been thought that the French, Israeli and international media
which had for seven years supported Enderlin against the small band of
independent investigators would finally abandon him. So too, it might have
been thought that after seven years of defending an indefensible piece of
journalistic malpractice Enderlin would finally own up to his misdeed. But
the opposite occurred.

In Israel, leading left-wing commentators like Gideon Levy, and Tom Segev
from Ha'aretz, Arad Nir from Channel 2 and Larry Derfner from The Jerusalem
Post accused Karsenty and his allies of waging a witch hunt against
Enderlain to advance their political agendas. In France, the media initially
ignored the story.

Then, less than a week after the verdict, the Who's Who of the rather large
anti-Israeli branch of the French media published a petition in the
left-wing Le Nouvel Observateur decrying Karsenty's exhaustively documented
dossier against the al-Dura story as a "seven-year hate-filled smear
campaign." In all, some 300 reporters and hundreds more notables signed the
petition. For their part, France 2 and Enderlin announced their intention to
appeal the ruling to the French Supreme Court.

In her account of the court case and its aftermath in the Weekly Standard,
French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet attributes the French media's
reaction to what she sees as a uniquely French practice of never apologizing
for misdeeds.

There is doubtlessly some truth to this. But arrogance is not the unique
trait of the French media and elite. And given the near universality of
media arrogance, how can one explain the BBC's quick apology for its
broadcast of its footage from the attack in Jerusalem last week? And how can
one explain Cristiano's obsequious letter to the PA in 2000?

THE ANSWER of course is that arrogance alone cannot account for the media's
defense of Enderlin. If Enderlin had been caught broadcasting a libelous
report about the Palestinians, the media and France 2 would have cast him
off immediately. But here there is more at stake than one man's reputation.
Enderlin didn't create the narrative of Palestinian innocence or at least
moral equivalence. In filing the clearly false story of al-Dura, Enderlin
was advancing a cause that all his anti-Israel colleagues in France, Israel
and worldwide have embraced. If he goes down, their indispensable narrative
is liable to go down with him.

Over the past eight years of the jihad against Israel, among countless
examples, three instances of open media collusion with Israel's enemies
stand out for their strategic impact on the course of events. First there is
the al-Dura affair. It was followed by the mythical "Jenin massacre" in
April 2002. That in turn was followed by the fabricated "massacre" at Kafr
Kana in Lebanon in July 2006.

The al-Dura story solidified the Palestinian narrative of victimization by
Israel just months after they rejected statehood and peace at Camp David.
When the so-called Jenin massacre was reported in April 2002, the IDF was in
the midst of Operation Defensive Shield. Just before the Palestinians began
making allegations of an Israeli massacre, IDF forces uncovered documentary
evidence proving that the Palestinian war against Israel was run by the PA
and Yassir Arafat. By fabricating the massacre, the PA was saved from being
delegitimized as an actor in Washington. The Israeli peace camp was also
resuscitated from its death throes.

As the Winograd Commission documented in its final report on the Second
Lebanon War, the media reports of the fabricated massacre of Lebanese
civilians by an IAF bomber in Kafr Kana in South Lebanon caused US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice to end US support for an Israeli military victory
over Iran's Lebanese proxy and to pressure Israel to accept a cease-fire
leaving Hizbullah intact.

Even as analyses of the reports from Jenin and Kafr Kana like the reports on
the al-Dura affair clearly demonstrated that the IDF had committed no
atrocities, the distorted footage put out by the media made it impossible
for Israel to defend itself in the court of public opinion. Like the al-Dura
affair, the media's open collusion with the Palestinians in Jenin and
Hizbullah in Kafr Kana prolonged false narratives predicated on Israeli
aggression just as they were about to be finally laid to rest.

So it is not merely arrogance that makes Enderlin and his colleagues
unwilling to come clean anymore than it was humility that made the BBC and
Cristiano apologize. Depressingly, what all of this illustrates is that the
media will only give us the information they wish us to have. And that
information's relationship to the truth is arbitrary at best.