Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #646, 5/19/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #646, 5/19/13

Breaking Today: “Committee Finds IDF Didn’t Kill Palestinian Boy al-Dura in 2000”

As I write this late Sunday afternoon, my internet search screen is listing news items marked “1 hour ago … 2 hours ago … 3 hours ago” by the Jerusalem Post, YNet and others reporting that the Israeli government committee commissioned by Netanyahu last September to investigate the validity of the super-viral news accounts that the IDF had killed a Gaza child crouched behind a barrel with his father handed him a report today that the Jerusalem Post headlined as quoted above, and sub-headlined:

Netanyahu presented with gov’t report finding that France 2 footage shows 12-year-old icon of second intifada was not hit with IDF bullets; claims French TV station edited footage to give misleading impression. [bold-face and underscoring in the original]

It would be difficult to overstate the damage done to Israel in the eyes of much of the world by the French 2 video that claimed the cowering child died “under a hail of Israeli bullets.” See, e.g., Stephanie Gutmann, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, quoted in Lee’s and my book, Pressing Israel, pp. 42-43. Gutmann, who devoted a full chapter of her book to “Al-Dura – A Case Study,” told readers why:

The narrative was established for most of the world on the night of September 30 [2000], when France’s powerful state-financed television channel, France 2, which was the exclusive owner of the videotape, reported that the twelve-year-old Palestinian had died ‘under a hail of Israeli bullets.’ The incident rapidly became ‘one of the most disastrous setbacks Israel has suffered in decades,’ in the words of Bob Simon, then bureau chief for CBS News in Jerusalem…. Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Discrimination Committee, called the film ‘one of the most damaging [images] in the history of Zionism.’

Here are quoted findings of the report that was handed to Netanyahu today, per the Jerusalem Post:

*** “Contrary to the [French 2] report’s claim that the boy is killed, the committee’s review of the raw footage showed that in the final scenes, which were not broadcast by France 2, the boy is seen to be alive.”

*** “ … there are numerous indications that the two [father and son] were not struck by bullets at all.”

*** “The review showed that it is highly-doubtful that bullet holes in the vicinity of the two could have had their source in fire from the Israeli position, as implied in the France 2 report.”

*** [France 2’s report was] edited and narrated in such a way as to create the misleading impression that it substantiated the claims made therein.”

The Jerusalem Post quoted Netanyahu as stating upon receiving the Israeli report today that the incident, “which has slandered Israel’s reputation,” is “a manifestation of the ongoing, mendacious campaign to delegitimize Israel,” and that the only way to counter lies is through truth.

JP: “International Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, who presented the report to Netanyahu, called the al-Dura affair ‘a modern-day blood libel against the State of Israel, alongside other blood libels like the claims of an alleged massacre in Jenin [on which see, e.g., Pressing Israel, pp. 31-32: “Jenin – The ‘Massacre’ That Wasn’t”]. The France 2 report was utterly baseless.”

YNet’s report today is similar regarding the Israeli report and Israeli officials’ statements, and then goes into the on-going France 2 suit against French media personality Philippe Karsenty, who claimed France 2 had staged the entire incident. A French court ruling is due in three days.

An irony YNet notes is that after the father, who survived, showed “the scars that he incurred in the incident,” a doctor at Israel’s Tel Hashomer Hospital came forward to reveal that the father’s scars were “actually the result of a surgery the father had undergone years earlier, after he was attacked by Hamas operatives who suspected him of collaborating with Israel.”

Arutz Sheva, citing JihadWatch and Times of Israel for its article, noted that “the picture of Dura, apparently dead across his father’s knees, was shown for days on Arab and international TV stations and was cited as inspiration by both Osama bin Laden and the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.”

Its article today added, as Gutmann had noted in her book, that “Israel initially did not dispute that IDF troops had inadvertently killed the child,” and that “only months later did the army complete an investigation that it said showed with certainty that, if Dura was killed, it could not have been from shots fired from the IDF position.”

As Gutmann wrote on page 58 of her book, it “took a while” for Israel to respond to the al-Dura affair’s public relations aspect because, as one involved Israeli put it to her, “we don’t understand that side of it as well as we should.”

Military and policing confrontations form a prime front in what Stephanie Gutmann rightly calls that “other war” between Arabs and Israelis. The “al-Dura affair” has had a devastating impact on that front. How Israel and the mainstream Western media will portray today’s Israeli government al-Dura report will deeply influence how many minds in the West may be changed. There’s another major media misportrayal on this violent confrontations front that’s less singularly sensational but no less damaging. Periodically, Israel has been driven to entering Gaza to stop continuing ever-more-powerful and further-reaching rocket fire aimed at civilians in towns and cities in Israel. These are confrontations between the Israeli military and Israeli-civilian-targeting terrorist rocketeers. The media heaps vivid condemnations – “fierce … punishing … devastating … crippling … inflicting collective punishment” upon these confrontations, but it applies these contumelies, not to the terrorists targeting Israeli civilians in work and recreation places, schools, vehicles and homes, but to the IDF counter-attacking the rocketeers. (See, e.g., Lee’s and my Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, Chapter “G: Gaza – Rockets, Responses and Rhetoric” (www.pavilionpress.com).

And this violent confrontations front is but one of the many fronts in Gutmann’s “Other War,” a primary one being the delegitimizing terminology – “creation and founding of Israel … West Bank … East Jerusalem … 1967 borders … etc, etc” – which we Diaspora Jews and even Israelis use, the self-delegitimizing significances of which “we don’t understand as well as we should.”

Regards,
Jerry