Tuesday, February 22, 2005
More from the "it is so if you think it's so" department: Also via Backspin, here is more at CNSNews about the two French journalists (see the entry about the NYTimes story here) who stepped forward to question France 2's handling of the al-Dura affair, and stating straight out that the unedited video footage shows that the boy could not have been killed by Israeli fire.
Note the reaction of France 2's editor, who cares not at all about the veracity of his own statements or the relationship of what's presented on video to actual events, so long as they are useful toward what he is just certain is an important end. Of course the result of such lies in this case has been a more violent second intifada, more murder, more suicide and a giant step away from a peaceful end. France 2 unapolagetically spread agitprop for the murderers.
French state television is standing by its claim that the broadcast is authentic. The broadcast purportedly showed 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durra being shot by Israeli soldiers, an event that led to the current Palestinian intifada.
But Denis Jeambar, editor-in-chief of the French news weekly l'Express, and filmmaker Daniel Leconte, a producer and owner of the film company Doc en Stock, say the videocassette is full of staged scenes of faked injuries.
Jeambar and Leconte were allowed by the France 2 network to view an unedited master video cassette of the incident, which took place in September 2000 at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. Leconte said he is satisfied that the shooting really happened, but he does not believe the bullets that struck the child could have been fired by Israeli troops.
"The only ones who could hit the child were the Palestinians from their position," Leconte told Cybercast News Service. "If they had been Israeli bullets, they would be very strange bullets because they would have needed to go around the corner."...
...France 2 reporter Enderlin, in a response in Le Figaro to the question posed by Leconte and Jeambar about why he accused the Israelis of the shooting, said "the image corresponded to the reality of the situation, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank."
"I find this, from a journalistic point of view, hallucinating," said Leconte, himself a former journalist. "That a journalist like him (Enderlin) can be driven to say such things is very revealing of the state of the press in France today," he added...
...Independent investigators have said that the French press is reluctant to criticize the public television channel because, as the prime employer of journalists in the country, it can exert a great deal of pressure.
Leconte said that because the pictures had such "devastating" consequences - including the public lynching of two Israeli soldiers and subsequent anti-Semitic statements by French Muslims - France 2 or Enderlin need to admit that they gave out wrong information in the report...
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