Hooray for Pallywood?
by Richard Landes
In the summer of 2006, Reuters News Agency, humiliated when bloggers caught them duped by obvious photographic manipulation, fired both the photographer and the chief of their photographic bureau. They then removed all the photographer™ photos from their news archive. In so doing, they acted decisively in punishing two of the cardinal sins of modern journalism: creating evidence and getting duped by created evidence.
These principles i.e., the ethics of a free press go so deep, that Westerners apparently have difficulty imagining that others might not share our commitments. Thus few people believe claims that footage of Muhammad al Dura, the twelve year old boy allegedly gunned down by Israelis at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000, was staged. Charles Enderlin, the correspondent for France2 who presented the tale to the world, derisively and successfully dismisses such claims as a conspiracy theory as ludicrous as those about 9-11. How absurd: Palestinian journalists would not do such a thing; and if they did, the Western media would catch it. To this day, most journalists still ask, Who killed al Dura? not, Was he killed in the footage we see?
The last time we see al Dura on Talal™ camera: He holds his hand over his eyes not his allegedly deadly stomach wound. He lifts up his arm and looks around. Enderlin had already declared him dead in an earlier scene, and (therefore?) cut this scene from his broadcast.
And yet, one of the major differences between Western journalism and self-styled Islamic media men emerges on just this issue of the permissibility of staging the news and attitudes towards what constitutes honest information. According to the Islamic Mass Media Charter (Jakarta, 1980), the sacred task of Muslim media men [sic], is on the one hand to protect the Umma from imminent dangers, indeed to censor all materials, towards that end, and on the other, To combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.
So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded: These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth! We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth. When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.
These remarks serve as an important prelude to considering the France2 rushes that will be shown in court in Paris on November 14 in the Enderlin France2 vs. Philippe Karsenty defamation case. These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes. Indeed there seems to be a kind of public secret at work on the Arab street: people fake injury, others evacuate them hurriedly (and without stretchers) past Palestinian cameramen like Talal, who use Western video equipment to record these improvised scenes. Pallywood: the Palestinian movie industry.
Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the truth is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?
the rest of the article can be read at PJMedia or my blog.
Richard Landes
The Second Draft
The Augean Stables (blog)
rl.seconddraft@gmail.com
617-504-7837
