“A lie can go around the world before the truth gets its trousers on.”
Mark Twain (attributed)
Richard Landes has been doggedly searching for the truth since that terrible day 7 years ago, September 30, 2000, when Mohammed al-Dura was apparently gunned down by Israeli soldiers at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip. Video of his apparent death shot by a Palestinian freelancer for France 2 Television, in short order became a staple on television news of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, reinforcing the narrative ofl those who attributed all violence to the Israeli occupation and the justifiable rage of the victimized Palestinians. Mohammed al-Dura, cradled in his father's arms, became the iconic image of the second Intifada. Thousands ultimately died in the violence that followed.
Yet all that blood shed was the result of a lie, a lie that persists and continues to poison the waters of the Middle East. Finally, 7 years later, the Israeli Government Press Office concluded that the video had been staged and has now demanded that France r release the entire film to show what actually happened that day.
Among all the other issues raised by the al-Dura affair, it remains remarkable how few journalists seem to want to unravel the tangled web.
Today Richard Landes remarks on interactions with James Fallows, an honorable and honest reporter, who despite having seen enough evidence to convince him that a grave misjustice has been perpetrated upon Israel and her people, still cannot quite bring himself to take the final step. Richard's post is Fallows Comments on Al Durah: Insights into Why the Story has taken so long to break and sheds some light on the issues invovled:
James Fallows’ piece on the Al Durah Affair was the first clue I had to the problem. After I did a fair amount of work and had an initial version of Pallywood, I showed it to him and Gabi Weimann in Washington. He seemed convinced and confessed to me that the reason he hadn’t believed it was staged was for the reasons he cites below in this article. In other words, his basic “take” on this has not changed despite the subsequent evidence of extensive (and undetected) faking that he has either seen (with me) or not noticed (e.g., the interview with Leconte and Jeambar). Below is Fallows’ latest comments, and my responses. If this seems like déjà-vu all over again, it’s because it is.
Richard's post is important, and should be read in full, for what it reveals of the mindset of a man, Fallows, who is committed to the truth but cannot yet work his way out of the conflict between what he thinks he knows of the world and the truth that contradicts his world view. This is neither a trivial nor a singular phenomena; it is universal and emerges from the deepest, pre-rational strata of the mind.
Many years ago, in a piece of research that would likely not find publication today (imagine PETA's reaction) psychologists placed lenses on 3 day old kittens eyes such that the kittens were unable to see horizontal lines. They discovered that when such lenses were placed on the animal's eyes during a critical period, that even after the lenses were removed, the kitten continued to be unable to differentiate horizontal lines in the environment. Adult cats so treated were literally unable to see horizontal lines.
Our "imprinting" is much more complex and contains many, many layers of complexity, yet we can still fail to see what is right in front of our eyes. Magicians make an excellent living fooling our eyes; the better they are enabling us to see what they want us to see rather than what is actually in front of us, the more successful they are. The camera, and motion pictures, have elevated this to an art form. Scenes are cropped to support the story line of the director. This is an everyday occurrence, whether done consciously by movie and news directors or less consciously by amateur photographers who attempt to capture small bits of truth.
Richard Landes has spent several years documenting an entire industry devoted to manipulating images to support a version of Palestinian victimhood which has justified murderous Jew-hatred and kept the Palestinians in their place of honor among victims. As always, anti-Semitism destroys the anti-Semite, but what is most worth noting is how the Western Media, so drenched in their self-congratulatory efforts to present the story of their chosen victims, actually end up doing so much harm to those they wish to help.
I will here not comment on the unconscious needs of the Media (as well as much of the Left) to have victims to champion, but would ask those who believe they are devoted to the truth to wonder why it is so hard to face truths that to do not conform with one's pre-existing narrative.
Men like Fallows, who believe they have an accurate model of reality, cannot tolerate incorporating true facts which would serve to undermine that conception. If the Palestinians lied about al-Dura, what else will be brought into question? Richard offers some trenchant thoughts:
Indeed, when this story breaks, one of the great scandals will be the profound negligence and neglect of the MSM, which never asked a hard question, never followed up on the story… indeed, did their best to bury it. (The fellow at WGBH that Fallows sent me to as someone who might be interested in the story, even as he admitted the evidence was convincing, told me he couldn’t do “just this” story, he’d need to do something about Israeli cameramen staging news.) When you read the comments of Clément Weill Raynal on how everyone in the MSM does it and knows it’s done, combined with the responses of France2 higher ups to the three journalists who saw Talal’s tapes, and Enderlin’s to me — it happens all the time — you begin to realize that this kind of staging, editing, and presenting as news is a public secret among the MSM as well.
Does Fallows not know this? Possibly. First of all, he himself is a scrupulously honest reporter, and I don’t believe for a minute that he would engage in such things, and being a decent human being, I don’t think he’d think so badly of his colleagues. Second, even though I think American reporters are (almost) as likely to engage in this as European ones — Bob Simon is our Pallywood example — by and large, Americans are less cynical than Europeans and therefore more likely to deny the evidence rather than wink an eye and make an honest, off the record comment. Gerry Holmes, the Middle East correspondent for ABC’s Nightline from 1999-2002 (i.e., the height of Pallywood) told me he never saw anything like it, and when I showed him Reuter’s footage, he responded: “We could argue about each frame.”
Contrary to Fallows’, my experience suggests that this story had many reasons to be buried by a general consensus of the MSM. The (largely unconscious) thinking runs something like this: if we all agreed that it was true at the beginning, then calling it into question opens too many cans of worms — how could we have been so gullible? why didn’t we ask the hard questions? why didn’t anyone follow up? why were the critics marginalized? what will the public think of our already slipping credibility? And given the likely backlash from the Palestinian/Arab/Muslim world, sticking one’s neck out doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As another reporter from ABC, also convinced by the evidence, said to me, “I don’t know how much appetite there is for this kind of thing here.”
Our Media are our eyes on the world. It is problematic but unavoidable that the unconscious biases of the reporters will effect how their stories are presented, and more importantly, what stories are not presented. The recognition that the al-Dura blood libel was a conscious deception of Western dupes, masquerading as men of integrity, is a potential paradigm shattering event.
The MSM have seen their credibility slowly erode for many years now. The mix of distortions, occasional overt lies, and neglect that have been increasingly exposed by the new media, all have served to hollow out the support for the MSM as people who do not have an emotional investment in the MSM are unable to avoid recognizing just how slanted the "news" has become.
(It is likely the news has always been slanted to some degree, though the historical attempts to attain objectivity which had been a traditional part of journalist ethics, did mitigate the tendency; in any event, the question is moot at this point.)
The internet is not yet ubiquitous, though it can sometimes feel that way, but as its presence increases, we will approach a time when there are much fewer layers of gatekeepers for either news or "news." The struggle between those who attempt to report the news and those who attempt to manipulate the "news" will be an increasingly important part of the evolving state of warfare; lies cannot be allowed to survive unchallenged for 7 years if we want to win.
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