Brought to us by Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is quite the scandal in a french court.
Philippe Karsenty is the founder of a French media watchdog called Media Ratings. Media Ratings accused French 2 of staging the al Durah “killing” and called for the resignation of some of France 2’s employees, namely Charles Enderlin, and the News Director, Arlette Chabot. France 2 and Enderlin in turn, sued Karsenty for defamation and won, and even Jacques Chirac himself intervened at one point. Karsenty appealed, and the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of the incident, which was produced on November 11th.
What is produced was only a part-18 minutes- of the 27 minutes. But as seen from the footage, there is no evidence that anyone was killed or injured in what appears to be 45 minutes of fictional continuous shooting by Israeli soldiers. By the end of the footage, it seems the kid is very much alive and is moving, and unmarked by any wound.
The ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah was swallowed uncritically by the western media, despite the manifold unlikeliness and contradictions which were apparent from the start, because it accorded with the murderous prejudice against Israel which is the prism through which the Middle East conflict is habitually refracted. This scandal has the most profound implications not just for the media, not just for the Middle East conflict but for the western world’s relationship to reason, which seems to grow more tenuous by the day.
