Seth Mandel
When Islamic terrorists strike, their sympathetic friends in the media seek to justify it by looking for “root causes.” They should be careful what they wish for, because Philippe Karsenty can prove that for the several thousand killed since the beginning of the Second Intifada, the media themselves own the lion’s share of the blame.
“I call them media terrorists,” Karsenty says. “You can put a bomb in a restaurant and you can kill ten people, and it’s dramatic and it’s terrible. But when you’re broadcasting this kind of a fake news report you are killing more than ten people. It’s a terrorist action, it’s a media terrorist action, and I think they should be treated that way.” Karsenty is referring to the infamous Sept. 30, 2000 Mohammad al-Dura incident, in which a twelve-year-old boy (al-Dura) was filmed supposedly shot and killed in the arms of his father by Israeli soldiers at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. The video, shot by France 2, a French national television station, was used as a rallying cry by the Palestinians and their allies as they excused their ensuing campaign of suicide terrorism by repeating one name: al-Dura.
But Israeli officials and journalists around the world began questioning the official storyline, and despite France 2’s refusal to show the full video, it simply did not hold up to scrutiny. It eventually became clear the video was staged by France 2 journalist Charles Enderlin, his Palestinian cameraman, and al-Dura’s friends and family.
Karsenty took up the fight in France to prove the fraud, was sued for defamation, and has been in a series of legal battles at home while traveling around the world exposing the video. I spoke with Karsenty last week during his current U.S. trip, when he described the (in his opinion, futile) bullying by France 2 in the courtroom, trying to win cases on technicalities because they cannot defend against Karsenty’s facts and research. Karsenty has shown, for example, that there was no blood on al-Dura and that the full film shows the boy raising his arm after he was “killed.”
“It doesn’t put blood on the body of the boy and the father; it doesn’t prevent the boy from raising his elbow,” Karsenty said about France 2’s attempts to suppress the truth. “It’s another step that they use in order to postpone the time when they will be forced to admit the fraud.”
And the truth might come as a bit of a shock to Karsenty’s countrymen, since Enderlin’s allies in France have been able to shove any discussion of the film out of the public square. Last month, Enderlin published Un Enfant est Mort (A Child is Dead), Enderlin’s side of the story. According to Karsenty, in 200 pages, the book mentions Karsenty by name 114 times. It is essentially an exercise in character assassination. In the last two weeks, Enderlin has been given two book awards in France.
“So there is no natural way” the French public will know the truth, Karsenty says. Though he is not without victories of his own; last June, French television station Canal+ was found guilty of defaming Karsenty.
On his current trip, he said, his audiences are too often “shocked” at the case against the France 2 footage. “Most of them don’t really know the truth,” he says–even members of the Israeli government, though they are coming around as well. In late October, the Prime Minister’s Office released a letter basically affirming the lack of evidence to support the original claim of the footage. Karsenty expects another letter to be released in the near future, this one worded even more strongly than the October letter.
That explains the mostly positive response Karsenty has received on his current tour, though even his antagonists cannot refute the evidence. “I’m bringing facts, and they’re bringing faith,” he says.
Most of his audiences, he adds, are still surprised.
“I’ll tell you that 90 percent of the people I’m meeting don’t know the details of the case and they don’t know that it’s a staged hoax,” Karsenty says. “Most of them know that the Israeli soldiers didn’t kill the boy, but they didn’t know that it was staged, that it was non-professional actors.”
Karsenty says his message is clear: follow your instincts when you watch or read the news:
“Look, I’m always telling them that they should use their common sense when watching the news, when they’re listening to the radio, or they’re reading the newspaper–use their common sense and cross examine the information when they really care about it.”
And Karsenty doesn’t ask to be exempt either; he challenges people to put his evidence under the microscope: “I don’t ask them to trust me.”
Karsenty compares the al-Dura hoax to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which took an inordinate amount of time to debunk, and by that time the damage was done.
Karsenty reminds me that Enderlin is still France 2’s Jerusalem bureau chief, and his cameraman is still a France 2 correspondent in Gaza.
“We are working for history, and we’re working for the future generations,” he says.
But Karsenty is not quite as bullish on the rise of New Media as I expected him to be. The proliferation of blogs and other media have allowed Israel defenders and media watchdogs to make their cases immediately, to attempt to blunt the force of a biased (or fraudulent) report. But Karsenty believes the current media environment allows would-be Israel defenders to be insulated from the bias they need to be fighting.
“All of us live in an electronic ghetto,” he says. “Before, when you were buying the newspaper at the kiosk you would read some articles which would please you and some which would really hurt you. But now you’re only receiving emails from your friends, from people who think like you, and you only go to Web sites that you like.”
Nonetheless, Karsenty says the al-Dura affair is close to being understood as a Palestinian crime, aided and abetted by the French government–the reverse of its initial impact.
“I think that we’re getting closer and closer to the end of this hoax, and I think that Charles Enderlin by publishing his book went too far and this has really infuriated some Israeli officials who really want the truth,” he says.
He concluded:
“For the future of the state of Israel, and for the future of the Jews in the world, and for the future of France, and for the future of all the Western democracies, it’s high time now for the Western elites to report the news correctly wherever they are reporting from. Because when they are lying about Israel and the Jews, they are lying about everything. The lies that we are reading in the European media about America are terrible, and I think it’s crazy to let them lie that much.”
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