|
The fact that the video was edited to fit an agenda does not bother you. The fact that the existence of the raw footage was concealed does not bother you. The fact that No autopsy, bullets, or ballistics examination occurred does not bother you. You dont think there should be an appeal even though the the appeal is based on the discovery of the raw footage which was hidden originally but was since discovered. Truth does not matter and all these things are OK with you as long as Israel is demonised. Is this what you are saying. In February 2008 Jean-Claude Schlinger, a ballistics expert appointed by the French court, submitted a report indicating that IDF gunfire could not possibly have killed al-Dura. The report concluded that if gunfire had killed the boy, it must have come from the Palestinian position. Schlinger was the first official investigator to review the footage in this fashion not associated with the Israeli government. <2> The controversy over al-Durrah's death centers on two main areas. First, neither Palestinian nor Israeli officials appear to have conducted a full investigation. No bullets appear to have been recovered; there was no autopsy; and no ballistics tests were conducted at the scene to determine the angle of the shots. Second, there is controversy regarding the way the France 2 footage was shot, edited, and reported. No autopsy, bullets, or ballistics examination It was reported that no autopsy was performed,<30> and no bullets appear to have been recovered, either at the hospital or at the scene. In an interview with Esther Shapiro for Three Bullets and a Child, a 2002 documentary for Germany's ARD channel, Talal Abu Rahma, the cameraman, said that bullets had been recovered; he said that Shapiro should ask a named Palestinian official, a general, about them. The general told Shapiro that he had no bullets, and that there had been no Palestinian investigation into the shooting because there was no doubt about who had shot the boy. "It was the Israeli side who committed this murder," he said.<29> When told the general had no bullets, Abu Rahma said instead that France 2 had collected the bullets at the scene. When questioned about this by Shapiro, he replied: "We have some secrets for ourselves ... We cannot give anything ... everything."<29> Shapiro also reported that the wall the al-Durrahs sheltered behind, in which bullet holes are visible in the footage, had been destroyed by the IDF before a ballistics examination could be conducted. <29><31> Shapiro's documentary concluded that the boy could not have been shot by the IDF, and that the shooting and his death were accidental.<29><31> What the raw footage showed The France 2 footage became controversial because Enderlin's report showed only 59 seconds out of 27 minutes of raw footage, and did not include the scene of the boy's death. Just over three minutes of footage was provided to other news organizations and to the Israeli army. France 2 provided the footage free of charge to the world's media, saying it did not want to profit from the incident.<4> None of the distributed footage shows the boy dying. Independent journalists view the footage
Charles Enderlin, the France 2 bureau chief in Jerusalem, said that he had cut the death scene from his original report, and from the footage supplied to other media, because it showed the boy in his death throes ("agonie"), which he said in an interview with Télérama in October 2000 was "unbearable."<32>
In October 2004, in response to criticism that the footage may have been edited inappropriately, executives at France 2 allowed three senior French journalists to view all 27 minutes of the raw footage. The three were Daniel Leconte, a former France 2 correspondent; Dennis Jeambar, the editor-in-chief of L'Express; and Luc Rosenzweig, a former editor-in-chief of Le Monde, and a Metula News Agency (Mena) contributor.
Shortly after the viewing, Mena's editor-in-chief Stéphane Juffa reported that the footage did not show the boy's death.<6> Leconte and Jeambar wrote about the footage in an article co-authored a few weeks after viewing it, although it was first published five months later on January 25, 2005 by Le Figaro, allegedly only after it had been offered to, and rejected by, Le Monde.<4> In their article, Leconte and Jeambar write that there is no scene in the France 2 footage that shows the child had died. They wrote that they did not believe that the scene had been staged, but that "this famous 'agony' that Enderlin insisted was cut from the montage does not exist."<4>
They also wrote that the first 20 minutes or so of the film showed young Palestinians "playing at war" for the cameras, falling down as if wounded, then getting up and walking away. They told a radio interviewer that a France 2 official had said "You know it's always like that."<33> In an interview with Cybercast News Service, Leconte said that he found France 2's statement disturbing. "I think that if there is a part of this event that was staged, they have to say it, that there was a part that was staged, that it can happen often in that region for a thousand reasons," he said.<4>
Leconte did not conclude that the shooting of the boy and his father was faked; in his view "At the moment of the shooting, it's no longer acting, there's really shooting, there's no doubt about that."<33>
In February 2005, France 2 also showed the raw footage to the International Herald Tribune. The reporter, Doreen Carvajal, writes that the footage of the father and son lasts several minutes, but does not clearly show the child's death. She also writes there is a cut in the scene that France 2 executives say was caused by the cameraman's efforts to preserve a low battery.<4>
Leconte asks France 2 to correct its report
On February 15, 2005, Leconte said in an interview with the Cybercast News Service that al-Durrah had been shot from the Palestinian position. He said: "The only ones who could hit the child were the Palestinians from their position. If they had been Israeli bullets, they would be very strange bullets because they would have needed to go around the corner."<33> He dismissed an earlier claim by France 2 that the gunshots that struck al-Durrah were bullets that could have ricocheted off the ground, stating "It could happen once, but that there should be eight or nine of them, which go around a corner? They're just saying anything."<33>
Leconte also told the Cybercast News Service that the cameraman had retracted his testimony. France 2's communications director Christine Delavennat said that Abu Rahma had not retracted his testimony, but rather "denied making a statement — falsely attributed to him by a human rights group — to the effect that the Israeli army fired at the boy in cold blood."<33>
Leconte said that because the pictures had "devastating" consequences, which included the public lynching of two Israeli soldiers and a rise in antisemitism among French Muslims, France 2 or Enderlin should admit that their report may have been misleading. "Who will say it, I don't know, but it is important that Enderlin or France 2 should say, that on these pictures, they were wrong — they said things that were not reality," he said.<33>
Enderlin's response
Enderlin responded to Jeambar and Leconte's charges in a January 27, 2005 article in Le Figaro. He wrote that he had alleged the bullets were fired by the Israelis for a number of reasons: first, he trusted the cameraman who, he said, had worked for France 2 for 17 years. It was the cameraman, he said, who made the initial claim during the broadcast, and later had it confirmed by other journalists and sources. The initial Israeli statements also played a role, he said.<14>
Enderlin said "the image corresponded to the reality of the situation, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank," where, he wrote, in the first month of the Intifada, the IDF had already shot around one million bullets, and killed 118 Palestinians, including 33 children, compared to the 11 Israelis killed. Enderlin attributed these figures to Ben Kaspit of Maariv.<14>
Leconte responded: "I find this, from a journalistic point of view, hallucinating. That a journalist like him can be driven to say such things is very revealing of the state of the press in France today."<33>
Enderlin also wrote that a journalist does not have to take note of "possibly dishonest" later uses by "extremist groups," and accused Jeambar and Leconte of promoting "censorship".<14>
Allegations that the incident was staged
Richard Landes
Richard Landes,<34> a Boston University professor specializing in medieval cultures, and founder and director of the Center for Millennial Studies,<35> studied full footage from other Western news outlets shot on the day of the shooting, including the pictures of the boy, and concluded that the shooting had probably been faked.<36>
He called the footage an example of "Pallywood" cinema, writing: "I came to the realization that Palestinian cameramen, especially when there are no Westerners around, engage in the systematic staging of action scenes."<4> Landes went on to found the website Second Draft, dedicated to gathering evidence on the al-Durrah case and other controversies in journalism.<37>
Shahaf/Duriel investigation
Nahum Shahaf, a physicist, and Yosef Duriel, an engineer, were informally commissioned by IDF Southern Commander Major General Yom Tov Samia to begin a second investigation of the case. Shortly after the shooting, the IDF acknowledged that there was "a high probability" that IDF gunfire had killed al-Durrah. Ha'aretz writes that Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon expressed his sorrow over the tragedy, assuming that "the damage to Israel's reputation was irreversible, and knowing that Israel faced the reality of more children dying ..."<38> Senior officers in the Southern Command were allegedly bitter about what they saw as this hasty capitulation, which is why Shahaf and Duriel's offer to help investigate was accepted. The two were already familiar with one another after being involved in attempts to develop alternative theories about the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.<38>
On October 23, 2000, Shahaf and Duriel arranged a re-enactment of the shooting on an IDF shooting range, in front of a CBS 60 Minutes camera crew. Duriel told 60 Minutes that he believed al-Durrah was killed by Palestinian gunmen collaborating with the France 2 camera crew and the boy's father, with the intent of fabricating an anti-Israel propaganda symbol.<38> Samia immediately removed Duriel from the investigation, but Duriel continued to insist that his version was accurate and that the IDF were refusing to publicize it because the results were "explosive".<38>
The results of the investigation were released on November 27, 2000. Samia stated: "A comprehensive investigation conducted in the last weeks casts serious doubt that the boy was hit by Israeli fire. It is quite plausible that the boy was hit by Palestinian bullets in the course of the exchange of fire that took place in the area." IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz later insisted that this investigation was a private enterprise of Samia's.<39> Yossi Almog, a retired senior police officer who specializes in evidence-gathering, told Ha'aretz: "I don't believe the IDF would release a conclusion revising a previous declaration without first conducting a thorough examination, using the best professionals in the security establishment. I wouldn't rely on an approach made by some anonymous person. I might welcome that person's initiative, but I certainly wouldn't accept his conclusions without conducting a systematic, orderly examination, under the best possible conditions. Anything less than that isn't serious."<38>
James Fallows, in a June 2003 article in The Atlantic Monthly titled Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura? characterized Shahaf's evidence for his conclusion as follows:
The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf's evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father's lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead? Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if 'directing' a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear — based on the length of shadows — to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father's shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, 'The boy is dead' before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?"
– James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly.<22>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_al-Durrah
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
