http://www.mishpacha.com/getPdf/1/289/18/0/
Whether al-Dura himself is dead or alive, the al-Dura case is still living and breathing and expelling a foul stench that still hovers over Israel to this day.
Nine years ago, it was one of the pivotal developments that gave impetus to the Palestinian Authority to launch its intifada against Israel, in 2000, in the aftermath of the breakdown of the Camp David talks.
Today, the televised pictures of al-Dura, a terrified twelve-year-old cowering in fear in his father’s embrace, caught in crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian terrorists, remains an enduring symbol of the Palestinian uprising. It may well be the father of the last decade’s worth of libelous slander against Israel, its elected officials, and its army. It keeps alive the simmering Arab hopes that one day their cause will prevail.
“If you go all over the Muslim world, it is still the most vivid picture used to incite against the Jews. In Mali’s capital, Bamako, there is a huge monument to it in the center of [the] city,” says Philippe Karsenty, head of Media-Ratings, an independent company based in Paris that assesses the reliability of information disseminated by the media. Mr. Karsenty has been locked in a multiyear legal battle with France’s state-owned France 2, which aired the original al-Dura footage that Mr. Karsenty says he has proven was staged for the TV cameras.
Just as Richard Nixon’s secretary, Rosemary Woods, erased eighteen minutes of Oval Offi ce recorded conversations that would have incriminated her boss, nine crucial minutes of the twenty-seven minutes of al-Dura tape was excised and never shown to the public. France 2’s bureau chief in Israel, Charles Enderlin, had contended the missing minutes showed al-Dura in his death throes and were too grisly for the eye to take, but at the end of the complete footage, which was seen by the French courts and a select list of French journalists, one can see al-Dura alive, with nary a bloodstain, as he raises his elbow to the camera.
An IDF reenactment of the al-Dura incident, where investigators made replicas of IDF positions and the concrete barrel and wall that sheltered al-Dura, has proven that the gunfi re could not have come from Israeli positions. The IDF ultimately concluded that al-Dura was likely killed by Palestinian gunfire.
After Mr. Karsenty’s initial claims, France 2 sued Mr. Karsenty for libel and won in court in 2006, but that decision was overturned last year by a Paris Court of Appeals that said Mr. Karsenty was within his rights to call the report a hoax, adding that the issues he raised were legitimate and that he had produced a “coherent mass of evidence” and “exercised in good faith his right to free criticism.”
Not Just a Jewish Story
Mr. Karsenty did not appear the least bit battle worn, as he sat down with me in the lobby of Jerusalem’s Inbal Hotel the morning after his arrival in Israel for a flurry of scheduled public debates with some of Israel’s best-known leftist journalists and commentators.
France’s Cour de Cassation - Supreme Court - is now hearing France 2’s appeal, with no date set for a fi nal verdict. “Even if I lose in the Supreme Court for technical reasons, it won’t transform a fake news report into a true news report,” said Mr. Karsenty.
His parents moved from Morocco to France in 1965 when they sensed there was no future for a young Jewish family in Morocco. Ten years later, they perceived that their Paris suburb was also becoming hostile to Jews and they moved again. “I remember the discussion my parents had,” Mr. Karsenty told me. “They were either going to buy a very nice, beautiful house in a dirty neighborhood or buy a nice, but smaller one, in what became the Jewish ghetto. They decided to buy in the Jewish ghetto to avoid having their children live in a hostile environment.”
“But please don’t make this into a Jewish story,” Mr. Karsenty added during the course of our conversation. “This story is all about the truth. I was raised in a family where the truth meant everything to them.”
In addition to being head of Media-Ratings, Mr. Karsenty doubles as deputy mayor of Neuilly, an exclusive suburb just west of Paris. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, served as Neuilly’s mayor for twenty years and Mr. Karsenty has the distinction of having run against him for the parliament in 2002. “Basically I ran against him because we disagreed on Israel,” said Mr. Karsenty. “He once told me over breakfast, with many other people present, that the Golan Heights was Syrian, and I disagreed. He said, ‘If you disagree, run against me.’
“I did, and I lost,” added Mr. Karsenty with a whimsical smile. “Otherwise I would be president today and Sarkozy would be sitting here talking to you.”
As we begin looking through some details of the al-Dura case on my laptop, the news headlines flash that British authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni on the eve of her scheduled diplomatic visit to England in her current capacity as leader of the Knesset’s opposition Kadima party. As foreign minister during last year’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and following the Goldstone Commission report charging Israel with war crimes during that military campaign, Mrs. Livni was potentially facing arrest for war crimes, had she arrived in England and been served with the warrant.
To Mr. Karsenty, this is vivid proof, in real time, of just how critical it is for Israel to counter false and exaggerated charges leveled against them by the slew of anti-Israel media outlets operating in the world. “It’s so important that Israeli politicians understand that giving up the good name of Israel can mean giving up their own freedom. If they start getting into trouble, maybe then they will see that their mismanagement of the information and the news makes life miserable for them.”
“When French TV is able to get away with such a blood libel, it allows the Swedish press to create the organ-stealing libel and allows other news organizations to create any other libels they may be preparing in their imaginations.”
