The investigation of the France2 affair is making some progress. John Rosenthal’s Transatlantic Intelligencer has several updates, this one from Feb 3: The Fake, but Accurate Intifada: New Developments in the Mohammed Al-Dura Affair.
In brief: France2 finally shows the 27 minutes of raw-footage to French journalists. France2’s reporter Charles Enderlin has long maintained that he intentionally cut the images of the boy’s death throes from the report because they were “intolerable”. In fact those images do not exist - they were not "cut". The 27 minutes are comprised of fully 24 minutes of "stagings". France2/Enderlin maintains that the 3 minutes devoted to filming Mohammed al-Dura and his father are real, though they do not show the boy being shot (it is now understood that it is physically impossible that the boy could have been shot by Israeli troops, if anyone actually was shot).
France2 finally allowed outsiders to view the 27 minutes of raw footage from which the famous images and 55 live seconds of video were extracted. For the Oct 22, 2004 viewing, former Le Monde reporter Luc Rosenzweig was accompanied by two senior figures of French journalism, Denis Jeambar, the director of the newsweekly L’Express, and producer (and frequent Arte contributor) Daniel Leconte. Rosenzweig was representing Metula News Agency (MENA), a French-language news agency in Israel.
For reasons I don’t understand, Jeambar and Leconte kept silent about what they had seen until they published an op-ed Jan 25, 2005 in Le Figaro. Rosenthal translates from the French:
Here is what they have to say about the content of the rushes and, more specifically, Charles Enderlin’s claim that he edited out “the child’s death throes” from the France2 report:
…the viewing of the rushes teaches us nothing more definite about “the child’s death throes”. Or rather, it does! These famous “death throes”, which Enderlin claims to have cut from the report, do not exist.
On the other hand, viewing the rushes permits us to note…that in the minutes prior to the gunfire, the Palestinians seem to have organized a staging [mise en scène]. They “play” at fighting the Israelis and simulate, in most cases, imaginary incidents of being wounded. The viewing of the complete rushes also demonstrates that at the moment that Charles Enderlin says that the child is dead, supposedly killed by the Israelis – that is to say that very evening on the nightly news on France2 –there is nothing that would permit him to know that the child is dead, still less that he had been killed by the Israeli soldiers. Everything, on the contrary, starting with the relative positions of the principals on the terrain, would seem to incriminate rather one or more bullets fired by the Palestinians.
Rosenthal later adds this important update:
Jeambar’s and Leconte’s interview with RCJ adds an important detail that was absent from their Figaro article. Whereas in the Figaro article, Jeambar and Leconte acknowledge that the rushes contain "stagings" [mise-en-scene], in the RCJ interview, Jeambar specifies that during fully 24 minutes of the rushes "one sees nothing but [my emphasis - JR] mise-en-scene":
…young Palestinians…faking being wounded. One sees them fall. When they have the impression that nothing is happening, they get up…. You see boys who look at the camera, they pretend to fall, they fall, and when they see nothing is happening, they get up and run off….They completely fake [simulent] being wounded. One sees ambulances coming and going, which evacuate people who have not been wounded at all.
In fact, those who have read Gérard Huber’s book will not be surprised to find out that the rushes contained such scenes, since Huber’s book contains virtually identical descriptions of footage shot on the same day in Netzarim. Perhaps it is indeed the same footage. But what is especially interesting about Jeambar’s comment is that he says there was "nothing but" mise-en-scene for some 24 minutes. Jeambar suggests that the scene of Mohammed Al-Dura and his father was somehow "completely out of context". Now, the total length of the rushes is said to be 27 minutes and some 3 minutes of rushes specifically of the scene of Mohammed Al-Dura and his father had already been provided by France2 to the Israeli government. This is to say that Jeambar and Leconte are claiming, in effect, that virtually the entirety of the rushes - except the scenes of Mohammed Al-Dura - consist of faked events.
More Rosenthal posts as new developments come along:
Feb. 07: Seeing, but not Seeing the Rushes: The NYTimes on the Mohammed Al-Dura Affair
Feb. 13: Controversy? What Controversy?: France2’s Continued Use of the Al-Dura Footage
Feb. 16: Controversy? No Controversy…
Mar. 02: Stéphane Juffa on the Al-Dura Affair and the French Media
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