Seeker Blog

Back in February 2005 I wrote I series of three posts on Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?, with the lede:

In the introduction to this March 2005 Atlantic Monthly piece, James Fallows writes: for the The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father’s arms during an Israeli confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. Now a number of Israeli researchers are presenting persuasive evidence that the fatal shots could not have come from the Israeli soldiers known to have been involved in the confrontation. The evidence will not change Arab minds—but the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon.

There are a series of iconic images derived from a France 2 videotape filmed on September 30, 2000, the second day of Arafat’s “second intifada”. The images are real in the sense they are stills from video taken on that day in that place. What is false is the claim by France 2 that the twelve year old boy was killed by Israeli soldiers.

Now Boston University historian Richard Landes has launched the Second Draft website to investigate “other problems and issues that plague modern journalism”. The first project, Pallywood, is a study of other distorted France 2 reportage from the first days of the “Second Intifada”. The results are compelling, and particularly powerful because the site presents the actual video, beginning with the raw footage.

The best commentary I’ve seen on the Second Draft efforts is by Neo-Neocon, including a number of useful background resources. Her post is superior to anything I could write, so get on over there…

PS: please do not miss the remarkable Solomonia interview with Prof. Landes - which I might not have seen absent the Neo-Neocon link. Just a few excerpts to demonstrate this is not your usual guarded interview:

…We’re heading over to an office to deliver a video tape of a debate the professor has just participated in. He leans over to me, this self-described Man of the Left, and says in a confiding tone, “Of the three participants…I was the right-winger.” He rolls his eyes.

That’s the state of things in 2005, where a guy who simply wants the truth to be told, who wants a little fairness — fairness for the Jews, for Israel, for America…and for the Palestinians, too — can be considered “right wing.”

…

S: What is Pallywood?

L: It’s a play on the expression Bollywood, the designation of India’s film industry, based in Bombay. It identifies a practice among Palestinian journalists to turn staged drama into news. This fictional news industry then feeds Western news reporting, who don’t seem to suspect they’re being duped.

The expression acknowledges that the active, if still young, film industry of Palestinian culture, especially since the advent of cultural autonomy with the Oslo Accords in 1993, has already made a distinctive contribution to global culture.

S: Isn’t the expression disrespectful…mocking?

L: On one level, not at all. Most national film industries would love to have the success in the larger world media that Pallywood has achieved. Pallywood is a distinctive and powerful national product. But on the other hand, because it identifies Pallywood as part of a campaign of disinformation and propaganda, why should we respect that, rather than criticize it? As for mocking, at a basic level Pallywood is a joke played by the Palestinians on the West, and one can see it in the smiles on the faces of by-standers as they walk away from these staged scenes.

…

S: What was the triggering event that brought you, a Medievalist, into this realm of media criticism? Was it the 2nd Intifada?

L: Yeah, it was that. I could see that the Muhamed al Dura affair [the young Palestinian boy who’s death has become a matter of great controversy] was operating in the Arab World as a Blood Libel. After 2000 the entire global system got an injection of poison via the Arab World, but with virtually no resistance, particularly in Europe. First it was Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians, then European Muslim attacks on Jews and Synagogues. Then it was suicide bombings. The Europeans should have slammed the brakes on and said, ‘That’s it! You don’t get our support. We know this poison!’ But their press was so uniformly anti-Israel, so eager to run whatever demonizing narrative the Palestinians had to offer, that instead they were out there in demonstrations with models wearing suicide bomber belts. Then I realized how terrifyingly stupid and self-destructive the media was behaving.

…

L: Yeah. So there’s this attitude like, if an Arab says things that the Israelis want to hear, you’re the equivalent of an Oreo, a coconut, brown on the outside white on the inside There’s a bizarre kind of self-destructiveness at work here, particularly for the press.

Part of the purpose of the web site is to examine a free media’s role in giving us reliable and relevant information — in other words that doesn’t obsess over stuff going on in one corner of the world while ignoring devastating things that happen in the rest of the world — that’s the question of relevance, and reliable in the sense of accurate and honest. That’s a major pillar of civil society. Y’know, that’s what I was trying to tell these students at Vassar [where Landes participated in a recent debate] — if you think that the United States is as much of a theocracy as Libya, or more, which was what one of my fellow panelists was basically saying, if you listen to this rhetoric and believe it, you have no idea what you have. You have no appreciation, and not only don’t you appreciate what you have, you definitely don’t appreciate how hard it was to get here. Civil society is a miracle, and one of the pillars of civil society is an accurate and relevant media. And right now, I’d say we’re in terrible shape.

S: They’re arrogant?

L: Yeah, well that’s one of the points of this book I’m reading by Renata Adler, Canaries in the Mineshaft — the idea that the New York Times has a Corrections Section where you correct the way you spell people’s names, but you don’t correct the major, major mistakes that you made…