Thread by @JewhadiTM

Revisiting Netzarim Junction and the Birth of Fake News tabletmag.com/sections/news/…

“In late October 2003, when I got to see the original raw footage that a Palestinian cameraman had shot three years earlier at Netzarim Junction on Sept. 30, 2000.

It was a peek through the lens of Talal Abu Rahma, the Palestinian cameraman who had filmed what journalists later depicted as a day of riots that killed many in the Gaza Strip, including the 12-year-old boy, Muhammad al Durah.

Charles Enderlin, chief correspondent of France2, aired the footage as news with his cameraman’s narrative: an innocent Palestinian boy, targeted by the IDF, gunned down while his father pleaded with the Israelis to stop shooting.

It became an instant global sensation, enraging the Muslim world and provoking angry protests where Western progressives and militant Muslims joined to equate Israel to the Nazis.

Ironically, for the first time since the Holocaust, “Death to Jews” was heard in the capitals of Europe. From that point on, for many, Israel was to blame for all violence, a pariah state.

In the Middle East, a new round of suicide bombers, “revenging the blood of Muhammad al Durah” targeted Israeli children to the approval of 80% of the Palestinian public. It was, in fact, the first postmodern blood libel.

The first blood libel announced by a Jew (Enderlin), spread by the modern mainstream news media (MSNM), and carried in cyberspace to a global audience. It was the first wildly successful piece of “fake news” of the 21st century, and, as an icon of hatred, it did untold damage.

But it gets worse. Not only did the evidence show that the Israelis could not have fired the shots that hit the boy and his father, but everything about the footage suggests the scene was staged.

There was no blood on the wall or ground and footage never shown to the public appeared to show the boy moving after being declared dead. I set out to explore this staged hypothesis, first raised by Nahum Shahaf, and exposed to the Anglophone public by James Fallows in 2003.

And that had brought me to see these rushes, the raw, unedited footage shot that day in September 2000 at Netzarim Junction.

The film was in the possession of senior French-Israeli journalist and France2 chief correspondent Charles Enderlin, who was the employer of Abu Rahma, the cameraman who had shot the footage.

For the viewing, I had Enderlin on my left, and on my right, an Israeli cameraman working for France2, who had been with Enderlin in Ramallah the day of the filming.

What I saw astonished me. In scene after scene, Palestinians staged scenes of battle, injury, ambulance evacuation, and panicked flight, which the cameraman deliberately filmed, all the while standing around in front of the Israeli position, completely unafraid.

To judge by Abu Rahma’s 21 minutes of film, and a Reuters cameraman’s two hours, Netzarim Junction that day of September, the “third day of the intifada,” was the site of multiple makeshift stages.

Cameramen, most Palestinian, some foreign, filmed “action sequences,” performed by everyone from military men with guns to teenagers and kids standing by.

The other shoe had dropped. In earlier sessions with Nahum Shahaf, the first (“semi-official”) Israeli investigator of the al Durah affair, hired by IDF southern commander, Yom Tov Samia, I had seen over two hours of video from that day.

This footage, shot by a Palestinian cameraman working for Reuters, had familiarized me with the Palestinian practice of staging scenes, whose basic sequence ran:

Fake a dramatic injury, have people gather around you, pick you up (often brutally, without stretchers) and rush you to an ambulance, helpers eagerly grabbing the injured on the run, in order to get on camera.

Those carrying the wounded, then throw him in the back of the ambulance, slam shut the doors, and the driver takes off, sirens blaring. That evening, you all go home and see how many times you made the news.

I already knew that Palestinians faked footage, but what I now understood was that the mainstream news media, whose first imperative was to filter out such blatant propaganda, had accepted it as a normal practice, and used the fakes to tell the “real” story.

Professional standards for journalists in the West can make even staging B-roll problematic. But apparently, in the ME, Western journalists have few problems with staged A-roll as long as they can cut it into believable site-bytes of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood.

For anyone familiar with journalistic norms in the Middle East, the practice of staging news as a tactic in ideological and narrative warfare, should not come as a surprise.

The Islamic Mass Media Charter adopted in 1980 states clearly its mission: “To combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.”

Elsewhere, the charter declares, “Islamic media-men should censor all material that is either broadcast or published, in order to protect the Ummah from influences that are harmful to Islamic character and values, and in order to forestall all dangers.”

Indeed, as one Jordanian editor noted, Arab states have been innovators of fake news.

And it’s not just Israel and the Jews who suffer from this disinformation campaign; as history has long shown, the second victim of anti-Semitism, are the anti-Semites.

If in the 20th century, Isaiah Berlin could quip: “Anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than absolutely necessary,” the 21st century version is “Anti-Zionism is hating Israel even when it hurts you.”

(via Richard Landes)