Philippe Karsenty Acquitted by French Appeals Court of Having Slandered News Faker Charles Enderlin for the al-Durah Hoax

UPDATED - LINKS ADDED & new link and commentary added on 6-4-2008

Today, 21 May 2008, a small piece of justice was done. Late, but better late than never. Philippe Karsenty, who runs a media rating and review web site [Media Ratings], called for Charles Enderlin to resign or be dismissed from France2 TV [a state TV broadcaster] for having endorsed and broadcast the filmed hoax of little Muhammad al-Durah allegedly being deliberately shot to death by Israeli troops in Gaza. Viewing some 20 minutes of the film taken that day by Enderlin's Arab cameraman as well as film by other cameramen taken at the same time and place, shows that young al-Durah was highly unlikely to have been killed at that time and place, let alone killed by Israeli soldiers guarding the Jewish civilian settlement of Netsarim in the Gaza Strip.

After Karsenty called for his resignation or dismissal, Enderlin and Arlette Chabot, his superior at France2, sued him for insulting, libelling, defaming a public official, since Enderlin works for France2, a state agency. Today Karsenty was acquitted. Here is material on the acquittal and the case in general.

Mena News Agency -- Stephane Juffa
14:30 à Paris, mercredi 21 mai.

La présidente de la Cour d’Appel de Paris, Madame Laurence Trébucq, a prononcé, il y a quelques minutes, la relaxe de Philippe Karsenty, qui avait été condamné en première instance pour diffamation à l’encontre de Charles Enderlin et de la chaîne publique de télévision française, Fr2.

Lors d’une audience qui aura duré moins de deux minutes, la présidente n’a pas explicité sa décision.

A en croire des confidences d’avocat, le tribunal aurait jugé qu’en considération des éléments existants, le débat sur l’authenticité du reportage de France2 était légitime et que le fait d’accuser la chaîne et son correspondant de mise en scène n’était pas diffamatoire.

On ignore, au moment de diffuser, si FR2 et Charles Enderlin vont se pourvoir en cassation.

Une petite dizaine de journalistes assistaient à l’audience, dont des confrères israéliens ainsi qu’un représentant de l’AFP.
Wednesday 21 May [13:14:00 BST]
[for more from Juffa and the Mena web site, in both French and English, hit the first link above. Also see the seconddraft website and the Media Ratings sites, both linked to from the blog roll on the right side of the Emet m'Tsiyon blog roll.

Bear in mind that the al-Durah blood libel was the pretext for massive anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and even anti-Western violence and mass murder over the past seven and a half years.
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More links on the al-Durah case:
the French daily Liberation, Augean Stables, Camera #1. Camera #2. The Camera #2 link provides useful notices about the important personalities in the al-Durah/France2 Affair. Prof Richard Landes of the Augean Stables blog is also the director of the Seconddraft website which displays much more footage about events at the Netsarim intersection in Gaza than were presented by France2's original hate-inciting broadcast. The site presents additional footage by Talal Abu Rahma, the cameraman for France2 [and its Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin], as well as unedited film by other cameramen on the scene at the same time.

In an article in the WSJ, Nidra Poller, an American author living in Paris, summarizes the court decision and the meaning of the case for journalism in the 21st century.
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UPDATING 6-4-2008
A rather good Wall Street Journal editorial of 5-27-2008, shows that even those with good intentions get taken in by the al-Durah myth. The Journal writes that:

The iconic image of the terrified child crouching behind his father helped sway world opinion against the Jewish state and fueled the last Intifada.

If we actually look at the film we see that the boy is crouching in front of his father. The father is next to the wall. The boy is more exposed than the father is to shooting coming from anywhere on a 180 degree arc [that is, within a semi-circle] based on the outermost point of the barrel and on a vertical plane parallel to the wall. This mistake by even a fair-minded observer shows how the myth created by Gaza Arab cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, by France2 correspondent Charles Enderlin, and by countless Islamic jihadist and pro-Arab Western propagandists ["journalists"] has the power to cause the highly visible empirical fact that the boy crouches in front of his father to be overlooked in the general gestalt view that the saintly father was trying to protect his martyred son. If anything, the boy is shielding his father. Here we have more testimony to the power of suggestion in a situation of ongoing indoctrination and emotion.
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Coming: the anti-Jewish racism of the "peace process," more on Zionist activists and other Jews in the Armenian genocide, etc.

Activist Zionists & Armenian Genocide -- Part Two

Testimony written down by Jewish eyewitnesses, Zionists in particular, describes genocidal acts by Ottoman troops against Armenians. We have presented quotes from a book of memoirs by Eitan Belkind, a survivor of the NILI group that decided to spy on the Ottoman forces and inform British officials based in Cairo. This decision was made after NILI members had learned of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians. Sarah Aaronsohn, sister of Aaron Aaronsohn, was another eyewitness of the massacres as she traveled by train across Anatolia and saw events from the train window. Meanwhile, Henry Morgenthau, an American Jew and US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent reports on the genocide back to the State Department in Washington, after receiving reports from his subordinates and other Americans throughout the Armenian areas of the Empire.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported from their homes and sent in the direction of Deir ez-Zor [Dayr az-Zawr] in northeastern Syria of today near the Euphrates. Of course, many many died on the way, and Arab sheiks plucked out attractive women for their own, as well as teenage children of both sexes. When survivors of forced marches reached the Deir ez-Zor area, they were massacred in caves and in other ways, as described in the account by Eitan Belkind which we quote from here at length. Deir ez-Zor has been in the news more recently, again in the context of genocide and mass murder. It was in this same region that Israeli special forces destroyed a plant under construction to produce material for nuclear bombs, in September 2007. This was a plant being built according to North Korean designs for the mass murderous Syrian dictatorship of Bashar Assad. It was a cooperative Syrian-North Korean project. Since Syria's main great power protector and sponsor is Iran, and Iran's leadership has threatened to wipe out Israel, the North Korean Communists were collaborating in a project for the mass murder --meant to be a Final Solution, genocide-- of Jews. Which is entirely fitting, that is, that Communists would help in the mass murder of Jews as Stalin did in 1939 when he joined with Hitler to make war on Poland, thus facilitating the Holocaust.

We continue with Eitan Belkind's account of the Armenian genocide:

After three days riding, I reached Aram-Naharayim [the area between the Euphrates and the Khabor rivers], where I witnessed a terrible tragedy. There were two camps next to each other, one Armenian and one Circassian. The Circassians were "busy" with exterminating the Armenians. There were also Arab sheiks who selected beautiful Armenian girls as their wives. Two women approached me and gave their photos to me. Should I ever get to Aleppo and find their families (whether their families were alive was a question), the women asked me to send their greetings to whomever I found there.
The Circassian officer seeing me talk to the two Armenian women ordered me to leave but I stayed to see what would happen to the Armenians. The Circassian soldiers ordered the Armenians to gather dry grass and pile it into a tall pyramid, then they tied up all the Armenians who were there, almost 5,000 souls, their hands tied together and put them in a circle around the pile of grass and set it afire in a blaze, which rose up to heaven together with the screams of the wretched people, who were being burned to death. I fled from the place. I could not stand this horrifying sight. I rode as fast as I could, wishing to get as far from the place as possible. After two hours of crazy gallop, I could still hear the screams of the poor victims until they died out. In two days, I returned to that place and saw the burned bodies of thousands of people.
. . .
At the foot of the mountain, on my way to the city of Urfa in the north, I witnessed several mass-exterminations of the Armenians. People were wretched, desperate to madness. . . All the roads were strewn with the corpses of murdered Armenians.
[grammatical and spelling corrections made by Eliyahu to the translated quotes from Eitan Belkind's book, That's How It Was, the Story of a Member of Nili (Tel Aviv: 1977; in Hebrew; translation by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute),
[כך זה היה : סיפורו של איש ניל''י [תל אביב: משרד הבטחון 1977

This account indicates a planned in advance, systematic, deliberate mass murder of the Armenians. This account leaves no room to imagine that what the Ottoman Empire perpetrated was not genocide. The knowledge of the Armenian genocide [albeit the word did not exist at the time] on the part of the Aaronsohns and other future members of the NILI group is what motivated them to form NILI and make contact with the British in Cairo. A recent book by Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn (New York: Viking 2007), demonstrates the mood among the members of NILI at the time. Florence also points out anti-Jewish measures by the Ottoman army: expulsions of Jews from Tel Aviv, forced labor, starvation, etc. Here is Florence:

Once Aaron [Aaronsohn] and Avshalom [Feinberg] heard Sarah's [Sarah Aaronsohn's] descriptions of what she had seen across Anatolia, they could no longer discount the stories of Turkish persecution and outright massacres of the Armenians as rumors. . . with the ready comparison of the escalating measures against the Jews in Palestine, they concluded that they could only expect the same fate as the Armenians. Just weeks before, new regulations had been announced in Haifa drafting all Jewish men from twenty to forty-five. The new recruits would be issued no bread rations, and no stores of food at home for their families, which made the levy "nothing less than a death sentence --through starvation-- not only for the enlisted men but for the women and children they shall leave behind"[Aaronsohn's words, 12-3-1915] . At the end of 1915 the Turks would still let men buy their way out of breaking rocks on the roads, but after years of starvation few could afford the baksheesh. It was "only a pretext," Aaron wrote in his diary, "the truth being that they would meet a shameful, cruel and certain death." The Jews of Palestine, he and Avshalom concluded, would soon have no escape from the fate that Sarah had already seen inflicted on the Armenians.
"My teeth are ground down from worry about whose turn is next," Feinberg wrote in a note to [Leonard] Woolley [Florence, pp 179-180]

Leonard Woolley was a British spymaster in Cairo and a famous archeologist, who made some serious and unfortunate errors in that field of research, which is another story.
So we clearly see that what happened to the Armenians was real genocide, and that Jews in Israel felt real and justified fear that their turn was coming.
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links added 5-14-2015
Eitan Belkind and his family [here]
Eitan Belkind on Armenian website [here], the Armenian Genocide Museum / Institute
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Coming: A Jewess caught up in the Armenian genocide, the Anti-Jewish Racism of the "peace process," the anti-Jewish racism of Condoleezza Rice and the State Department, Jews in the Land of Israel, Jerusalem and Hebron, Muhammad's bloodthirst, peace follies, propaganda, etc.

Activist Zionists & the Armenian Genocide in WW I -- Part One

During the recent controversy over a congressional resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide during WW I, certain Jews spoke against the resolution and/or against agreeing that there was such a genocide. Moreover, there are certain Jewish historians and Middle East specialists, in the US, Israel, and France, who argue that there was not an Armenian genocide. Some of these writers are rabid Islamophiles for whom Muslims, whether Turks or Arabs, can do no wrong. These cannot be considered friends of the Jewish people. Others may think that they are helping Israel or the Jews keep good relations with Turkey by rejecting the real history.

Be that as it may, while the genocide was going on Jews in Israel and elsewhere were witnesses to the events and sent this information to the world outside of the Ottoman Empire. These included Aaron and Sarah Aaronsohn, and Eitan Belkind. The genocidal events so terrified them and their friends that they set up the NILI group to spy on the Ottoman war effort and send info to the British. This reversed the policy of most Zionists in Israel who were content to be loyal Ottoman subjects, participating in its institutions, before WW I. Aaron Aaronsohn was so desirous to help the Armenians, that he sought out Armenian political leaders in France after the war during the Versailles Conference to give them advice. He advised them, correctly I believe, to declare independence at that time, even though they were in a weak military position.

Aaronsohn and Belkind left testimonies that have been published of the massacres and persecutions. First Eitan Belkind's accounts from a book in Hebrew, apparently translated under the auspices of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem. Here are translated quotes from Eitan Belkind's book, That's How It Was, the Story of a Member of Nili (Tel Aviv: 1977),
[ כך זה היה : סיפורו של איש ניל''י [תל אביב: משרד הבטחון 1977

Belkind belonged to a locust eradication team appointed by the Ottoman government, which gave him the opportunity to travel about fighting the locusts.

. . . On the second day of our journey, we saw a corpse floating in the Euphrates. We were surprised but the soldier accompanying us reassured us that this was a body of an Armenian. We found out that there was a camp nearby, on the other side of the Euphrates where Armenians deported from Armenia were being held. Our friend Shirinyan turned white and asked to cross the Euphrates and go to the Armenian camp.

We found several hundred people in the camp living in small handmade huts. The territory was clean; the huts were built on one line . We passed by huts and looked inside. We say women and children. In one of the huts, Shirinyan found one of his aunts, who told him that all men had been killed; only women and children remained. Shirinyan had no idea what had happened to his nation. Shocked he began to cry on his aunt's shoulder. . . We went on the further we traveled the more more floating corpses of Armenians we saw. . .

Deir ez-Zor [Dayr az-Zur] was a military center, so it had a military hospital lead by a Jewish doctor Bekhor and Jewish pharmacist Arto. There we found out that Ahmad Bey was the commander of Circassian troops mobilized for exterminating. . . The doctor and the pharmacist invited us to their roomy house, told us that all Armenian men had been killed on the way from their homes in Anatolia, and the beautiful women and girls were left to the mercy of Bedouin. . .

At night before departure, we heard terrible, heart-rending female screams. The Armenian camp was one kilometer from our house. The screaming continued all night. We asked what was happening; they told us that children were being taken from their mothers to continue their education. However, in the morning when we set off and crossed the bridge across the Euphrates, I was shocked to see the river red with blood and beheaded corpses of children floating on the water. The scene was horrible, as there was nothing we could do.
[to be continued]

Now, is there anyone who can honestly claim that Belkind is not describing genocide? Note the massacre of children. Yet there are many throughout the world, not only Turks or other Muslims, who seek to deny the true character of these massacres. To be sure, some of the beautiful women were taken for sexual purposes. Nonetheless, that does not change the genocidal character of these events.

We should be proud to state that Zionist activists left accounts of the genocide and sought to help the Armenians at that time.

By the way, among those opposing the congressional resolution acknowledging the reality of the Armenian genocide was the US State Department, as well as its head, Condoleezza Rice, no friends of the Jews. The State Dept's hostility to the right of Jews to live in parts of the Land of Israel under Jordanian or Egyptian control before the Six Day War of 1967 is anti-Jewish racist in character and unsupported by international law, except as international law is deliberately misrepresented by the USA, UK, other governments, and the UN.
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see earlier post on related matters.
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Coming: Zionist Activists and the Armenian Genocide, Part Two; Jews in Israel, Jerusalem, Hebron; peace follies; the anti-Jewish racism of the "peace process" and the drive against Jewish settlements; propaganda; part of the British press descends into the Nazi cesspool [Johan Hari, et al.], etc.