Lies and Vicious Calumnies

What is it with the news media in the West, have they been completely suborned by their unspoken pledge to uphold a collective agreement to paint Israel in the most blighted colours possible, throwing truth and reality to the winds? Guess it sells.

The condemnations that accrue and rain down on Israel for its purported inhumane treatment of a neighbour population that outright refuses to relinquish its vendetta against an upstart presence are cringe-inducing to Israelis, seemingly incapable of mustering the resources to deny slanderous accusations.

During the Israel-Hezbollah confrontation that escalated into semi-war proportions in the summer of 2006, the "political wing" of the terrorist organization proved itself adept at providing western news media with photographs showing Israel in a human-rights abusing light, just as the "military wing" of that group laid the theatricals by staging assaults directly from within crowded population centres.

Doctored photographs allied with vicious propaganda were fodder for international condemnation of Israel. As public relations and media manipulation go, Hezbollah proved downright masterful. But they wouldn't have succeeded as spectacularly as they did without the complicity of the news sources eager to avail themselves of these special resources handed over to them by Hezbollah's agents.

And when it came to cynical manipulation of public opinion, leading to outright censure of Israel, no one knows how to twist reality as well as the Arabs do, they've had a long tradition of doing just that. Their blythe arrogance in flying traditional white flags of truce to avoid fire when they ferried about members of their militia placed real refugees from firing zones at risk, but that hardly mattered to the warriors of terror. About as much as deliberately placing civilians at risk by firing assaultive rockets against the IDF from the midst of crowded residential areas.

The thing of it is, even when astute observers, neutral or partisan alike have been able to determine that damning photographs and the narrative that accompanied them were falsified, nothing unravelled the original damage. The apprehension in the public mind of Israel victimizing those whose sole purpose is to destroy that country remains indelibly engraved in the memory and minds of a readily manipulable public. The original story sticks, it will not relinquish fiction to restore reality.

So when a French appeals court recently overturned the libel conviction of Philippe Karsenty who claimed that the France-2 TV report of the death of a young Palestinian boy, huddled beside his helpless father as Israeli troops shot the boy to death, it was a vindication too long in coming. One that will never resonate with the public for the simple reason that it will not receive anything resembling the wide international media coverage that the falsified film footage had.

Mr. Karsenty, as publisher of a media critique website, Media Ratings, stated that a media report aired in September 2000 by France-2 from Netzarim Junction in Gaza, ostensibly showing the shocking killing of an Arab youngster by Israeli soldiers represented a deliberate and vicious fiction. One that the world absorbed and condemned Israel for.

And which Arabs found useful for the purpose of instilling even more hatred of Israel from within the Palestinian population, as well as the broader Arab world. The Arab League found it useful to dedicate October 1 as the Day of Arab Children, honouring the name of the "dead boy". Iran saw fit to name 150 schools after the "dead boy", a symbol of monstrous Israeli inhumanity.

Yet the Arab father and child, feverishly attempting to protect themselves from IDF gunfire were play actors in a deliberate theatre of public relations whose purpose was to smear Israel beyond redemption. And they succeeded admirably.

On the basis of raw film footage that the court viewed that encompassed the production of the film, the court ruled that Mr. Karsenty's allegation that the clip had been staged - was a reasonable conclusion. Thus exonerating him from an earlier libel conviction brought against Mr. Karsenty by France-2, which sued him for libel.

A formal Israeli investigation indicated without a shadow of doubt that it would not have been physically possible for any Israeli soldier to have shot the boy; subsequent independent investigations served to confirm the Israeli findings. Some foreign media outlets came up with similar findings.

Yet none of this was ever reported in the media at large, that same media so eager to leap all over the film that appeared unequivocally to show Israeli inhumanity in a theatre of war. Left-wing, anti-Israeli journalists remain eager to make use of any emotion-inspiring photographs and rumours calumniating Israel.

Locally contracted Palestinian stringers, photographers, cameramen who serve an agenda not entirely commensurate with serving up truth and reality provide the wherewithal for outside news agencies to report on items of mass emotional content, irrespective of lack of truth.

News agencies from Europe to North America routinely use the work of these stringers and cameramen without any questions as to their veracity. Editors don't seem very much interested in establishing that there is no fraud involved. It's been left up to keen-eyed bloggers to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from febrile imagination.

"The Al-Dura lie is an assault on our ability to think, to criticize, to evaluate, and finally to reject information", said Karsenty. "Especially the right to reject information on which we base our most cherished assumptions. One of Europe's most cherished assumptions is that Israel is a vicious Nazi-like entity that deliberately murders Palestinian Arab children.

"Moreover, polls conducted in Europe have identified Israel as the greatest threat to world peace, greater than Iran and North Korea, Pakistan and Syria. The Al-Dura hoax is one of the pillars on which these assumptions rely."

In Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the country's public broadcaster, is funded with an annual budget of over $1-billion, with more in other government grants for independent production companies producing programs for CBC airing. This once-proud media corporation, designed on the template of the British Broadcasting Corporation, has followed the BBC in its left-wing, anti-Israel trajectory through its broadcasting biases.

Canadians were at one time so very proud of their very own CBC, yet it has reached such a pitifully low standing of popularity that its viewership has diminished in lock-step with the lost quality of its programming. Inclusive of news coverage whose bias is painfully evident.

It seems somehow fitting that the CBC's former head of neutral news production has retired to take up a similar position with Al Jazeera.