The mysteries of an iconic video frame

By Doreen Carvajal International Herald Tribune
Monday, February 7, 2005
PARIS Since the start of the second Palestinian uprising more than
four years ago, many children have died in the gunfire. But it is the
harrowing image of a single terrified 12-year-old boy, shielded in his
father's futile embrace, that possesses the iconic power of a battle
flag.
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Tunisia and Egypt have issued postage stamps of the Palestinian child,
Mohammed al-Duri, crouching in a fetal position against his father
under attack from a fusillade of bullets in September 2000. Egypt also
named a street in his honor, and suicide bombers invoked Mohammed as a
martyr in videotaped farewells.
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In France, far from Gaza's street battles, the indelible scene is a
picture worth a thousand arguments. Here, a debate seethes about
whether the ghastly televised footage of Mohammed al-Duri was genuine,
misinterpreted or - as one American academic put it - artfully staged
"Pallywood" theater.
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Battle photographs have long been potent media weapons, and some of
the most memorable war pictures have provoked questions about
authenticity, like the evocative 1945 Associated Press image of U.S.
Marines at Iwo Jima who raised a flag twice and switched Stars and
Stripes for a grander banner.
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At the center of the dispute is state-run France 2 and its Jerusalem
correspondent, Charles Enderlin, a veteran reporter who says fierce
criticism about the channel's exclusive footage of the boy has
provoked death threats against him.
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Images from the violent street confrontation in a remote junction in
Gaza have been endlessly dissected in books and the sharply worded
universe of blog commentary. The video also has been explored by a
small French-language Israeli news agency, Metula, which rented a
theater to examine the footage.
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And a 2002 German documentary called "Three Bullets and a Child: Who
Killed the Young Mohammed al-Duri?" tried to address lingering
questions about whether the child was killed by Israelis or
Palestinians.
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Last week, the issue gained fresh momentum after a prominent French
editor and an independent television producer broke ranks in the
country's media circles and published a cautious article in the
center-right national daily, Le Figaro, expressing some doubts about
the original reporting.
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"That image has had great influence," said Daniel Leconte, a former
France 2 correspondent. "If this image does not mean what we were
told, it is necessary to find the truth."
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Leconte wrote the Le Figaro article with Dennis Jeambar, the editor in
chief of L'Express, weeks after station executives at France 2 allowed
both men in October to see the 27 minutes of raw rushes, or all of the
footage shot.
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But their commentary did not emerge publicly until after they offered
it to another prominent national daily, Le Monde, which rejected it,
according to its new opinion page editor, Sylvain Cypel. He called the
entire debate "bizarre" and propelled by the tiny news agency. For
France 2, whose glass offices tower over the Seine, the nagging
questions about the whole episode are a constantly shifting debate
that is motivated by different agendas - from the ideology of extreme
rightist groups to efforts to push Enderlin out of his Jerusalem post,
where he is an institution.
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When the report first aired, France 2 offered its exclusive footage
for free to the world's television networks, saying it did not want to
profit from the images.
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The scenes were filmed by its Palestinian cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma,
who was the only one to capture images of what Enderlin characterized
then as the killing of a child by gunfire from the Israeli position.
Enderlin was not present during the shooting.
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Esther Schapira, a German producer for ARD in Frankfurt, said she
tried unsuccessfully in preparation for her 2002 documentary to see a
master copy of the tape and was astonished when France 2 did not share
it.
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European stations commonly exchange material. "If there is nothing to
hide, what are they afraid of?" she said of France 2's initial
reluctance.
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When critical articles started appearing in publications like The
Atlantic Monthly in the United States, Enderlin wrote public letters
insisting: "We do not transform reality. But in view of the fact that
some parts of the scene are unbearable, France 2 was obliged to cut a
few seconds from the scene."
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In many ways, Enderlin argues, the al-Duri video has become a cultural
prism, with viewers seeing what they want.
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Richard Landes, a Boston University professor specializing in medieval
cultures, studied rushes from other Western news outlets that day,
including the al-Duri tape.
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"We could argue about every frame," he conceded. But after watching
the scenes three times, he concluded that it probably had been faked,
along with footage on the same tape of separate street clashes and
ambulance rescues.
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"I came to the realization that Palestinian cameramen, especially when
there are no Westerners around, engage in the systematic staging of
action scenes," he said, calling the footage Pallywood cinema.
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Some France 2 executives privately faulted the channel's communication
as questions were raised. Last week, they showed the International
Herald Tribune the original 27-minute tape of the incident, which also
includes separate scenes of rock-throwing youths.
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The footage of the father and son under attack lasts several minutes
but does not clearly show the child's death. There is a cut in the
scene that France 2's executives attribute to the cameraman's efforts
to preserve a low battery.
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When Leconte and Jeambar saw the rushes, they were struck by the fact
that there was no definitive scene that showed that the child truly
died. They wrote, however, that they were not convinced that the
particular scene was staged, but only that "this famous 'agony' that
Enderlin insisted was cut from the montage does not exist."
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To counter its critics, France 2 called a news conference in November
and prepared a frame-by-frame folder of photographs, including
blow-ups to respond to skeptics like Landes who argued that blood was
not visible.
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The station also sent a journalist back in October to film the boy's
father, Jamal al-Duri, rolling down part of his pants and shirtsleeves
to show scars on his right arm and upper right leg. They compiled
footage of the bandage-swathed father in an Amman hospital, where he
was visited by Jordan's king. But critics like the former Le Monde
reporter and radio host Luc Rosenzweig want an independent medical
expert's opinion.
.
"It's a crazy story," said Arlette Chabot, the station's deputy
general director. "Every time we address one question, then another
question surfaces. It's very difficult to fight a rumor. The point is
that four years later, no one can say for certain who killed him,
Palestinians or Israelis."
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Last autumn, France 2 filed a series of defamation complaints against
some of its critics, but it did so without naming targets, simply
labeling them as "X." The station's lawyer, B?n?dicte Amblard, said
that France 2 took this approach because of the difficulties of
legally identifying the owners of Web sites, which were harsh in their
attacks on the station and Enderlin.
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But that tactic has emboldened critics like Philippe Karsenty, who is
one of the station's intended legal targets along with the Metula news
agency. Karsenty runs a small Paris-based media watchdog group called
Media-Ratings that has called on both Chabot and Enderlin to resign.
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"We will offer 10,000 to a charity chosen by France 2 if the channel
can demonstrate to us and a panel of independent experts that the
Sept. 30, 2000, report shows the death of the Palestinian child,"
Karsenty said.
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The Ministry of Culture and Communications is one agency that has been
approached. Privately, one government official said, "We can't take
any initiative because it is not our mission or job. The press is
independent, especially in the French tradition."
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So settling the debate falls to others. By late this weekend,
Enderlin's supporters were organizing to place an advertisement in Le
Monde backing the Jerusalem correspondent.

To the editors:

I was surprised to see that of the four pictures you chose to show of
Muhamed a Durah in your article of February 7, you omitted the key
picture, the last one Talal Abu Rachmah took of the boy that fateful
day, September 30, 2000. In this last scene, when the boy is
supposedly already dead (your fourth picture), he holds his hand over
his eyes not his stomach, lifts up his elbow high and looks around (you
can see his face), in a gesture impossible for someone dying or dead of
a stomach wound.

This is the key photo: it shows us that the last time Abu Rachmah
filmed the boy, he was alive and apparently uninjured in his stomach,
something confirmed by the lack of blood visible. Not surprisingly, it
is also the only shot of Muhamed a Durah that Charles Enderlin cut from
his famous news report in which he accused the Israelis of targeting
the boy. Anyone who has seen the France2 rushes knows two things: 1)
all the footage Abu Rachmah shot that day was staged (Pallywood), and
2) Enderlin has no "scenes of agony" he spared us. It turns out that
his bluff ~V 'unless you're ready to see the agony, don~Rt ask to see
the rushes' ~V was doubly dishonest. What he cut was unbearable to the
story he wanted to tell us, the story virtually all of us believed.

You owe it to your readers to publish that picture.

Richard Landes