by Haviv Ret­tig Gur
THE JERUSALEM POST

The French Court of Appeals on Wednes­day found in favor of media critic Philippe Karsenty, over­turn­ing a lower court deci­sion that he had libeled France 2 and its Jerusalem cor­re­spon­dent Charles Ender­lin when he accused them of know­ingly mis­lead­ing the watch­ing world about the death of the Pales­tin­ian child Muham­mad al-Dura in the Gaza Strip in 2000.

“The ver­dict means we have the right to say France 2 broad­cast a fake news report, that [al-Dura’s shoot­ing] was a staged hoax and that they duped every­body — with­out being sued,” Karsenty told The Jerusalem Post shortly after the ver­dict was issued at 1:30 p.m. Paris time.

Al-Dura was filmed cow­er­ing with his father, Jalal, behind a bar­rel at the Gaza Strip’s Net­zarim junc­tion on Sep­tem­ber 30, 2000, dur­ing an appar­ent gun bat­tle between Pales­tini­ans and IDF troops.

Fifty-five sec­onds of video footage were released to the world by France 2 at the time, out of some 18 min­utes that were shown in court and even more footage that France 2’s detrac­tors claim is not being shown to the public.

The video, taken by Pales­tin­ian cam­era­man and France 2 stringer Talal Abu Rahma, shows al-Dura hid­ing, and then cuts to footage of him lying, appar­ently dead, at the junc­tion. It does not show the child killed.

The footage, and Enderlin’s broad­cast asser­tion of Israeli respon­si­bil­ity for the killing of al-Dura, turned the 12-year-old’s death into a cause célèbre in the Mus­lim world.

Accord­ing to Mid­dle East and media expert Tom Gross, “Osama bin Laden referred to al-Dura in a post-9/11 video; the killers of Wall Street Jour­nal reporter Daniel Pearl placed a pic­ture of him in their behead­ing video; streets, squares and acad­e­mies have been named after al-Dura. He became a poster child for the [sec­ond] intifada.”

Karsenty, the head of the media watch­dog Media Rat­ings, was sued for libel after call­ing for Enderlin’s and France 2 news direc­tor Arlette Chabot’s dis­missal, say­ing the footage was “a hoax.”

Ender­lin, who was not present in Gaza at the time of the inci­dent, has vehe­mently denied the charge, express­ing con­fi­dence in cam­era­man Abu Rahma’s honesty.

Con­victed of libel in 2006, Karsenty was slapped with two $1,380 fines — one to be paid to France 2 and one to the station’s reporter — and ordered to pay another $4,000 in court costs when he wrote that the inci­dent con­sti­tuted a “mas­quer­ade that dis­hon­ors France and its pub­lic television.”

On Wednes­day, his appeal against that con­vic­tion was upheld.

The IDF, which ini­tially apol­o­gized for the death of al-Dura, con­cluded after an inves­ti­ga­tion that the boy could not have been hit by Israeli bullets.

A state­ment for­warded to the Post from Ender­lin said “the appeals court ruled that Karsenty’s words were, in fact, libelous, and that Karsenty failed to prove that the news was staged and/or false.”

The state­ment added that the case was nev­er­the­less over­turned because “the court believed Karsenty had the right to stri­dently crit­i­cize the [France 2] report, since it dealt with an emo­tional topic, and that Karsenty’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the mat­ter con­vinced the court he was being sincere.”

A source close to Enderlin’s side of the case explained that “you can get out of a libel suit either by prov­ing you’re right, or by show­ing you were sin­cere and had some research. The court found the lat­ter to be the case.”

The source also said Ender­lin and France 2 would appeal the ver­dict, not­ing that they had won three out of four instances of judg­ment in the matter.

But, replied Karsenty, the only appeal left would be to France’s Supreme Court.

“If they con­tinue to insist they are cor­rect,” added Karsenty, “we will have vic­tims of ter­ror attacks that directly resulted from the [al-Dura] footage sue France 2.”

Karsenty also called on French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy, who Karsenty sees as “ulti­mately respon­si­ble” for the pub­licly owned tele­vi­sion sta­tion, “to take respon­si­bil­ity for the French state’s defense of the worst anti-Semitic lie around. It’s time to apol­o­gize to the world for broad­cast­ing a fake news report that has inflamed the Mus­lim world and endan­gered world peace.”

Karsenty’s claims are based on incon­sis­ten­cies in the footage, includ­ing a pub­licly avail­able video-taped admis­sion by Abu Rahma that there are untold secrets related to the case, the fact that only seven bul­let holes are seen behind al-Dura despite Abu Rahma’s repeated state­ments that the child sur­vived 45 min­utes of con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing by Israeli forces directed at the boy, footage clearly show­ing pre­tend gun bat­tles and faked ambu­lance runs at the junc­tion that day, tes­ti­mony of the IDF sol­diers sta­tioned at the junc­tion who said they did not par­tic­i­pate in any fire­fight that day, and the lack of footage of al-Dura’s actual shooting.

Despite France 2’s play­ing down of the ver­dict, some ana­lysts believe it is sig­nif­i­cant. Accord­ing to Gross, “Today’s rul­ing shows there are seri­ous doubts about France 2’s ver­sion of events, and that the entire world press was irre­spon­si­ble in being so quick to take at face value the claims of a local Pales­tin­ian cam­era­man, who has admit­ted his partisanship.”

Sev­eral months ago, the deputy com­man­der of the IDF Spokesman’s Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, wrote to France 2 ask­ing for the entire unedited 27-minute film shot by France 2’s Pales­tin­ian cam­era­man on Sep­tem­ber 30, 2000, as well as footage the cam­era­man filmed on Octo­ber 1, 2000. Am-Shalom stressed that the IDF had “ruled out” the notion that al-Dura was killed by Israeli fire.

Cit­ing the find­ings of the IDF’s probe into the inci­dent, ordered by then-OC South­ern Com­mand Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia, Am-Shalom wrote, “The gen­eral has made clear that from an analy­sis of all the data from the scene, includ­ing the loca­tion of the IDF posi­tion, the tra­jec­tory of the bul­lets, the loca­tion of the father and the son behind an obsta­cle, the cadence of the bul­let fire, the angle at which the bul­lets pen­e­trated the wall behind the father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the great­est cer­tainty the pos­si­bil­ity that the gun­fire that appar­ently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF sol­diers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed posi­tion [at the junction].”

The text of Wednesday’s rul­ing has not yet been released to the media.