The New York Times and the al-Dura Hoax
Why won't the New York Times accept responsibility for repeatedly publishing a falsehood which caused many deaths?
Mohammed al-Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, became an icon in 2000 when French State television ("France 2") ran agonizing views of the boy, cradled in his father's arms, supposedly under fatal fire from Israeli soldiers during a Gaza battle. The incident, deplorable if true, was presented by international media (see below) virtually as a reprise of the Crucifixion. A French appeals court ruled on May 21-dismissing France 2's libel suit against the media watchdog who exposed the hoax-that the footage could not be accepted as true, citing testimony from the former Le Monde chief editor that "the theory that the scene [of the child's death] was faked was more probable then the version presented by France 2."
Have you read about exposure of the hoax in the Times or other mainline media (excepting the Wall Street Journal and New York Sun)?
That the al-Dura lies incited murders of many innocent people is indisputable. The Jihadis who beheaded reporter Daniel Pearl inserted repeated footage of al-Dura in their gruesome video. Osama bin Laden cited al-Dura as a justification for his carnages in a post-9/11 recruitment video which showed the boy's "death" 12 times. Streets and plazas--including the street on which Israel's embassy in Cairo is located -- were named after the boy.
Times reporter Deborah Sontag published a near-contemporaneous account -- under a headline stating "In Battling Gazans, Israelis Sow Seeds of Hate" -- on December 10 2000, which can fairly be read as justifying rather than explaining Palestinian suicide bombing. Sontag referred with certainty to "the boy shot dead as he crouched behind his father" and quoted a "cosmopolitan" Palestinian who wants a gun because he is "haunted by the image of Muhammad al-Dura."
Sontag, a serial second-generation fictionalist, recently published a Sunday front-page article portraying returning U.S. combat personnel as deranged murderers; the Times' Public Editor hastily acknowledged that her statistics were faulty.
"Palestinian casualties...are textured with memory. Some have become household names from Morocco to Muscat: Muhammad al-Dura, the 12-year-old-boy from Gaza whose father could not shield him from a hail of Israeli gunfire..."
"Palestinian cameramen, especially when there are no Westerners around, engage in systematic staging of action scenes."
Were it not for a few truth-telling bloggers -- Tom Gross of NRO, Andrea Levin of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting) in the Jerusalem Post, Ed Lasky in the American Thinker -- the hoax would still be accepted.
To exacerbate its failures, the Times recently savaged Israel for several days for not immediately granting visas to Gaza Fulbright awardees (while not mentioning that three American diplomats were murdered in Gaza in 2003, with complicity of the Palestinian Authority, while in Gaza to conduct Fulbright interviews, an atrocity I reported contemporaneously in the Chicago Sun-Times.)
I am subject to discipline if I lie as a lawyer; there is no similar corrective mechanism against journalists who lie (though no sensible person wants to empower the Government to regulate the press). If the fakery rises to the crescendo of a Jayson Blair, someone may be fired. But the many editors who accepted the al-Dura hoax and then failed to report its exposure are free to continue business as usual, notwithstanding they have trampled truth. If the press wants the respect it craves, shouldn't it-starting with the eminent Times-accept responsibility for the al-Dura hoax and disclose what it will do to prevent repetitions?