Sunday, January 20, 2008

Enderlin Does a Dirty al-Dura

Asked about al-Dura, Charles Enderlin recently said:-

Al-Dura was killed before a live correspondent, the day after Israelis opened fire on demonstrators on the Temple Mount. My journalist filmed this kid dying in front of the camera. The video is authentic, we had other witnesses, we had an Israeli military reaction that admitted it was probably them. We broadcast all the relevant reactions from the Israeli army. In November I suddenly heard that an Israeli general was reconstructing the events. The video rushes don’t show you exactly what is happening. So in November a general said that the probability was higher that he was killed by a Palestinian bullet than an Israeli bullet. Then in Septemer 2002, a campaign started. People started saying that the event has been staged. It has not been staged; it is authentic; it has a time code; and if it has been staged, then the father is not injured and the doctors in the chief hospital are staging the events, and then when the father was brought to a military hospital in Amman where King Abdullah visited him, so King Abdullah is part of the conspiracy, and then the Israeli journalists interviewed the father. We sued for libel, and we won, and on appeal we were told to hand over the rushes. It was thought that there were 24 minutes, but we discovered that the rushes had been recorded on a film that already had something on it. So we presented to the court the 18 minutes of the original cassette, and now the story is that the kid is alive, and the father is inviting anyone to go and check the remains in the child’s grave. Today there are generals who say they believe it is fake, but at the time they believed it because they saw the images. Well, does anybody believe that Israeli generals learn things by looking at images on the television? So, we have several libel suits going on. We have won 2. Someone accused me of encouraging the assassination of Israeli children, and if that’s not libel then I don’t know what is.

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