Can Internet criticism of Mideast news footage be slander?

[Englander]

By Doreen Carvajal
International Herald Tribune

Published: September 17, 2006

PARIS In a somber, wood-paneled courtroom of the Palais de Justice, French judges in black robes and linen cravats are carefully examining harrowing television images of a Palestinian father shielding his son from a burst of bullets.

The ghastly television footage transformed 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura into an international martyr of the second intifada and ignited a lingering controversy. Six years later, France 2, the state-supported channel that captured the exclusive video, is fighting to protect its reputation in a French courtroom, where it is suing three Internet critics who questioned the channel's veracity.

To confront its online detractors, France 2 is invoking the 1881 press slander law that Émile Zola defied when he published "J'accuse" in the Dreyfus affair. In effect, it is an insult law that protects individuals or groups from defamation that "strikes at honor" and reputation.

The channel's lawsuits accuse three Web site operators - an Israeli translator, a Parisian doctor and a former candidate for Parliament turned media consultant - of impugning the station and its Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, a gravelly voiced veteran whose work and writing have drawn plaudits from the mayor of Paris and President Jacques Chirac, among others.

In the case of Charles Gouz, 64, a doctor who posts a Web log at www.- debriefing.org, his alleged insult was republishing critical text from a small conservative Israeli news Web site that has been doggedly questioning the way the shooting was first reported.

More at;
International Herald Tribune

[Poll_Blind]

1. Freedom of speech does not include defamation.

  This trial appears to have everything to do with the defamation of Enderlin, not mere criticism of his reporting.

  The death of al-Dura ranks up there as one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. Anyone wishing to view the video of the event may find it online but I gravely caution those who do so that they will recall it afterward. When Bill Clinton viewed the footage (as this video was played on CNN at one time along with the President's reaction), he described it as "phantasmagoric" and that unique word, given its fuller definition, is appropriate.

  Al-Dura's death is a visual footnote in the history of Israel's military control over the Occupied Palestinian Territories and one, like the video of Huda Galian (the little girl who survived the Gaza beach killing of her family), which the Israeli government and its sayanim will do their most to disprove the inescapable reality of or, barring the ability to do that, vilify those who reported it.

  These entities are usually fairly-well financed in their attempt to cleanse Israel of all involvement in the atrocities which it has arguably and reasonably been a part of. I have seen some of those videos on YouTube. Lots of freeze-framing, red circles, commentary, even 3-D computer-generated models (in one case) of the entire area just introduce doubt. "It was not the IDF that killed al-Dura, it was the Palestinians!" "It was not the IDF that killed Huda Galian's family, it was the Palestinians!"

  The most articulate work that I can reference on this pattern of behavior, tools and techniques used (and I invite alternatives to be presented, maybe the moderators can assist?) is Deborah E. Lipstadt's book on Holocaust Denial. I have found a much broader application of her work useful in understanding how even the reality of a well-known historic event may be intentionally decomposed and those components, individually, questioned, hammered on, until there is enough doubt contained about individual elements that the conclusion of the whole is questioned. Specifically (for those who have access to the book), the use of Zyklon-B as the terminal agent, the construction of gassing rooms and the safe retrieval of bodies by the Nazis afterward.

  I want to make a point to direct the reader's attention toward the earlier paragraph: "...to cleanse Israel of all involvement in the atrocities which it has arguably and reasonably been a part of." On occasion, deaths of Palestinians are the result of the internecine conflict there and it would be just as tenuous to claim all Palestinian deaths in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are the result of Israelis as it would to claim that Palestinians were behind the Rabin assassination.

  The subject of this case, the defamation of Enderlin, is just another in a set of tools used to decompose, discredit and ultimately deny the facts of the event. The outcome is likely to be in Enderlin's favor and it may be greeted with a chorus of "There is no free speech in France" which would be another unsurprising conflation. I have already seen threads on DU some time ago proposing that the Franklin AIPAC case bore a closer kinship to Ginsberg's Pentagon Papers than a nation usurping classified information for its own purposes.

PB

[Tom Joad]

2. There is a lawsuit in progress against David Horowitz..

of "discover the network" infamy. (maybe more than one, but one i know about)
It is in the discovery phase. this lawsuit will have to work under U.S. laws, which means, i think, it has a higher hurdle to prove slander.

But given that this rather extreme individual, and the people who work with him, tie the World Wildlife Fund, Osama Bin Laden, Dan Rather, Revolutionary Communist Party, into some vast conspiracy ...this may not be too hard. I mean these guys that run these hate sites... not dealing with a full deck, in my opinion.

One fellow in particular, one of Horowitz's lieutenants, whose real name should be forgotten here, (let's call him Oliver) will first accuse people of being terrorists... of which he has absolute proof in his little mind, then say again and again in his own writings, that the FBI, the IRS, the Israeli authorities are not listening to him, though he calls them again and again to complain about his targets. Maybe for good reason, Oliver. Gives me some hope that this government may have some decent people left.

I call him Oliver Crangle, after a rather despicable character in one episode of the Twilight Zone.
http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6189&reviewer=1

[Tom Joad]

3. People could honestly believe that Mohammed al-Dura did not

die as a result of Israeli military attack. It's just that those who promulgate such fantasies (they read it on the web!) have no credibility with me.