The Court of Appeals Decision: A Professional Translation into English As you can see from the details, the judge dismissed the case after she ripped Enderlin. Just one paragraph (emphasis added)

Given that, indeed, the testimony by Luc ROSENZWEIG, former chief editor of MONDE, established that after having met, in May 2004, some colleagues who shared with him their doubts about Charles ENDERLIN’s commentary, and having thereafter himself shared these doubts with Denis JEAMBAR and Daniel LECONTE, on October 22, 2004, he viewed with them FRANCE 2’s rushes and was surprised that, of the 27 minutes of Talal ABU RAHMA’s rushes, more than 23 minutes of the scenes on film had nothing to do with the images broadcast by the station, including those of little Mohamed’s death, and consisted of young Palestinians faking war scenes. The witness concluded his testimony at the hearing in the lower court by stating his conviction that “the theory that the scene [of the child’s death] was faked was more probable than the version presented by FRANCE 2,” while admitting that, as a journalist, journalistic “criteria did not allow him to go further than that.”

and found,

ON THESE GROUNDS

The court

By judgment rendered after due hearing of the parties and after having deliberated according to the law;

In view of the interlocutory order of October 3, 2007;

Declares no objection to the pleadings submitted by Philippe KARSENTY;

Overturns the deferred judgment and dismisses the charges against Philippe KARSENTY;

Dismisses the demands of the civil parties.

Go read the entire translation. Dr Landes is going to comment on the text of the decision in the future, so I’ll be posting updates.

Via Maria,
Jonathan Rosemblum writes, Pallywood: For once, the good guys win. The article summarizes the details of Enderlin’s nefarious blood libel (emphasis added), one of the most harmful anti-Israel propaganda videos ever made:

Enderlin distributed the France 2 clip free of charge, and it was subsequently broadcast thousands of times. The image of the terrified boy cowering behind his father quickly assumed iconic status. It featured prominently in mass anti-Israel demonstrations in Europe, where it was juxtaposed to the image of the Jewish boy with his hands raised in the Warsaw ghetto.

To heighten its impact, Palestinian TV cropped into the France 2-clip pictures of an Israeli soldier firing. The image of “Muhammed al-Dura” beckoning other Palestinian children to join him as martyrs in paradise features prominently in the Palestinian death cult. His name was invoked by the Ramallah mob that disemboweled two Israeli reservists, in Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 video, and in that of Daniel Pearl’s beheading.

France2 has played the footage thousands of times over the years (and the footage is still played by the international media as if it were true) but to the best of my knowledge have not reported on the court decision in their newscasts. I watch the France2 newscasts almost daily.

The whole Enderlin footage was a lie:

From the general to the particular. The sole footage of “Muhammed al-Dura’s death” was that of Palestinian cameraman Talul Abu-Rahmeh working for France 2. Abu-Rahmeh is a liar. On October 3, 2000, he testified under oath to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights that there had been 45 minutes of sustained Israeli fire directed at the man and boy. As an experienced war reporter, he could verify that they could have only been hit by Israeli fire. Abu-Rahmeh claimed to have filmed 27 minutes of the fusillade. Later he told German documentary filmmaker Esther Schapira that he had filmed six minutes.

We now know that the boy could have only been hit by Palestinian fire. The story of a 45-minute fusillade was on its face laughable: Had Israeli soldiers wanted to kill Palestinians, they had dozens of rioters immediately in front of the Israeli stockade from which to choose. Moreover, Abu-Rahmeh’s entire footage of the man and boy consisted of 58 seconds comprised of six spliced scenes.

The rest of his 27 minutes of footage – only 18 minutes of which France2 produced when ordered to do so by the French appeals court – consists of obviously staged scenes, according to three veteran French journalists who viewed it. The “al-Dura” footage was shot in the same area that Abu-Rahmeh and other Palestinian cameramen spent the day shooting such staged scenes.

Abu-Rahmeh once declared, “I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people,” and was certainly not above employing his camera for a bit of deception. A Reuters clip from the day shows him filming another staged scene involving a Molotov cocktail. That scene was inexplicably omitted from the rushes produced in the French court.

Whether Charles Enderlin knew from the first that his voice-over was false is unclear. That he lies is certain. He drew for gullible journalists a false map of Netzarim Junction, which wrongly placed the Israeli position in a direct line of fire to the man and the boy. Worse yet, he repeatedly claimed that he had edited out the last three seconds of the “al-Dura” footage because the boy’s death throes were too painful to watch.

Enderlin was ridiculed in the courtroom:

Enderlin drew twitters of laughter in the French courtroom when he offered that perhaps the crowd was anticipating the boy’s death.

There were no such death throes. In those last three seconds, the boy lifts his head, peeks out from under his arm (with which he is shielding his eyes) prior to resuming a prone position — albeit with his leg still held aloft. A nearby mob chants, “the boy is dead, the boy is dead,” before he even lies prone the first time. Enderlin drew twitters of laughter in the French courtroom when he offered that perhaps the crowd was anticipating the boy’s death.

What has the French media done? They’re circling the wagons and claiming that Enderlin is a victim – along with the Palestinians – of the Jews.

The word perfidy doesn’t begin to describe it.

Dr Landes and Yaacov Ben Moshe have been my podcast guests, most recently on May 20, the day before the final verdict. You can listen to the podcast here.

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