Melanie Phillips on France's New Dreyfus Affair

It's the Karsenty case, now on appeal in a Paris courtroom, of a libel judgement against Karsenty's complaint that French television staged anti-Israel propaganda:

This scandal has many layers of evil. It reveals the wickedness of the Palestinians who so cynically stage hoaxes like this, as a result of which murderous hatred and mass hysteria are exponentially spread and innocent people are attacked and butchered in a rising spiral of terrorist atrocities. It reveals the wickedness of western journalists who transmit footage they know is a fraud as a matter of routine, becoming as a result active collaborators in the deaths of innocents. As someone from France 2 remarked during this affair, ‘It happens all the time’. Sure it does — we saw it last year in the Lebanon war when ‘atrocities’ that had been faked by Hezbollah were transmitted as true accounts by broadcasting organisations which turned a blind eye to the evidence of journalistic fraud because the story they told fitted the broadcasters’ own prejudices. And it reveals the intellectual corruption of the French judiciary, which perpetrates a transparent injustice and in turn helps further promulgate a murderous lie because, instead of holding power to account, the French judiciary is in its pocket.

To my knowledge, there has been no coverage whatsoever of these revelations about the al Durah footage, let alone the Karsenty case, in the British media. That says it all. They are so resistant to the suggestion that the story in which they so fervently believe — that Israel is the evil aggressor in the Middle East and the Palestinians are their innocent victims —might be wrong, that they simply do not register any evidence which bears that out. How can it possibly be the case, they think, that fashionable progressive French journalists (like themselves) could deliberately make themselves party to a lie? Since in their own eyes progressive people are by definition the unique repository of moral virtue, anyone who challenges that position is by definition evil. It is therefore impossible that the Palestinians staged a theatrical hoax, impossible that France 2 deliberately transmitted such a fraud, impossible that the Israelis could be the innocent victims of such a deception. The image of the killing of Mohammed al Durah exists; and the image is all. Nothing else has any reality. The fact that the ‘corpse’ moved and peered behind its hand to see if the cameras were still filming is irrelevant. The terrible thing about so many western journalists is that they really do deeply and sincerely believe their own lies.

The trial of Philippe Karsenty is an event of the greatest political and cultural significance. It may well come to define the relationship of Europe to Israel and the Jews as devastatingly as the 19th century Drefyus affair — in which the false accusation of treason against a patriotic Jewish French army captain produced an outpouring of virulent anti-Jewish prejudice — once convinced an assimilated French journalist by the name of Theodor Herzl that there could be no future for the Jews unless they had their own country. But now the French are determined to traduce and defame that country, too.

The Karsenty appeal is a very big story indeed. Let’s see how many journalists, in these degraded times, are able to recognise it.