Pallywood
Brilliant discussion with Richard Landes, the Boston University professor who spearheaded the research into the Mohammad al Durrah video, the event that started the intifada.
I can’t recommend this enough. He is a genius. He explains how the Palestinians faked “news events” for a press that was delighted to slam Israel, and then how those falsified images were spread throughout the world. He explains his ideas of how and why the modern Left is working with Islamic fundamentalists. Honestly, it is worth your time. Here’s a few snippets:
Pallywood is a term I coined - when I was looking into the Muhammad al-Dura case in October 2003 [the famous case of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy shot in the crossfire at the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, broadcast by France 2 TV] - to describe staged material disguised as news. The Palestinians regularly fabricate scenes for TV cameras, which, when sent to Western media outlets, are cut down to the believable three-second sight bite. And what makes it to the evening news is a stringing together of these staged scenes.
How do you know that these kind of scenes are staged?
By watching the rushes [raw footage]. So, for example, in one scene in the rushes - a scene we call “Molotov cocktail kid” - there is a Palestinian with red “blood” on his forehead, indicating he’s got a head wound. And he’s running along with no sign of pain whatsoever, then hands over what looks like a Molotov cocktail to a friend and runs into a crowd. Then, in the next frame, all of sudden he’s being picked up and carried into an ambulance, all the while holding his head up high in spite of his supposed serious injury. It’s really obvious that it’s fake.
And check this out:
I made a documentary film called Pallywood, and tried to shop it around. I figured [the network] ABC would be interested in it as rivals of CBS whom we criticized [for bad coverage]. I was wrong. The guy at ABC said, “I don’t know how much appetite there is for something like this.”
Then I ran it by somebody else, who said, “We couldn’t broadcast this unless it were balanced.”
When I asked him what he meant by that, he said, “We’d have to have something showing how the Israelis also fake it.”
So that means that according to modern journalistic standards, either the public will not learn about the faked “news footage” or someone will have to make up footage showing Israel doing something that is faked. To be fair. To be nuanced. Because truth doesn’t exist, all life is a series of narratives, stories we tell one another of heroes and villains. The roles simply shift. The Literature departments at the universities have taken over the Journalism schools.
- Aggie