The authenticity of footage of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah being shot and killed as he sheltered with his father is a cause celebre on the Internet. Melanie Phillips calls it a modern blood libel. Strong stuff.

According to Philippe Karsenty of Media Ratings, the report has “fuelled hatred of Israel, the Jews and the West around the world.” Karsenty is appealing a conviction for defaming France 2 and its Middle East bureau chief Charles Enderlin. Phillips has gone to Paris to report on the case. She concludes:

The ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah was swallowed uncritically by the western media, despite the manifold unlikeliness and contradictions which were apparent from the start, because it accorded with the murderous prejudice against Israel which is the prism through which the Middle East conflict is habitually refracted.

Let’s say it is “inauthentic.” Does that mean the Israeli soldiers do not shoot defenceless civilians? They do. Just like British soldiers did in Northern Ireland. Just like American soldiers do in Iraq.

It is one of the reasons civilised societies try to limit the number of nervous young men with guns wandering the streets. In the spectrum of culpability such killings range from the industrial accidents of conflict to negligence, through recklessness, right up to psychopathic opportunism.

Let’s say it is genuine. Does that mean that Hamas and Hizbollah are justified in encouraging suicide bombings or other terrorist outrages? No, it does not.

And yet the blogosphere buzzes with the barely suppressed hope of writers like Phillips that to “solve the mystery” of a boy’s staged killing/accidental shooting will vindicate the “murderous prejudice” against Israel. And that getting the original footage shown in a French court will do the trick. As one blog noted:

If the raw footage is projected in the courtroom, the battle will be half won, no matter how the court rules on Karsenty’s appeal. If a dozen world-class journalists attend the November 14 hearing, the al-Dura affair will be brought out of its dark alley and into the agora of democratic societies, where it should receive its final judgment.

A comment on the same blog painted a rather more dismal picture:

If the raw footage is projected in the courtroom, the result will be a depressing anticlimax, as the world press declares that the confusing pastiche of images is subject to multiple interpretations, and that showing it publicly has left the Al-Dura affair as unresolved as before.

If a dozen world-class journalists attend the hearing, they will immediately recognize, in the raw footage and the resulting slanderously edited capsule, the same narrative construction process they engage in every day: trimming and molding the cacophony of words and images arriving daily by the bucketful from the world’s stringers, to fit the script that they or their editors have decided will reflect well on their news organization.

Faced with the choice between covering for their professional peers and admitting that the Al-Dura fabrication is simply business as usual for the modern journalist, they will see where their interests lie, and act accordingly.

So there you have it, journalism contra mundum.

Could there possibly be a longer, more measured take on the whole business (that’s my bias – the quest for moral ambivalence). Try this piece from Haaretz. Journalists, eh?