[Update: Don't miss this full announcement of the new material release at Pajamas Media.]

I last interviewed BU Professor Richard Landes on the occasion of the launch of his media watchdog web site, The Second Draft -- a site that uses raw footage from mainstream media cameras to expose the Pallywood phenomenon -- that is, the way mainstream Western news outlets have been manipulated by a canny Palestinian Arab propaganda machine.

The Second Draft has just released some new footage. To say it will have some impact would be, to put it mildly, an understatement.

According to Palestinian Sources II: The Al Durah Affair has been released. One of the most infamous images of the past five years has been given the full Second Draft treatment, complete with mini documentary/expose, along with the release of raw footage, relevant interviews, documentation and essays. This is really not to be missed.

Start Here. If you'd like to go straight to the al Durah film, go to this page and look for "The Birth of an Icon," but be sure to watch the Pallywood movie available on the same page first if you haven't already seen it. This is very important to understanding the context of the images you will see in the new film.

On this occasion, Professor Landes has been kind enough to do a second interview (the first one is here), this time conducted via email.

Sol: Are you satisfied with the success of Second Draft? It seems to have found some audience.

Richard Landes: I'm quite happy with the reception, although we haven't yet made it beyond cyberspace and into the MSM. As I've noted at your blog recently, MSM is not known for its openness, especially to something so highly critical of its own flaws. It's not like we expected people at the main news services to hear about Pallywood and go check if the footage they had from their Palestinian cameramen were laced with Pallywood. As one person at a major network put it, "I'm not sure how much appetite there is for this here."

So, no I didn't expect much more than I got from MSM, but I was delighted with the response in cyberspace, especially in the blogosphere. One of the more exciting parts of attending the OSM launch was meeting all these people who had seen the video-essay and visited the site. For these folk the MSM bottom has already fallen out. They don't have a huge armor of conventional thinking (cognitive egocentrism and political correctness) that prevents them from understanding what they were looking at.

S: In our original interview, you talked about how the site would follow the intifada in real time through press and internet accounts. I notice that never really shaped up. Too technically daunting?

RL: Good question. We were unable to do that for lack of funds, manpower, etc. We may do it next year in September. There are tremendous lessons to be learned from seeing how appallingly the media covered the "Second Intifada" - the partisanship and bad faith that marked both their coverage and their refusal to correct themselves. The damage that this has done to everyone, including the media is startling, and I think that until we begin to unravel it, we won't be able to get off the spiral of violence that has marked this century.

One of the things that I think will emerge from the exercise of going over the Intifada in real time six years later is a better sense of where the blogosphere comes from. The first people to fully realize how dramatically wrong the MSM could get it were the Israelis and their supporters, starting in late 2000, when they saw the way MSM covered the outbreak of violence, and the widespread public acceptance of so distorted a presentation. A number of them took to cyberspace to communicate the story/stories the MSM didn't/wouldn't carry, people like Naomi Ragen in Israel and the Christian and Jewish members of the CJE in France. Not being particularly adept at cybertechnology, they didn't put up blogs, but some did put up websites and have large emailing lists. Others, like Nidra Poller and Ellen Horowitz, started journals that are only now being published. We'd like to put up some of their work, in real time 6 years later alongside the MSM coverage, to give people a sense of what was being said but not heard by those of us who were still prisoners of the MSM in 2000. Then you'd see the more powerful response to 9-11 in America with the emergence of the political blogosphere.

S: Have you been attacked for the site, had any negative feedback?

RL: No. Some people have actually complained that we're too politically correct - for example that our section on Palestinian Suffering overstates their misery. I have rumors of some unhappiness in pro-Palestinian circles, but my sense is that as long as we don't make it into the MSM, they'll hold their fire, rather than draw attention to us. One of our visitors did send a copy of Pallywood to the BBC who had used the "man in front of the jeep" for their recent review of the conflict (the scene with which we start Pallywood). They responded much along the lines of someone defending himself in court - you can't prove it's a fake.

S: So Second Draft will be releasing its al Dura footage shortly?

RL: Hopefully by the time this interview is up, so will our presentation of the footage. We wanted it out on the anniversary of the event (Sept.30), but the logistics of preparing the site and the video essay once the semester began have proven daunting, and we're mostly doing this without funds.

S: Could you give our readers a brief synopsis of the incident? Who is Muhammed al Durah, and why is this incident significant?

RL: I recommend coming to the site, where we do that. But briefly, Muhamed al Durah was a 12 year old Palestinian boy who grew up in a Gaza Strip refugee camp and, with his father, was crouching behind a concrete barrel at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000 during demonstrations against the Israelis two days after Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. Talal abu Rahma, a Palestinian cameraman working for France2 TV took footage of the two, apparently caught in a cross-fire between Israeli and Palestinian troops, with the boy ending up on his stomach, apparently dead. Charles Enderlin, the France2 Middle East correspondent presented the footage according to Talal's story: the boy was shot dead by Israelis despite the father's pleas. Western media outlets, unwilling to ask difficult questions of Talal, and trusting Enderlin as a professional, ran it a real news, often warning their viewers that the footage they were about to see was shocking.

The picture had a stunning impact. In the Arab world it became a symbol of Israeli genocidal intentions, unleashing torrents of demonizing abuse (blood libels, Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and provoking widespread violence against Israelis, military and civilian, on both sides of the Green Line (pre-67 borders). The savage lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah twelve days later was done to shouts of "revenge for Muhamed al Durah."

In the West it immediately swung public opinion against Israel and in favor of the Palestinians, whose violence was easily "understood" given Israel's wantonly aggressive behavior. The radical left took al Durah as proof of their claims of Israeli imperialism/racism/apartheid/genocidal evil, and stepped up their demonizing discourse. In France in particular, the picture played over and over on TV, provoking mass demonstrations against Zionism and attacks (largely from the Arab immigrant community) against French Jews. Muhamed al Durah, carried in effigy at demonstrations against Zionist racism, was the patron saint of the Durban hatefest in August 2001. As a medievalist, I first noticed al Durah as the first "blood libel" of the 21st century - one made all the more powerful by its immediate acceptance by the mainstream culture and its rapid broadcast all over the globe.

When the wave of suicide terror began in early 2001, all the first "bombers" invoked Muhamed al Durah, gaining widespread support among the Palestinians (up to 80%), and widespread understanding among Westerners. Thus, the first scourge of the 21st century, suicide terrorism, which we now see targeting everyone, including Muslims, exploded onto the world scene and received widespread approval under the aegis of Muhamed al Durah.

And in some ways the most terrible part of this story is that this poisonous hate-mongering image may have been false… not only that Israel didn't kill the boy on purpose, not only that they may not have killed him, but that he may not have been killed at Netzarim Junction at all… that the whole affair was staged. The evidence is not decisive, but I would say pretty powerful. For a variety of reasons that we explore at the site, the media refused to even inform their public of what kind of doubts emerged subsequently. For different reasons, neither the Israelis nor the Jewish leadership in the West dared to challenge the story publicly, fearing it would backfire and start a new round of accusations.

Put simply, if the MSM are supposed to operate as a filter for lies and distortion, a kind of dialysis machine, in this case they have pumped poison into the system. And it's not just the al Durah Affair itself, it's the way al Durah set the tone, and the way that media credulity about al Durah made them credulous about all the other Pallywood material, from the inflated casualty rates to events like the Jenin "massacre."

S: So this occured on the same day as the other Netzarim Junction activity we've seen in the other SD material?

RL: Precisely: we got that other Pallywood material from that day. In some sense it's only because Nahum Shahaf, doing the investigation for the IDF about al Durah asked the various news networks with cameramen at Netzarim Junction that day for their rushes (only Reuters had the decency to respond), that we even know about Pallywood. Who would have imagined that this was going on as a regular activity? (some, actually), and that our media would be so stupid as not to catch it? (far fewer).

S: You had held this back when the site first launched. Why?

RL: Everyone who got involved in this affair has been burned by a widespread attitude, even among Israelis - they just can't believe that the al Durah footage is fake. (I even found people who were sooner ready to believe that the Palestinians killed him on purpose, than that it was a fake.) On one level this is understandable - not only is it hard for many people to imagine that the Palestinian journalists would outright fake such a terrible tale, but even harder to believe that our own media would be so stupid as to swallow it hook line and sinker. After all, professional news journalism does have standards.

I ran into resistance not only with the obvious characters (MSM, liberals who immediately go into "even-handed" mode, and pro-Palestinians), but even the people I most expected to be receptive - media watchdog groups, Israeli government, Israel advocacy groups - showed remarkable reluctance to grapple with the dossier. "Without 110% proof, we dare not go public…" said one to me; others talk about needing a "smoking gun." Some major Israeli advocates actively opposed discussing this.

I think there's also something else operating here: even those convinced it's a fake don't think they can convince others, so, in order not to appear either as a conspiracist, or as too credulous and partisan, they resist the arguments. Many people watch the material with two sets of eyes - their own, and the eyes of some hypothetical other. Unless they have the "smoking gun" that can convince anyone, they dare not allow themselves to accept the evidence. It really is a kind of emperor's new clothes: it's so much easier to agree with everyone else.

As a result of these reactions, even from the inside, the early investigators, including the first, Nahum Shahaf, found themselves running into a brick wall of resistance. They thought that once they put out the evidence, the media would be as eager to reveal the fake as they were eager to present it. Hah! It's hard, once you're convinced that this is a scandal of major proportions, to believe that the people who disagree are not being obstructionist if not dishonest. (I remember the first time I showed Stephane Juffa's film to an American professor, expert in the media, and he said he wasn't convinced [nor was he curious about following up]. I got pretty annoyed, and my friend Steve, who came with me, gave me a real dressing down afterwards.)

So when it came to presenting this material to the public, we decided that the best thing to do was accustom people to a phenomenon that challenges our cognitive egocentrism, that a) the Palestinians fake injury and ambulance evacuations a lot (constantly?), b) Palestinian cameramen working for western media outlets film the fakes, sometimes setting them up, and c) western media edit the fakes to make them look good, and run them as news, and d) no one blows the whistle on these widespread and scandalous practices. In other words, Pallywood.

Only then, the strategy runs, will people be ready to consider the case for the al Durah affair as staged. We'll see soon enough.

S: Is this footage the same footage that France 2 will not release?

RL: No. The footage we have up is either the brief (3 minutes) that France2 released to everyone, or footage that's relevant to al Durah from Reuters (previously posted at Pallywood), or footage from AP that Nahum Shahaf managed to get.

France2 still refuses to release the tapes that Talal took that day. I've seen them three times. It's nothing but boring scenes and fakes, some of them ridiculously comic. That's what made me realize that there was such a thing as Pallywood. But my guess is that unless some dramatic pressure is put on France2, they'll fight like hell to resist putting it out. It's soooooo embarrassing. Apparently when Arlette Chabot, the head of France2 saw the footage in the presence of three independent journalists, she turned "pale as the wallpaper."

S: How did you get it? Who's footage is this?

RL: This footage is a copy of material that Nahum Shahaf first collected when he was doing the investigation for the IDF. I got copies while I was working with Nahum on this affair for about two years. After realizing that Nahum and I would never be able to agree on how to present it and it might never get before the public - it is five years and most people think it's too late now - I decided to go it alone.

S: What happened to Nahum Shahaf's investigation? Why haven't we heard about that?

RL: That's part of the long and sad tale of this scandal. Shahaf's associate in the investigation, an engineer named Youssef Doriel concluded, largely on the basis of the evidence of the shots coming from the Palestinian position, that the Palestinians actually shot the boy. He leaked his conclusions before the investigation was over and caused a firestorm of criticism. He was fired, Shahaf continued, but under a cloud. The Israeli army backed off of the more radical conclusions, including the staged hypothesis, and went public with the minimal position - given the angle of fire and the protection afforded by the barrel, Israeli gunfire could not have hit the child as reported.

Few reporters showed up to the press conference, even fewer from the foreign press that had given the affair such widespread coverage. Critics accused the Israelis of blaming the victim. Ha-Aretz wrote ferocious attacks on the investigation. And fairly quickly, the IDF, distancing itself even from its own general, Yom Tov Samia, decided to drop the matter.

Shahaf remained with the materials and his profound conviction that the whole event was staged. He managed to convince a number of people to report more extensively - Stefane Juffa of MENA, James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly, and Esther Schapira of Hessischer Rundfunk. To this day, anyone who wants to can get in touch with him and view his material (much better quality than the copies we've put up). However, for reasons that are not entirely clear but partly stem from the MSM's hostility to the staged hypothesis, he has never published any of the results of his investigation. Part of my own decision to go ahead with the website was an awareness that if I did not put this up at a website, most people would not even know about the matter.

S: Will you be releasing this in a manner similar to the other material...an edited piece with narration and then also some of the raw pieces?

RL: Yes. The edited piece with narration is called, According to Palestinian Sources II: The Al Durah Affair and is available here. The raw material and analysis are available at the website. As with Pallywood, we welcome comment.

S: It's a little difficult to buy into, isn't it? You've got all these cameramen floating around, and no one steps forward to admit that the thing was a set-up? Someone must have seen who was really firing the shots. Wouldn't someone say something, shoot some footage of it from a wider angle, or take a picture of the shooter?

RL: That's just what James Fallows said to me, when I showed him an early version of Pallywood. His resistance to the Al Durah as staged hypothesis was that "surely someone would have blown the whistle." Thinking that way is a classic example of cognitive egocentrism - that's probably (hopefully!) the way it would play out in the West (except maybe in France).

But in Palestinian culture, you have a very powerful role of what the Mafia would call omertà - the code of silence. Break it and you're in trouble. As one Israeli Arab said to me when I gave him an early version of the video essay on Muhammed al Durah and urged him not to show anyone: "Are you kidding? He's a martyr. If I'm found with this on me, it's the equivalent of a death sentence."

But I think it goes farther than that. The resistance of the western media to hearing this news is itself a major obstacle. I actually wrote the plot outline of a movie in which a Palestinian teenager gets recruited to help stage the scene. He thinks it's to give the Israelis a black eye, but when he sees how it's used by Jihadis to preach undying hatred and recruit suicide terrorists, he tries to tell people it's a fake. The end of the movie is him trying to convince someone from ISM that it was staged and being told, "Forget it, it's too valuable to the cause for us to challenge."

S: That is something that's striking about much of the footage. We see photos of bullet impacts, and lots of Palestinians firing guns, but no Israelis firing. Why didn't someone try to get a picture of the shooter, as well?

RL: Well taking pictures of the Israeli position while they're firing is very dangerous, since they might be firing at you (although even Talal indirectly admits, they don't fire at cameras). But if they did fire for 40 minutes, it's hard to imagine that Talal couldn't have gotten a few seconds. Of course the Palestinian Authority TV made up for it by taking footage of an Israeli soldier firing rubber bullets during a riot in Nazereth caused by the Al Durah footage, into the sequence so it looks like he's aiming at and killing Muhammed al Durah.

S: Enderlin is an Israeli, isn't he?

RL: He's an FBI (French born Israeli). Made aliyah to Israel sometime after the 67 war, like many western Jews. He was in the army, served in the IDF Spokespersons Unit, and is the Middle East correspondent for France2. Part of his credibility in Europe comes from his personal history: if he says something that's bad for Israel, and he's Israeli, it must be true. He's a good example of the kind of pathological self-criticism we talk about at the website. It's hard to think of anyone in the media has done more damage to Israel than Enderlin.

We deal with the distortions in our picture of the conflict that come from the combination of Israeli pathologies of self-criticism and Palestinian pathologies of scape-goating at the site. Essentially, people who don't factor in self-criticism can't understand what's going on in the Middle East. If you don't realize that what Palestinians say comes out of a culture of radical refusal to self-criticize and a correlate tendency to blame the other side (demonization), and that the Israelis have one of the most self-critical cultures in the world, you can't really assess what each side says. NPR did a review of the refugee problem, interviewing Israelis who said "it's at least half our fault" and Palestinians who said "it's all their fault," leaving the uninformed "even-handed" outsider to think, so it's about ¾ Israel's fault.

My own conversations with Enderlin leave me uncertain whether he's genuinely fooled by Talal or dishonest. Most of the people working on the Muhammed al Durah dossier think he knew he had staged material from the get-go (or the next day), and given the inconsistencies in Talal's story, he'd have to be massively incompetent to not know something was wrong. But, having studied apocalyptic movements, I have a great appreciation of how powerful cognitive dissonance can be. My impression is that Charles thinks he's a "good guy" and that he's done nothing wrong, and in order to protect his self image, he's capable of telling himself anything.

S: Why should I as an American care about this episode of Middle Eastern in-fighting?

RL: A lot of people make the point to me that it's five years old and doesn't matter anymore. I obviously disagree. There are a number of reasons why this case is so important.

1) The image has had a poisonous effect on the new century: it played a key role in the popularity of suicide terrorism both among the perpetrators and the larger world audience who, believing the story of al Durah, excused the first rounds of suicide terrorism. Now it's become the scourge of the new century, and it's worthwhile knowing how it made its first beachhead.

2) If you understand the dynamics of global Jihad, you realize that the Israelis are on the front line of the battle. What happens there is a bell weather of what will happen later to the rest of the West - as, for example, what's happening in France.

3) If it's a fake, as some of us think, then it represents a colossal act of media incompetence that has had terribly damaging impact on everyone, including the media. It underlines the danger of the kind of partisan sloppiness embodied in Pallywood's success.

4) It illustrates the way the Palestinian leadership has systematically lied to its people in order to foment hatred and war. The same people who hate Bush for "lying to the American people" should be even more incensed by this revelation. And yet, for reasons worth thinking about, the same people who, watching Farenheit 911, get indignant at the idea that the G.W. Bush led us into war by lying to us somehow are just the people who don't want to hear about al Durah.

5) The image remains deeply embedded in Muslim attitudes towards both the Israelis and the Jews (and beyond that, towards the West). It is a symbol of both Palestinian self-deception and demonization, and of Western complicity. If there's any hope of getting out of the current spiral downwards into the clash of civilizations and a way out without violence, then confronting both Arabs with this lie, and our own intelligentsia (media and academia) with their complicity, is a major way out. After all, it's something that can be dealt with without violence, just by showing enough courage to maintain standards.

6) Put briefly it's not that it's old news and not worth our attention. On the contrary, it's scandalous that it's gone so long without being corrected. It's beginning to rival the Dreyfus Affair for the amount of time it took to correct.

S: Do you think the Muhammed al Durah phenomenon is playing any role in the current French rioting?

Yes. I've even written an essay laying out the case, which I'll summarize here. The French played the footage of al Durah almost as obsessively as the Arab media. For them (and other Europeans) it was a "get out of Holocaust-guilt free" card. The picture "erased" the one of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. But while it meant one thing for them, it meant something very different to the Arab immigrant population, who began to get very aggressive, especially with French Jews. Eventually French rabbis ruled that Jews shouldn't wear skull caps in the street lest they invite attack.

Refusing to acknowledge the sharp rise in attacks on Jews because it would put France in an embarrassing light, and at the same time excusing the Arab attacks as not anti-Jewish, but understandably anti-Israeli, the French basically allowed an Arab street to take root in France. It was visible in the anti-American "peace" rallies of Spring 2003, where Arab immigrants, carrying placards of Arafat and Sadam, attacked Jews participating in the demonstrations while the French demonstrators looked the other way. Again, the French media and government avoided dealing with the problem. By 2004, the French had Arab and African immigrants beating up French demonstrators who had nothing to do with Jews, just "because they were white." Now that the riots of Ramadan 2005 have broken out, the French don't know what to do.

In some senses, the French case illustrates how anti-Zionism operates as a kind of cultural auto-immune deficiency syndrome. By believing any and every accusation the Palestinians made about Israel (first and foremost al Durah), by accepting the demopathic claims that the Palestinians didn't want to destroy Israel but just wanted to have their own nation, by believing the Israelis deserved whatever they got, including suicide terrorism, the French have set themselves up to make the same mistakes when faced with their own uprising. So they believe that the riots are about poverty and discrimination and have nothing to do with a hatred of French (and Western) civilization, and they take the bad advice they gave to the Israelis: make more concessions, apologize, appease. Under the circumstances, that's most likely to be read - as was Oslo and Camp David - as weakness and therefore a recipe for further violence.

What's the way out of this self-destructive spiral that empowers the worst elements of Arab and Muslim culture? I can think of fewer ways to clear the mind - Arab world and Western - and begin thinking intelligently, than by addressing the al Durah Affair, the Dreyfus Affair of the 21st century.

S: Professor Richard Landes, thank you for your time, and good luck with your project.