Karsenty, France 2, and French libel laws

Philippe Karsenty is a French citizen who runs the media watchdog site "Media-Ratings". Several years ago he accused "France 2" -- France's main public TV network -- of knowingly broadcasting doctored footage that supposedly showed an innocent Palestinian boy being shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. France 2 sued him for libel and won. Yesterday he won his appeal in a French court. It wasn't easy.

It is disturbing enough that France 2 aired manipulated footage and used it to make false statements to support an inflammatory news piece about Israel.

It is even more disturbing that a private citizen who accuses the French media of doing this thus opens himself to being sued for libel by the same French media. And here I thought libel laws are supposed to protect private individuals from being libelled BY the media! France supposedly has a free press. Apparently that means that the French press is to be free from criticism and is in turn free to suppress criticism by suing critics for libel.

It wasn't as if Karsenty was making an idle accusation. He had spent many months and many euros studying the footage, despite not having access to all the dailies. He was able to show the court that Mohammed al-Dura was actually alive and moving at the point in the sequence when the French narrator said he was dead. There was no other footage of an actually dead boy. Karsenty also had a ballistic expert demonstrate that the shots fired couldn't have come from the direction of the Israeli snipers.

You can be sued for libel for this in France.

J’accuse.
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FITNA is FREE SPEECH

It took a certain amount of courage (and film editing skills) to produce FITNA and post it on the web, knowing in advance what could be expected: threats of violence from Muslims, followed by censorship and "official" condemnation in the face of those threats. But it's not as if the Jews-Christians-atheists of the free West don't already know what is depicted in FITNA. We've read about and seen pictures of all this before. FITNA just ties it together in a 16 minute piece, showing how all these acts of violence, incitement, and hatred of non-Muslims are exact echoes of words in the Koran. The irony of course is that Muslims are again threatening violence against a person who has in essence done nothing more than expose their previous violence.

And he's been hung out to dry by the very media and politicians who should be showing solidarity, no matter what political persuasion they represent. They too have bought into the misperception that merely exposing Muslim violence is "Islamophobic". When the IRA was bombing London, did we refer to anyone who spoke negatively of that as "Eirophobic"?

What to do? Now if all of us in one fell swoop were to rise up and fight back against the kind of Muslim-generated violence depicted in this film or the threat of it at any time and at any place, things would start to change. If we as a group were to shout from our windows, "We're sick and tired of this, we're not taking it anymore, we're fighting back!", they'd be in for a surprise. If they stopped seeing us as soft, lazy, self-denigrating wimps, always eager to appease, and saw us instead as tough, angry, self-confident, organized, and, most importantly, ready to defend ourselves en masse ....... wouldn't this nightmare start to end?

Die Walküre at the Met

Last night I attended the final performance of Die Walküre conducted by Lorin Maazel. Maazel's interpretation was lyrical and introspective compared to Levine's. He is not afraid to let the orchestra play at less than maximum volume, building slowly to climaxes, rather than pounding away as Levine tends to do. Despite vocal unevenness from everyone except mezzo Michelle DeYoung, the Fricka, it was a profound, moving, almost religious experience.

Wotan's existential dilemma -- to either satisfy Fricka's request to punish the adulterous Siegmund and Sieglinde, or allow the Wälsungs to retrieve the Nibelungen gold and save the Gods -- is of course the proverbial rock and a hard place. What major political decision today, while accomplishing some short-term, politically expedient good, does not also contain the seeds of eventual disaster?

Opera and Free Speech

In Sept. 2006, a decision was made to close the Deutsche Oper's production of Mozart's Idomeneo because one small scene depicting the severed heads of Mohammed (and Jesus) caused security concerns (fear of violence from the practitioners of one of the "offended" religions.)

Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit spoke against the closing, articulating perfectly the reasons why: "Our ideas about openness, tolerance and freedom must be lived on the offensive. Voluntary self-limitation gives those who fight against our values a confirmation in advance that we will not stand behind them."

Why don't other politicians get it, that this is the way to respond to these kinds of threats? Appeasement and apologies don't work.