Written evidence submitted by Second Draft

Fake News from the Middle East

Submitted by Professor Richard Landes, American medievalist, Director of Second Draft, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Communication at Bar Ilan University, Israel.

Executive Summary:

    The most dangerous form of fake news, by far, is when deliberate misinformation gets carried, as a consensus, in the mainstream news media (MSNM). No news can disorient the consumers of modern journalism, hence, the democratic public sphere, as thoroughly as can this mainstream “fake news.”

    The first major example of a “fake news” consensus in the 21st century, was the Western coverage of the Second Intifada between the Palestinians and the Israelis, in particular the Muhammad al Durah “Murder” (October 2000) and the Jenin “Massacre” (April 2002).

    Both these fake stories had an electrifying effect on the global community. In the Muslim world, they inflamed feelings of anger and revenge, a recruiting device for global Jihad. In the West, they provoked angry demonstrations against Israel globally, violent both verbally and in deeds, propagating even more virulent Jihadi war memes (comparisons of Israel with the Nazis). 

    In neither case have the MSNM acknowledged the scope and impact of the errors they made in these cases, and the learning curve in catching subsequent cases has proved flat.

    Thus these media-enhanced recruiting moments have happened repeatedly in this young century: every time the IDF engages – in 2002 (West Bank), 2006 (Lebanon), 2008/9 (Cast Lead), 2010 (Mavi Marmara), 2012 (Cloud of Defense), 2014 (Protective Edge).

    Given how beneficial this “fake news” is to Jihadis including ones who target other Western nations with a free fourth estate, one would have expected Western authorities, including the information professions, to look closely at claims about events in the Middle East and develop ways to filter out the “fake news.” 

    Instead, the first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed the longest case of pack “own-goal war journalism,” in which the MSNM consensus mainstreams, as news, the war propaganda of the enemy of their societies.

• The Parliamentary Committee’s investigation into “Fake News” is most welcome, and one hopes it will take measures to ensure that the contribution of British MSNM to the problem of fake news from the Middle East is properly recognised and addressed.
  

Autobiographical Note:

I am a retired professor of Medieval History. In my work on the 11th century, I dealt with a major body of forgery by the monastic historian Ademar of Chabannes, an opus of hundreds of folios of autograph manuscript, that had fooled historians for almost a millennium. Even after an astute medievalist identified the massive fake in the 1930s, historians continued to treat Ademar’s texts as genuine for another two generations.[1] In 2003, I read James Fallows article on Muhammad al Durah, the twelve-year old Palestinian boy allegedly gunned down by the Israelis at the beginning of the second intifada (late 2000). I went to the “autograph” sources (raw footage shot onsite) to check Fallows’ analysis and discovered an extensive network of Western news media using scenes staged by Palestinians in reporting their news.

Since then I have dedicated a major part of my research to documenting and analyzing this phenomenon of staged footage and its astonishing longevity, even after being revealed (much like the medieval forgery mentioned above). I established Second Draft in 2005 to serve as a critique of journalism’s “first draft of history.” My change in field from medieval history (explaining the origins of the West) to contemporary news media critique is motivated by my concern for how the “fourth estate’s” current dysfunctions constitute a major vulnerability of Western democracies. I am currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Communications at Bar Ilan University.

1. Definitions:

1.1 Journalism: profession that collectively writes the first draft of history: Witness to the times. This “fourth estate” provides the eyes and ears of civil polities, informing the voting public.

1.2 Mainstream News Media (MSNM): news outlets claiming to follow professional guidelines (public accountability, self-correction), and thereby deserve the confidence and trust of their audience as honest and reliable witnesses.

1.3 Fake news. The fictitious narratives designed to circulate as news, thereby manipulating audiences to engage in behavior they would not otherwise choose. Fake news ranges from deliberately misreport (Duranty from Stalin’s Moscow) and staged (Hearst and Pulitzer, 1898), to reporting unchecked stories from people who are lying. False witness to the times.

1.4 Pack Journalism: journalists using the same “nut” (story-frame) and reporting the same limited information that “fits the nut”: pask arise from combinations of laziness, peer pressure, ideological advocacy, and intimidation.

1.5 Propaganda: information systematically produced and disseminated in order to support and propagate a given doctrine or cause. Untrue propaganda, disseminated as news, is “fake news.”

1.6 War Propaganda: fake news designed to convince an army to fight and a public to support war against a designated enemy, often accompanied by political cartoons and editorials that demonize the enemy. (World War I, II)

1.7 Cognitive Warfare: the campaigns waged by the weaker side in asymmetric wars, in order to “make patriots of their own people and pacifists of their enemies,” i.e., to convince the enemy not to use its superior strength. (Vietcong vs. USA)

1.8 Invasive Cognitive Warfare Convince stronger enemy not to resist, even assist, a hostile invasion (Trojan Horse). Key invasive strategy: get enemy to run your lethal narratives about them as news to their news consumers.

1.9 Lethal narrative: a false or embellished story about deliberate murder, massacre, or other moral outrage, designed to arouse feelings of hatred and a desire for revenge against the alleged perpetrators. Lethal narratives are the core component of war propaganda; invasive cognitive warfare invests great effort and ingenuity into getting lethal narratives about the enemy into the enemy’s mainstream news.

1.10 Lethal journalism: journalists covering foreign wars, who consistently report the lethal narratives of one side’s war propaganda, as news, to an international audience “back home.”

1.11 Own Goal Journalism: journalists who report the war propaganda of their own society’s (and own profession’s) enemies, as news. Own goal journalism is most dangerous when it purveys invasive cognitive warfare fake-news, blinding a civil polity even as it’s being attacked.
 

2.0 Fake News and the Mainstream Media:

2.1 Fake news is to journalism what lying is to interpersonal speech. And like any lie, fake news only succeeds when others trust it as true (accurate). Thus, fake news hopes to win the trust of at least one journalist, and find at least one mainstream news publication to run it… the more reputable, the more widely seen, the better. In a world of serious professional journalism, other news agencies and independent investigative journalists, quickly catch and correct mistakes, especially important ones that the passage of time reveals as false. Most fake news is ephemeral.

2.2 More rarely, however, we have cases of fake news that not only penetrate the mainstream media, but come to command a consensus within it. Most of these cases involve denial, a deep-seated human instinct, where a system of Omertà prevents publishing contrary evidence, as in the decade-long silence about sexual grooming of teenage girls in Rotherham. In some cases, it may be hard to distinguish between conspiracy and mainstream news (Protocols of the Elders of Zion 1934, Kennedy Assassination 1963). In other, more rare cases, the MSNM actively introduces fake news as news.

2.3 With the internet, the 21st century offers new and extensive venues for feeding fake news into the MSNM, making a reliable MSNM all the more important – a journalism that can filter fake news out as much possible before publication, and correct and remove fake news items after they prove wrong. With the advent of the Trump era, fake news in the MSNM has become a major issue, with accusations flying in all directions. Presumably this was one of the reasons behind this Parliamentary investigation. While fake news coming from marginal sources – in our day, primarily independent websites and fabricated dossiers – is dangerous, it gains vastly greater destructive power if it gets mainstreamed as news by the MSNM.

2.4 Far more dangerous, then, is MSNM-produced fake news, which has greater impact because of its credibility. And once a consensus arises among journalists, pack journalism can sustain it. MSNM “fake news” as news disorients a public that is vulnerable to misdirection when their “eyes and ears” play tricks on them. And the more threatened they feel in this confusion, the more an information-disoriented public will lash out at their MSNM.

2.5 The conflict between Israel and her neighbors presents a particularly rich terrain for fake news. In addition to the millennia-long tradition of lethal narratives about Jews, the current asymmetrical nature of the conflict (Israel’s commanding military superiority), makes cognitive warfare central for Palestinian strategy. In the case of military confrontations (2002, 2006, 2008/9, 2012, 2014), Palestinians use images of their people’s suffering to arouse outrage so great that Western nations have intervened and forced Israel to stand back. 

2.6 In this effort, Palestinians rely on the sympathy of Western journalists who see them as fighting oppression and consider their narratives as the “weapons of the weak.” From the final months of the year 2000 until the present, Western MSNM have consistently channeled Palestinian lethal narratives into the Western public sphere as news, one of the longest sustained cases of fake news successfully becoming part of the mainstream news media consensus in the history of the fourth estate and of the democratic public sphere
 

3.0 Fake-News Palestinian Style: Pallywood

3.1 A key dimension of the “fake-news” that comes from the Middle East concerns the way in which the Western TV news media had, by 2000, become accustomed to use footage staged by Palestinians in their reporting. Most often these short clips served as B-roll while the journalist recited casualty figures provided by the Palestinians. The Palestinian industry of filming fakes, replete with directors and stages, was documented in Pallywood (2005). Since very few people see the full rushes, and journalists themselves often see only extensively cut versions, the staging passes undetected most of the time.[2]

3.2 In fact, Pallywood only came to light in the context of the Al Durah controversy (see next item), when independent observers got to see the raw footage that Palestinian cameramen shot the day of the incident. These “rushes” were filled with staged scenes. When three independent observers saw the France2 raw footage and objected, news editors at France2 responded: “it’s always like that.” One commentator even argued that since everyone knows this happens all the time, why feign shock “that fake images were used and edited in Gaza. But this happens all the time, everywhere on television and no TV journalist in the field or a film editor would be shocked.”[3] Public secrets provide the obscurity necessary for fake news to succeed. In principle, however, professional journalism depends on transparency in order to assure honest witnessing.

3.3  Muhammad al Durah “Murder” (September 30, 2000):

3.4 Charles Enderlin of France2, using footage from his “Pallywood” cameraman Talal abu Rahmah, reported that 12-year old Muhammad al Durah was shot dead by “fire coming from the Israeli position.”[4] This case of an on-screen death of a child had an explosive impact globally, despite the fact that it is a clear case of a lethal narrative, not only flatly inaccurate in its attribution of the gunfire to the IDF (identifying the perpetrator), but also the implication that this was “targeted” (attributing deliberation, core of any lethal narrative). Worse still, the most likely explanation for the 78 seconds of footage that allegedly recorded the boy’s last moments, is that they were staged in their entirety.[5]

3.5 The initial journalist (Enderlin) and network (France2) should not have rushed to publish this footage without checking, and certainly not the authoritative voice-over by a non-witness. Once out, however, other journalists and networks should have checked and corrected it, instead of giving in to a pack mentality, lionizing the “brave” cameraman, and heaping opprobrium on Israel. On the one hand, journalists jumped on the lethal aspects of the narrative, insisting that it was done “on purpose” (Robert Fisk, Independent) and that the evidence clearly showed Israel had “targeted” the boy (Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian). On the other hand, anyone who opposed it, like Esther Schapira (ARD) and James Fallows (Atlantic), elicited harsh responses, including from colleagues. Indeed, France2 refused to play Schapira’s documentary, made by its sister German news agency ARD, and then sued French critics for besmirching Charles Enderlin’s honor. To this day, almost two decades later, the MSNM has yet to correct this piece of fake news.[6] (On the impact, see below.)

3.6  Jenin “Massacre” (April 2002):

3.7 From April 1-16, IDF troops entered the refugee camp outside the city of Jenin in the West Bank. During the fight and after, Palestinian officials claimed Israel had massacred hundreds, even thousands of civilians, crushing them with bulldozers and burying them in mass graves. The media, which until the 16th did not have access to the scene and events, reported these claims as accurate, accusing Israel of atrocities, war crimes, even comparing their military operation to 9-11. In the end, after two weeks of combat, at most 56 Palestinians were killed, as many as 42 of which were combatants, giving an exceptionally low civilian casualty rate (1:3) especially in urban warfare.[7] And yet, even after having entered the site and not found bodies or mass graves, reporters, especially a pack of British reporters (Janine di Giovanni, Peter Beaumont, Chris McGreal, Brian Whitacker et al.), basing themselves in some cases on the same single witness making uncorroborated allegations, insisted that the evidence before their eyes confirmed the reports of massacres.[8] While a few reporters (Beaumont) and newspapers (Milwaukee Star), subsequently apologized for their errors, most have refused.[9] To this day the BBC site has no corrections, and the Guardian explicitly refused to reconsider on the tenth anniversary of this fake-news episode.

3.8 Death of Palestinian children killed by Palestinian rockets

One of the most tragic and telling cases of fake news in this tradition of lethal journalism concerns the cases where some of the 10% of Gazan rockets that fall short actually killed their own people.

3.9 Jihad Masharawi, 11 months old (November 14, 2012). On the first day of Operation Pillar of Defense (November 14-21), Omar, the 11-month old son of Jihad Mashrawi, a BBC employee, was killed by a shell that came through the roof of his house. The BBC immediately blamed Israel, and featured an oft-repeated sequence of Jihad holding his dead son in anguish. It became the “iconic” image of this brief “war,” spreading far and wide on social media, confirming the image of the IDF as child-killers. The evidence (nature of the damage and of the wounds), however, suggested that the damage was done by an errant Hamas bomb, something bloggers pointed out immediately, and a UN investigation confirmed a month later.[10] In response to the UN findings, Jon Donnison, the senior BBC reporter in Gaza and the author of the reports on the anguish of his colleague, Jihad, addressed the issue with an dishonest and dismissive report that suppressed evidence and highlighted Jihad’s response that the claim was “rubbish.”[11]

3.10 Mahmoud Sadallah, 4 years old (November 17, 2012). Sadallah and a 20-year old man (unidentified) were killed when an explosion went off in an alleyway in Jabalya Refugee camp. The strike was immediately blamed on Israel by, among others, CNN’s Sara Sidner, whose accusations were relayed as news by the MSNM, despite the evidence that it was a Palestinian rocket (limited damage, small shrapnel holes, area off-limits to press while clean-up crew removed shrapnel).[12] The boy’s body was taken from the morgue at Shifa and passed around for a gruesome photo-op starring visiting Egyptian (Muslim Brotherhood) Foreign Minister, Hisham Kandil, and Hamas chief, Ismail Haniyah, weeping and kissing the dead boy.[13] Some Western media conveyed the event as Hamas wished, not as the ghoulish exploitation of a child they had killed. In recanting her original report, CNN’s Sara Sidner was as reluctant as Jon Donnison.[14]

3.11 Shati Refugee Camp Bombing (July 28, 2014): In the course of Operation Protective Edge (July 7-August 4), two explosions from missiles hit Shifa Hospital and nearby Shati Refugee camp during the truce negotiated for Eid al Fitr. Ten children were killed, and the media reported extensively on the devastation, physical and emotional, of the survivors and their parents. Although it was obvious to everyone on site, both Palestinians and journalists, that it was a Hamas shell rather than an Israeli one (size of damage, Hamas clean-up crews removing shrapnel), no one reported that as news.[15] Israel quickly published trajectories of the two shells fired from Gaza, but that had little impact on coverage which shifted from assuming Israel guilty to playing “he said-she said.” NBC journalist Ayman Mohyeldin bore personal witness, and repeatedly tweeted that it was an “Israelis strike.” When it became clear that it was not, NBC removed the attribution to Israel without noting the change or removing their reporter. A day later, Italian reporter, Gabriele Barbati tweeted:

“Out of #Gaza‬‬‬‬‬ far from #‬Hamas‬‬‬‬‬ retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris.”

This episode featured all the elements of consensual fake news: misfired rockets, clean-up crews removing incriminating shrapnel, Hamas intimidation of reporters, reporters who know but won’t say.

3.12 We have no idea how often this happens. Despite the availability of evidence – ballistics, clean-up crews, blocked access – we outside the news makers circle only find out in unusual cases, and only if we’re looking for it. None of our journalists seems ready to ask people what really happened or how they feel about it. Everyone knows that would be dangerous to everyone involved. Again, no subsequent investigative follow-up, no analysis of what happened both in fact, and in the community of journalists. Matti Friedman, a journalist who worked for AP has documented how this pack, fake-news, journalism operates in its coverage of the ME.[16]

4.0 Impact of this Lethal Fake News about Israel: Own Goal War Journalism

4.1 Fake news’ impact grows exponentially the wider the media consensus to accept it. It is unthinkable to most members of democratic societies that almost everyone in positions of authority and trust would pass on fake as accurate news. And yet, in the case of the ME, news consumers are heavily misinformed not only about the conflict between Israel and her neighbors, but about the whole region. Hence their dramatic misreading of the Arab turmoil of 2011 as an Arab Spring for democracy when, instead, it was Springtime for apocalyptic and tribal war.

4.2 Fake news about Israelis is especially explosive. No other reports of atrocities - not the genocide of Rwanda, nor that of Darfur and Southern Sudan, not the excesses of Western armies in the Muslim World - can draw anywhere near the numbers and intensity of the protests that every campaign of lethal journalism about Israel has produced… starting with the first global protest of the new millennium on October 7, 2000, where crowds carrying Muhammad al Durah’s image, compared Israel to Nazis and shouted “Death to Jews” – a cry not heard in the streets of European cities since the Nazis.

s

Place de la République, October 6, 2000.

In fact, with the exception of the spectacular anti-War demonstrations of February 2003, virtually every major Western world-wide rally of protest in the first two decades of the 21st century, has been provoked by reports of Israelis killing Palestinians. By Operation Protective Edge (Summer 2014), the crowds shouting “Death to Jews” carried on for hours, and spilled out into violence in some places, including in Western Europe.[17]

4.3 And from the rallies, where really poisonous accusations are made, these attitudes feed back into the MSNM. A.N. Wilson attended one such rally protesting the Jenin “Massacre” and promptly wrote a piece for the Independent the next day, accusing Israel of genocide.[18] Lethal reports about Israel can inspire so widely admired a figure as Jostein Gaarder (Sophie’s World) to paroxysms of hatred and contempt for the “chosen people.”[19] By the mid-oughts, majorities in some European countries (including Germany) believed that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people.[20]

4.4 And every episode of lethal journalism has strengthened the forces of global Jihad, giving their recruiters icons of hatred to fuel the rage of a generation of Muslims the world over, including in the West. The journalists may have thought they were showing Palestinians suffering at the hands of Israelis – but horrified Muslims the world over saw innocent Muslims being slaughtered by hateful infidels. In prisons, in slums, in “zones urbaines sensibles,” Jihadis report how TV images of Muslims suffering at the hands of the infidel had awakened that combination of feeling that Islam was under attack and rage against the attackers that makes recruiting for Jihad so effective.[21] Bin Laden used the image of Al Durah as a centerpiece of a recruiting video produced by Al Qaeda sometime between the France2 report and 9-11; the “icon of hatred” adorned the DVD cover of the recruiting videos used in British universities in the oughts (‘00s).[22]

4.5 When considered in terms of the damage done to the societies in which the fake news about Israel is spread, it’s fair to characterize it as “own goal war journalism,” running one’s enemy’s invasive cognitive warfare propaganda as news… a self-damaging corruption of the information stream and a huge boost to those seeking to undermine the society. When European demonstrators wore mock suicide belts to show their solidarity with Palestinian “victims,” in response to the “Jenin Massacre,” they actually welcomed global jihad’s new and most powerful weapon of terror, soon to target them and their societies.[23]

4.6 The only winners here are the global Jihadis. The losers? Too many to count, but certainly the following: Israelis, Palestinians who want to live in peace and prosperity, Jews in the diaspora, Western infidels and their nations, moderate Muslims the world over, a free press, global civil society, progressive values…

5.0 Recommendations

5.1 Have the TV news media independently check all footage (certainly from the Middle East) to be used in broadcasts, against the original raw footage, for signs of staged scenes, and penalize cameramen who knowingly film such staged scenes.

5.2 Insist on corrections of errors in a timely and visible fashion.

5.3 Encourage discussions of intimidation of journalists and their self-censorship.

5.4 Do a major and public reconsideration of British mainstream news media’s contributions to the problem, rather than blaming foreign and international corporations for the devastating effects of fake news.[24]

March 2018

Endnotes.