Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

174 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:139
exhaustively documented case a “seven-year hate-filled smear campaign”
aimed at destroying Enderlin’s “professional dignity.” It flatly declared that
Muhammad al-Dura had been killed “by shots coming from the Israeli position.”
It said that the court had granted “equal credibility to a journalist
renowned for his rigorous work, and to willful deniers ignorant of the local
realities and with no journalistic experience.” 135
The petition was signed by over 300 journalists. Among them was
Jonathan Randal, a 75-year-old former Washington Post foreign correspondent
based in Paris, who was quoted as saying he saw in this case a dangerous
American trend of “vindictive pressure groups interfering with news
organizations,” which had now unfortunately crossed the Atlantic:
Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but
France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid,
they’re persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters.
I can’t imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this
case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist. I don’t care if it’s the
Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles
simply doesn’t make a story up. 136
Similarly, Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte, two seasoned reporters
from Le Figaro, thought that Enderlin was still the best reporter currently in
the Near East. 137 Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist and expert on radical
Islam, was similarly dismissive of the criticism: “Guy sends him pictures
from Gaza, tells him the Israelis shot the kid, he believes him–I mean,
even the Israeli Defense Forces spokesman believed it?” 138
*
By virtually any traditional journalistic standards, this case was a
135. Moutet, supra note 124.
136. See Augean Stables, available at http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2008/08/
10/the-nouvel-obs-petition-signers-study-1-jon-randal/print/.
137. “These people, the ones attacking him, they’re extreme rightists . . . . You
can’t take anything they say seriously.” Moutet, supra note 124.
138. Id. And then there was Theo Klein, a former president of the official representative
body of French Jews, who that he was outraged by the court ruling. .
“Perhaps the bullets were not Israeli after all, but if something was set up, I’m sure
Charles had nothing to do with it. He is a remarkable journalist. I respect him, and
I’m sure this matters more than whether a bullet came from the right or from the
left. After all, many Palestinian children have been killed in the intifada. You
know, the Israelis haven’t made half the noise about this that some French Jews
have. Id.