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2nd Al Durah Trial Starts Today

Neo Neocon is in Paris to cover the second Al Durah Trial with an explanation of who France2 is suing for libel. And why it is bound to strike Americans, used to freedom of speech, as absurdist right off the bat.

And Richard Landes has a fascinating follow up analysis of the legal dynamics of the first trial.

[The verdict] shows a minimal grasp of what the evidence before them implies, and an extraordinary capacity to ignore inconvenient evidence. The judges work like journalists, bad journalists...

The tragedy here is that justice becomes the handmaiden of social order defined in terms of the “honor” of the elite. When faced with the classic dilemma of the Dreyfus affair, and here the Muhammad al Durah affair — honor or honesty — those in favor of “social order” choose honor.

Pretty much as I thought. France2 is too much of a state aligned company for France - in the person of the judge - to damage it, which would mean to damage herself, her own honor.

And merely for the denizens of that "shitty little country," as the French ambassador to England once called Israel at a dinner party of like minded souls and Barbara Amiel, who, unfortunately for the dear man, exposed him publicly for it.

Isn't it interesting these days that in both Britain and France, it is private individuals, in this case private, Jewish individuals, who are battling the state aligned major media corps in order to have them adhere to a standard of objective, unbiased information in their reporting. Or, at least, to admit their bias and expose it publicly.

And it is, of course, the media corporations that are resisting this, because they are too at home in their own culture.

Political pundit Andrew Marr said: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.'

At least the BBC had their encounter session, however. Honestly, can you imagine France2 ever doing so?

posted by Alcibiades @ 10:46 AM