Stéphane Juffa on the Al-Dura Affair and the French Media

Stéphane Juffa is the director of the Metula News Agency (MENA). Based in Israel and publishing in French, the MENA is the organization that has undoubtedly done the most over the last four years to expose the inconsistencies involved in France2’s report of the alleged shooting of Mohammed Al-Dura at the Netzarim junction on September 30, 2000. Despite this fact – or perhaps indeed because of it – Stéphane Juffa and his collaborators in the investigation of the alleged Al-Dura shooting (most notably, Gérard Huber and Luc Rosenzweig) have been essentially boycotted by the French media during the recent flurry of attention to the affair.

Here [in English and here in French] is Stéphane Juffa’s analysis of the current state of play of the Al-Dura affair and the attitude of the dominant French media to it. For background on the Al-Dura/France2 affair and the ambiguous – as Stéphane Juffa puts it “third way” – role played by journalists Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte in it, see here [on Trans-Int] and here [from the media watch group CAMERA], as well as the other articles devoted to the affair listed in the Trans-Int sidebar. Incidentally, the MENA is also presumably the principal intended object of France2’s legal complaint “against X” - France2 has not yet specified the object or objects of their complaint - in connection with the Al-Dura affair.

On France2's seemingly half-hearted attempt at legal action, Juffa writes the following:

As for the police file, constituted by complaints against “X”,...that I consulted last Wednesday, it reveals a vacuity that shows up the paucity of the plaintiffs’ accusations. An empty file that makes the French police wonder where the plaintiffs find any characteristic of an act of defamation. And yet if these people consider that “there was no staging on their part (or broadcasting of a staging) of a war event”, and that we are smearing them by claming the contrary, they only have to choose in the abundance of our texts — this one, to start with — to engage coherent judicial action.

As Stépane Juffa indicates at the close of his article, the MENA is now apparently contemplating legal action of its own.