Ivestigations Introduction

Investigations

This section of the The Second Draft contains the primary (archival) and secondary material that we have used to produce our short documentaries. We adhere to the academic principle of transparency, in which viewers/readers of our publications can view – and critique – our original sources. Our investigations generally begin from a close analysis of original video footage and then, treating these primary documents (primarily “rushes”), we compare their evidence with the accompanying “narrative” of the journalist-cameraman and the other witnesses to the event.

In the three cases we have dealt with so far, the gap between evidence and narrative is shocking, and the inability of the Mainstream news media (MSM) to see the contradictions and explore them in “real” (news cycle) time have contributed to some serious global disorders. These three concern the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is a specialty of the founders of The Second Draft. But we do not think that these problems are limited to this conflict, and we plan to have studies of other cases of major media malfeasance – e.g., Rwanda – in the future. We welcome suggestions and material from independent sources that would lend themselves to the kind of analysis we give here.

Pallywood Investigation

Pallywood is the term we coined to designate a Palestinian film industry that systematically stages scenes of Palestinian injury and evacuation on the one hand, and “resistance” on the other. The resulting propaganda footage, designed to “frame” the conflict as the brave Palestinian David fighting the cruel Israeli Goliath, is then passed on to the news media which fails to spot (or ignores) the staging, edits it into the most believable “sight-bytes” and presents it to their audiences as “real news.”

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Al Durah

The story of Muhammad al Durah, allegedly gunned down by a hail of Israeli bullets on September 30, 2000, took the world by storm. It played an important role in a wave of Anti-Zionism that helped propel the “new Anti-Semitism” of the 21st century. Here again, we find a startling gap between the narrative of witnesses – the cameraman Talal abu Rahmeh – and the evidence of his rushes and those of other cameramen there at the time. Since the first publications of our findings in 2005, this Affair has gone through a series of trials in France and a new documentary by Esther Schapira. This section explores not only the forensic evidence, but the impact of this “lethal narrative.”

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Gaza Beach Investigation

On June 9, 2006, the story of the Ghalia family, struck by an Israeli gunboat shell hit the airwaves, moving viewers deeply with footage of a surviving twelve-year old Huda, wild with grief at her family’s slaughter. Again, an investigation of the gap between narration and evidence suggests that, while the family was indeed wiped out by an explosion, the Israelis may not have been responsible. The news reporters, in this analysis, became professionally irresponsible pawns in a cynical exploitation of grief by Palestinian propagandists.

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