Another victory for the exposer of the al-Durah hoax

From Avi at the Astute Bloggers:

Phillipe Karsenty, the media watchdog manager in France who exposed the Mohammed al-Durah hoax for what it was, a blood libel, has won another lawsuit against Canal Plus, who tried to defame him with a "documentary":

A French court has upheld a suit by journalist Phillipe Karsenty, ruling that a French documentary about him and the death of 12-year-old Muhammed Al-Dura in 2000 was defamatory and prejudiced.

There's a bit of an inaccuracy here: al-Durah didn't die in September 2000 at the Netzarim intersection in Gaza in the originally filmed propaganda itself. That said, we can't be sure if he's still alive now either; what if his own kin murdered him instead?

Karsenty, a French media commentator, has now been twice vindicated in his fight against the France-2 television station’s version of the boy’s death. Karsenty was sued for libel in 2004 by France 2 for saying that the film of Al-Dura’s death, which accused Israeli forces of killing him, was distorted and false. Though the case is now being heard by the French Supreme Court, the status quo is that in May 2008, the Paris Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ruling against Karsenty from 2006.

In the weeks preceding the Paris Court of Appeals’ decision, an attempt was made to sway public opinion against Karsenty when private French television channel Canal + broadcast a documentary about the case. “The verdict found that the Canal + news documentary about the case was defamatory,” Karsenty wrote late last week, “and that the journalist who made it wasn't objective, even though he had access to all the necessary information to know the truth about the al Dura hoax.”

“Here are some statements that were made about me in the documentary,” Karsenty continued. “According to this film, I am - faking information, pressuring journalists to self-censor themselves, manipulating the information in order to promote extremist political views without any interest in the truth, using the internet to dupe, falsify facts and to serve a cause and promote a despicable ideology,” etc.

Though the original France 2 report claimed that Al-Dura was killed by Israeli gunfire, a subsequent investigation by Israel and additional footage showed the boy lifting his head, opening his eyes and lifting his arm after being pronounced dead. Though France 2’s Charles Enderlin said that these were was just the boy’s death throes, others said the boy was actually peeking at the camera in what was actually an elaborate ruse.

A shame that even now, the MSM in France is vengeful for his success in proving that atrocity a hoax (and lest we forget that Enderlin acted very thin-skinned about it later on). Make them pay a nice big chunk of money now, with which Karsenty could open his own private news channel.