Richard Landes, founder and director of The Second Draft, is guest blogging over at Solomonia. Don't miss this post.
It took the NYT 4 days to acknowledge the error identifying the victim as "Tuvya Grossman, an American student in Israel" and a week to do a story on the beating. But by then the damage had been done. Not only was the PCP firmly set in place, but the picture had become an emblem of Palestinian victimization. (This incident triggered the formation of the media watchdog group, Honest Reporting).
This subsequent retraction, and a successful lawsuit against both AP and the French paper Libération, had little impact on those who wanted to believe in Israeli villainy. As in the case of the poison accusations of 1983, Palestinian and Arab media, like the Egyptian Government and their Post Colonial Paradigm supporters, have continued to use the picture as part of their Palestinian victim narrative. To this day, Tuvya Grossman's picture adorns a poster calling on everyone in the world to boycott Coca Cola in order to stop Israelis from killing Palestinians.
No picture better illustrates the mood of the media at the outbreak of the intifada. "Already already listening" as Werner Erhardt might have put it. The storyboard was up, they just needed the material to start pinning to it. On September 29, it was Tuvya Grossman. The next day, it was Muhamed al Durah.
(links omitted but mind boggling -- the whole thing, complete with active links, is here)
BTW, earlier this month, Tuvia Grossman proudly made aliya (immigrated) to Israel.
