Last Thursday, journalist Charles Enderlin was sponsored by Snell Library and the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development to speak on his new book and the political issues in the Middle East.
Aside from his short talk covering only elementary issues, which was not suitable for a university setting, he dodged nearly all relevant questions. However, this is not the only reason so many students were upset about the decision to bring Enderlin to Northeastern.
In September 2000, Enderlin contributed to the Palestinian intifada with faulty journalism and lies. The France 2 network aired and freely distributed Enderlin’s inconclusive report that shows a 12-year-old boy supposedly killed by Israeli soldiers amongst Palestinian bullets.
After broadcasting the edited footage on TV, an uproar began that fueled indiscriminate violence against Israeli civilians. After a comprehensive investigation, evidence compiled showed the likely killers of the young boy to be Palestinian terrorists, not Israeli soldiers. Enderlin and France 2 threatened any accusation against them with lawsuits, and to this day continue to cover up the true source of information related to the scandal.
Enderlin and France 2 had continuously refused to let anyone view the 27 minutes of unreleased footage, which Enderlin claims he cut out because the agony of the dying child is too much to bear. In fact, once the footage was finally viewed, the journalists, who had pressured France 2 to let them view the footage, saw no agony in the child at all. In the footage, not only is there no visual evidence of the boy dying, but there are no soldiers in view at all.
Students at Northeastern are at a loss as to why the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development would sponsor a propagandist whose lies and distortions exacerbated the loss of innocent lives during the Second intifada. Professor Denis Sullivan, director of the Middle East Center, seemed indifferent to the criticism students in his Arab-Israeli Conflict class expressed, after they had been required to attend Enderlin’s talk as part of mandatory classtime.
– Joshua Shainess is a freshman international affairs major.
