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Al-Jazeera, extremism, footage, france, international, jihad, killing, le figaro, le figaro in english, media, merah, mohamed merah, news, newspapers, shooting, toulouse
On Monday, the French headquarters of Al-Jazeera received a package containing the footage filmed by Mohamed Merah during his killings in Toulouse and Montauban.
The news service turned over all evidence to police… but remained unsure of what to do with the footage.
As soon as the news got out, responses poured in.
As I wrote in an article for Le Figaro in English:
French president Nicolas Sarkozy asked channels to refrain from broadcasting the grisly images “under any pretext.”
The families of victims also asked Al-Jazeera and any other channel to avoid broadcasting the images. The family of Jonathon Sandler, who was killed alongside his two young sons, spoke out, as did Latifa Ibn Ziaten, the mother of first soldier killed by Merah.
“People want to show it as if it is a film– please, I don’t want to see that,” she begged.
The uncle of Aaron Bijaoui, the teenager seriously wounded by Merah, had said that showing the videos would have allowed Merah to win “all the way to the end.”
In the end, Al-Jazeera decided not to broadcast the images, but the statement made by Aaron’s uncle has stayed with me. This case has been mediatized to its very core and, as a journalist working in France, I haven’t been able to escape it. Our newsroom has barely mentioned anything else since the horrifying shooting outside of a Jewish school was first announced.
On that Monday when Merah slaughtered four people, three of them children, I walked into the newsroom cold, blissfully unaware of the events after a weekend travelling. It was the first story I wrote of the day and I have been thinking about it since.
Not that I had much time to think about other things: each time a new piece of information appeared, I was writing about it. People hungrily sought out the words written by myself and other journalists—the sorrow of those who knew the victims, the fears of another attack, the discovery of a suspect, the police closing in…
On Thursday, I was listening in direct as police sieged Merah’s apartment and did a minute by minute coverage. I heard gunshots through my flimsy purple head phones and typed out the time and information and then hit “publish” or “tweet.” During that time, our readership spiked phenomenally, people subscribed to our tweets and re-tweeted out headlines.
An hour later, it was over. Merah leapt from his balcony in a hail of gunfire and was found dead on the ground below, killed by a bullet fired by a special forces officer just before he slammed into the pavement.
I unplugged my headphones and sat outside in the remarkably beautiful weather. After a tragedy that has ended numerous lives and completely and horrifically changed many others, I can make no special claims to trauma. But I was traumatized, I was emotionally exhausted and I am still traumatized and emotionally exhausted.
That’s terrorism for you. It’s about provoking as much terror in as many people as you can, including an intern in a big office in Paris who knew no victims and was nowhere near the actual event. And who can’t remove the images, real or horrifically imagined, from her mind.
All of this has brought up so many questions for me: one being what the role of the media is in all this?
Knowledge is power and the media helps to increase access to that information. During the shooting sprees in the D.C. area several years ago, police used the media to help track down the gunmen John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. In the end, a man who had heard about it on TV tipped off the police and led to the eventual arrests. When Merah was still on the loose in Toulouse, the police were putting out very little information and local residents were turning on the radio and TV to inform themselves. Even now, the media is becoming the tool for people to raise serious questions about the police handling of the crisis and the growth of extremism in France and abroad.
And yet, these killings were Merah’s foil-proof plan to get the microphone for his causes, to spread the messages he wanted to spread. The media allowed the horror of his crimes to reach more people. What do I say when my friend tells me her nine-year-old son heard about it on the news and is angry and scared and doesn’t understand?
People have already said that in a lot of ways, Merah won. He took the lives he wanted to take and was never arrested as he died in a hail of bullets, fighting to the end.
I still don’t know what I think about all this… who does? But I will say that in deciding not to publish Merah’s images, I believe that Al-Jazeera denied him one last grisly victory.