by Felix Quigley
29 June, 2008
Penny Marshall tried to say that she never used the word “concentration camp” when she and her cameraman took the photo composed of two main elements, a skinny man and some strands of barbed wire. However in the last article, the report by Professor Wladimiroff we see that it was totally unnecesasary for Marshal to do so. Marshall and ITN had a whole organizational backup for distributing that film around the world and the film was accompanied by text which did just that.
Penny Marshall is an accomplished deceiver, that special kind of deceit which has been bred into the British ruling class over many centuries.
The problem for Marshall though is that there are very many people alive and well in the world who are not so easily deceived.
First of all the context. In discovering whether people tellthe truth or not the context is always very important. In this case the context refers to what was going on before they took that trip to Yugoslavia. And the context also refers to what happened after it, including the written reports and interviews which Marshall gave to various Media.
Marshall and Vulliamy were sent out there to Yugoslavia in order to find “Serb concentration camps”. Marshall and her cameraman Irvin then proceeded to produce the iconic photo of the decade and not only did they do so but they proceeded to blow their trumpet about it.
The key factor in this picture was the barbed wire and the skinny man. Immediately the image of concentration camp is brought up into the mind. This is because the image of the Holocaust of the Jews remains such a strong emotive force in the minds of all humans no matter what country they hail from.
Even the most cursory knowledge of photography will teach that you eliminate and you accentuate. In this photograph the real background was eliminated and the two components, the barbed wire and the skinny man were accentuated. The actual mechanics were terribly simple. A 12 year old could easily have done it.
However it was not standing alone. The ground had already been prepared by other professionals in this business, such as the Irish woman Maggie O’Kane. Prior to the Marshall visit and photograph this individual had built quite a name for herself in the journalistic world by her lurid accounts of concentration camps being run by the Serbs. Invariably the evidence for this was “discussion” O’Kane was having with Muslim “refugees”. The Islamofascist professional liars of Izetbegovic must have seen this Irish woman Maggie coming from a mile off. And that was “journalism of the “O’Kane School”. O’Kane was not alone! There were thousands like her!
All of that was going on with the Marshall film from the Balkans which showed the skinny man and the barbed wire. And the jutting nose of flinty eyed Marshall had an overall strategic picture and knew it all very well.
We have just seen with Professor Wladimiroff how Marshall’s employers and company the ITN was linked with another company which did all the lying about the picture showing a concentration camp.
But what about hard eyed Marshall. How careful she was! But how blatantly and bloodily obvious she was as well! Let us examine what Marshall said exactly. Her very own words tell the story and I see a remarkable similarity to Charles Enderin in the El Durra France 2 case. My comments are in brackets in the following quote and analysis by Deichmann:
[start quote here]
Penny Marshall did mention the barbed wire fence in the first report she wrote after returning from Trnopolje, published in the Sunday Times (16 August 1992). About her first visit to the camp she simply wrote that ‘Outside was barbed wire’. Describing her second visit to the camp in the same article, she noted that ‘Outside, the camp had changed in the week since our original report. The barbed wire fence had been removed and the Serbians had left building materials for the prisoners to make shelters’.
(This is surely the sneakiness of the British ruling class I talked about above. “Outside there was barbed wire” says this woman. You are damned right Marshall there was barbed wire, which was one of the two components which made up that phorograph which consumate Imperialist that she is knew very well that this barbed wire in THAT photograph was what really was going to screw the Serbs good and proper. This is not a journalist really but a consumate member of the British Imperialist class. Got that! Doing a job willingly on behalf of here masters and did she ever get the Queens Honours for that work! Williams did npot have to say anything more. She was full of comprehension of her own role, she was but one cog in the whole British ruling class strategy against the Serbs)
This was true; the barbed wire fence (and the ordinary wire mesh fences) which Marshall’s cameraman had shot during the first visit had indeed been removed before her return. But Penny Marshall had left open the question of precisely whereabouts ‘outside’ the barbed wire fence had been located. She thus failed to correct the false interpretation which so many people had placed upon the pictures. Similarly, Ed Vulliamy wrote in his book that ‘Four days after our visit to Trnopolje, the fence came down’ (p113). This left untouched the impression which had settled in the public mind – that the camp had been fenced-in with barbed wire.
(Absolutely right! Marshall said in her second report that the wire had come down. Vulliamy that “the fence came down”. They were doing 2 things. They were providing a cover for themselves. And at the same time they were doing nothing to challenge the Big Lie that had been set in motion by THEIR picture)
A year after the ITN pictures were first broadcast, Penny Marshall reacted to the suggestion that her report might have been sensationalist: ‘I bent over backwards, I showed guards – Bosnian Serb guards – feeding the prisoners. I showed a small Muslim child who had come of his own volition. I didn’t call them death camps. I was incredibly careful, but again and again we see that image being used.’ (Independent, 5 August 1993) Despite her plea of objectivity, however, she did not explain how ‘that image’ of Fikret Alic behind barbed wire had been produced by her team.
(You can see the deviousness of this woman. Marshall knew very well that it was that picture that counted and none of the rest of her padding. It was the two things, the skinny man up against the barbed wire. Marshall knows very well the psychology of the Fascism of the Empire, aka Imperialism, which she was serving)
In a German television programme ‘Kozarac – Ethnically Cleansed’, broadcast on 11 October 1993, Marshall told German movie producer Monika Gras about the impact of the Trnopolje picture: ‘That picture of that barbed wire and these emaciated men made alarm bells ring across the whole of Europe. I believe that the report would not have caused such a reaction had it been transmitted without that picture, although the facts would have been the same.’ Marshall said that the Bosnian Serbs did not know how to deal with the Western press: ‘It was a PR mistake in the Bosnian Serbs’ terms.’ She did not mention her team making any mistakes in their presentation of the Trnopolje story.
(And this paragraph proves what I said above and proves the deviousness of Marshall. I will repeat the key sentence which I believe also draws the parallel with Enderlin. The above proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Marshall set up the fix on the Serbs, she was sent there to do a job, it was all part of the Big Lie, and as far as journalistic probity this cynical woman could not have given a damn. In the above Marshall pinpoints the two material factors, the emaciated man and the barbed wire. Not men but man. Note that Marshall says “men” but there was only one skinny man in that picture, some of the rest had big bellies. Marshall cannot help but embroider her story. That is where truth goes, a little compromise here, a little compromise there, and soon the Big Lie builds up! And in pinpointing the essence Marshall is really telling that all her previous comments were lies. Her key phrase “I believe that the report would not have caused such a reaction”. That is it. Marshall was a partisan in the war and not a factual reporter. Marshall tells us out of her own lying and phoney mouth that she was out to create a “reaction” and not to report the facts. Yes Marshall was a partisan, not a “reporter”. Whatever Marshall is she is not a reporter. And this is the link with all of this emoting rather than reporting. O’Kane, catholic product of the convent nuns in Dublin, was all the time in the Balkans full of this emoting, rather than armed with a technique for reporting facts. Who trains these people as reporters is a question. And from Marshall with chum Vulliamy on to Charles Enderlin in the El Durra case)
It is worthwhile at this point recalling what Charles Enderlin of France 2 said when he was hammered into a corner, when he was forced to retreat by the weight of evidence against his phoney footage of the El Durra shooting.
[start quote here]
The possibility of a staged scene is further substantiated by expert testimony presented by Mr. Karsenty — including a 90-page ballistics report and a sworn statement by Dr. Yehuda ben David attributing Jamal al-Durra’s scars — displayed as proof of wounds sustained in the alleged shooting — to knife and hatchet wounds incurred when he was attacked by Palestinians in 1992. In fact, there is no blood on the father’s T-shirt, the boy moves after Mr. Enderlin’s voice-over commentary says he is dead, no bullets are seen hitting the alleged victims. And Mr. Enderlin himself had backtracked when the controversy intensified after seasoned journalists Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte viewed some of the raw footage in 2004. The news report, he said, corresponds to “the situation.” The court, concurring with Messrs. Jeambar and Leconte, considers that journalism must stick to events that actually occur.
[end quote here]
To Enderlin the final report that he put out to the nation of the French and to the world using the phoney footage of an antisemitic palestinian Arab cameraman was not true (he is admitting that) but it “corresponds to the situation”. By that he means to the situation that the Palestinian Arabs are in, or anyway his interpretation of same.
So to Enderlin it is not a matter any longer of a journalist seeking out the facts of a case and truthfully reporting them. Rather it is that Enderlin and France 2 are participants in the drama and are partisans, making thje case against Israel for the Palestinian Arabs.
This is the same mode in which Marshall and Vulliamy worked. It is also the same immoral method used by Hoare and Kammwho will argue that black is white and no matter what evidence is placed in front of them will seek to make a case against the Serbs.
The responsibility on Marshall and Vulliamy is horrific.
Marshall says above that the Serbs did not understand how to deal with the British Press. Well you bet Marshall. The Serb leaders had invited Marshall to come out and view for herself. The Serb leaders had organized a safe escort, had deliberately shown here everything, there was nowhere that she and Vulliamy could not go. The mistake the Serb leaders made was in thinking that they were dealing with journalists. They were not! They were dealing with the express representatives of the British state machine, not really journalists at all. Was that a mistake! Was that naivity! I think not! That was rather a very normal reaction of a civilized people showing hospitality to people from another country. let us not let Marshall and Vulliamy drag us down into their sordid British Media hell hole.
They singled out the skinny man, they quickly spotted the barbed wire, then they constructed their dirty little lie of a picture. They had their ITN organization and its sister organization write the blurbs which called it a Serb Concentration camp. Marshall and Vulliamy wretches that they are though have no compunction about doing this. They are partisans. They are British Imperialists essentially. The result led to the murder of countless Serb ordinary small people going about their lives. The result was a civil war in which innocent on all sides lost their lives and others suffered terribly. And they started the whole industry of lies as seen in the following described by Deichmann, sheer licence to lie in a book later published by a fellow hack:
[start quote here]
The notion that there was a barbed wire fence around Trnopolje camp, and the comparison with Nazi concentration camps, have been widely accepted as matters of fact. ‘When the first journalists had arrived there a few days earlier, barbed wire surrounded the place and there was no welcoming banner’, Peter Mass wrote in Love Thy Neighbours: A Story of War, about his visit to Trnopolje in the late summer of 1992. (London, 1996, p41) ‘I walked through the gates and couldn’t quite believe what I saw. There, right in front of me, were men who looked like survivors of Auschwitz.’ Marshall, Williams and Vulliamy have not used such language themselves. But neither have they corrected the false interpretation of the picture of Fikret Alic apparently imprisoned behind the barbed wire.
[end quote here]
ibid
Do not forget that Marshall and Vulliamy work led to the later murder of Milosevic in the Hague, to the emergence of the first Islamofascist states in Europe. Also to centres of drug running into Europe and even prostitute trading. Some achievement for a womens libber like Marshall.
4international 