A stunning article in Commentary by Nidra Poller exposes what might eventually come to be regarded as a racial libel on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in both its malevolence and its contribution to the history of racial hatred. The defining image of the second Palestinian intifada was the television footage of 12 year-old Mohammed al Dura being sheltered by his father as they cowered under a hail of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers in a gun battle at the Netzarim junction on September 30 2000, at the very beginning of the violence. These pictures, shot by a France 2 cameraman, instantly achieved a lethal iconic status. The image of Mohammed al Dura slumped in death in his father’s lap like an Arab pieta was used on countless occasions to recruit human bomb volunteers for the jihad against Israel. As Poller says, his death scene has been replicated on murals, posters, and postage stamps, even making an appearance in the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading.

Testifying under oath before the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the cameraman Talal Abu Rahmeh alleged that Israeli soldiers had intentionally murdered the boy and wounded the father. There had been, he said, a five-minute exchange of fire between Palestinian policemen and Israeli soldiers. This was followed by fully 45 minutes of gunfire coming exclusively from the Israeli position and aimed directly at the man and the boy crouching desperately behind a concrete barrel. He had captured on film a total of 27 minutes of this fusillade, risking his own life in the process.

From the start, however, many smelled a rat and several journalists have suggested that this event was not what it seemed. Now, Poller reveals information that strongly suggests the whole thing was a cynical and evil fraud. She has obtained hours of out-takes from film shot by dozens of cameramen at the Netzarim junction that day. What was recorded on these films were two types of activity — real attacks and crudely staged, entirely confected battle scenes:

'In the "reality" zone, excited children and angry young men hurl rocks and Molotov cocktails at the Israeli outpost while shababs ("youths") standing on the roof of the Twins throw burning tires down onto the caged lookout; this goes on seemingly for hours, without provoking the slightest military reaction from Israeli soldiers. At the same time, in the "theatrical" zone, Palestinian stringers sporting prestigious logos on their vests and cameras are seen filming battle scenes staged behind the abandoned factory, well out of range of Israeli gunfire. The "wounded" sail through the air like modern dancers and then suddenly collapse. Cameramen jockey with hysterical youths who pounce on the "casualties," pushing and shoving, howling Allahu akhbar!, clumsily grabbing the "injured," pushing away the rare ambulance attendant in a pale green polyester jacket in order to shove, twist, haul, and dump the "victims" into UN and Red Crescent ambulances that pull up on a second’s notice and career back down the road again, sirens screaming. In one shot we recognize Talal Abu Rahmeh in his France-2 vest, filming a staged casualty scene.* Split seconds of these ludicrous vignettes would later appear in newscasts and special reports; the husk, the raw footage that would reveal the fakery, had been removed, leaving the kernel rich in anti-Israel nutrients.

‘The al-Dura death scene was filmed right in the middle of these falsified incidents. It can be localized and situated. In one section of Reuters footage we see the man and the boy crouched behind the upended culvert as a jeep drives slowly up the road, stops in firing range of the Israeli position that is clearly visible in the near distance, makes a U-turn, drives in the opposite direction, stops short of the barrel/culvert, and helps perform the clearly faked evacuation of a man wounded in the right leg, as also shown in the France-2 news report. In fact, two ambulances stand for a long moment no more than fifteen feet from the al-Duras. There is no evidence of armed combat in their vicinity. No sound of gunfire. Men run down the road, passing in front of the al-Duras. No one is hit...

‘I also viewed a copy of the satellite feed transmitted by Abu Rahmeh late in the afternoon of September 30. In addition to the 55 seconds aired that evening, it includes a final image of the boy who would be described afterward as "killed instantly by a shot to the stomach": in it he is seen shifting position, propping himself up on his elbow, shading his eyes with his hand, rolling over on his stomach, covering his eyes...

'The 45 minutes? Gone. Abu Rahmeh’s 27 minutes? Gone, too. We are left with approximately a single minute of Jamal and Muhammad al-Dura filmed in continuous time. In that minute, the two crouch behind an upended culvert and contort their faces in fear. Guttural screams are heard, but they do not come from the man or the boy; they come from men standing within range of the France-2 cameraman’s microphone. Jamal bobs his head. Muhammad stretches out at his father’s feet. Then, in the brief portion that was carefully edited out but that can be seen in the outtakes, the boy changes position several times, using voluntary muscles that only living people can activate. During the 55-second sequence we see two bullets hitting the wall, which is already pockmarked with a number of other bullet holes nowhere near father and child. A cloud of dust obscures the last few frames. There is no sign or sound of a crossfire. There are no death throes. The rest, as we say in French, is literature.

‘But now look again at the Reuters outtakes. A jeep drives up a road, turns, goes down the other side, takes part in a battle scene. An ambulance pulls up, a "wounded" man is dragged across the road, placed on a stretcher, loaded into the ambulance, the ambulance drives away. Men run from position A to position B. Children toss Molotov cocktails at the IDF fortress. There is much laughter and cheering from the "audience," clusters of cheerful young men watching the show. All this time, traffic trundles through the intersection, schoolchildren go by with their bookbags, a fashionably dressed woman talks on her cellphone and chats and jokes with cameramen who stand nonchalantly with their backs to the Israeli position. Things are moving, the energy level is high, the shababs are fearless. Palestinian policemen mingle in the crowd, occasionally shoot a few rounds into the air, join in the battle scenes, get "wounded" and come back for more. Children set fire to tires; you can almost smell the rubber burning. The France-2 cameraman, Abu Rahmeh, is there, too, clearly visible, in the heat of the action, filming ambulance evacuations of fake casualties in large patches of real time. Familiar, retrievable, believable.’

The story then gets even worse. A retired Le Monde journalist, Luc Rosenzweig, wrote an article which was due to be published in the weekly l’Express in which he accused France-2 of an ‘almost perfect media crime.’ The magazine’s editorial director, Denis Jeambar, decided to double-check Rosenzweig’s facts. He, Rosenzweig and a TV director met a France 2 executive:

‘They requested the 27 minutes of raw footage showing the al-Duras pinned down by Israeli gunfire; they were shown a half-hour of fake battle scenes similar to those described above. They asked why there were no pictures of Israeli soldiers aiming at the al-Duras; they were told that on this point the cameraman had retracted his testimony, given "under pressure" to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. They asked to speak to the cameraman, then said to be undergoing medical treatment in Paris; they were told he did not speak French and that his English was too rudimentary (patently untrue). They asked to see the scene of the child’s death throes, professedly edited out by Charles Enderlin because it was "too unbearable"; they were told that no such images existed. They in turn produced pictures of a dead child, identified as Muhammad al-Dura, who had been admitted to Gaza’s Schifa hospital at noon or 1 PM on September 30, several hours before the alleged incident occurred; his face did not match that of the boy in the shooting scene, his wounds did not match the eyewitness descriptions (my emphasis). They were told that the channel’s forensic specialists would look into the matter.’

Jeambar, it seems, then lost his nerve but the story was leaked and a vicious row ensued which has left the whole thing up in the air. As Poller says, there is no conclusive evidence to prove beyond doubt that the killing of Mohammed al Dura was an atrocious lie staged to whip up hatred of Israel, most lethally in the Arab world. But the evidence assembled in this article strongly suggests that France 2 is guilty of one of the most monstrous pieces of deception of modern times whose effects in terms of fomenting hatred, violence and mass murder have been incalculable.

Israeli officials who have privately said from very early on that the al Dura footage was faked also say that there is no point opening up this affair to public scrutiny because the magnitude of this lie is so great, and so deeply has Europe absorbed the wider big lie of Israel’s ‘oppression’ of the Palestinian Arabs, that even to raise a question about the death of Mohammed al Dura is to invite further opprobrium. Faced with a world that has taken leave of its senses and suspended normal conventions of journalism, evidence and reason over the war against Israel, the despairing fatalism of the Israelis is understandable. But it is wrong. Whatever reaction it provokes, there is an obligation to history to unmask an apparent lie of this magnitude and establish the truth. Commentary has performed an important service.

Posted by melanie at September 6, 2005