The Mohamed al Durah Fraud

Excellent detailed account, by Melanie Phillips, of the Mohamed al Durah hoax and its continuing fall-out:

"Tomorrow, an appeal starts in Paris in a case which encapsulates all that is most rotten and murderous about the media war against Israel and its truly monstrous consequences. At the beginning of the second intifada, an event occurred which more than any other was to incite mass hysteria against Israel, lead directly to the terrorist murder of Jews and whip up demonstrations and incitement against Israel and the west throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

On September 30, 2000 viewers around the world watched a short news clip screened by the TV station France 2 which appeared to show the killing by the Israel Defence Force of a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, in Gaza. The boy was shown crouching with his father behind a barrel next to a concrete wall in an apparently vain attempt to shelter from the gun-battle between Israel and the Palestinians that was raging around them. In his commentary on the incident France 2’s Israel correspondent, Charles Enderlin, declared that the IDF had killed the boy.

This footage become the iconic image of the intifada and the Palestinian ‘struggle’ against Israel. It served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities as well as inflaming hatred of Israel around the world. It was used in Palestinian educational materials to incite other children to turn themselves into human bombs. It was used repeatedly in al Qaeda’s videotape of the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. And most stomach-churning of all, it was invoked by the Palestinian mob in Ramallah that lynched IDF reservists Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche, who had taken a wrong turning, two weeks after the alleged al Durah killing. As Joanna Chandler wrote:

The consequences of their fatal error are well known: they were tortured and beaten to death in the Palestinian Authority police station, and their lifeless bodies thrown out of the station’s second story window to a throng of men howling, Allahu Akbar -God is great! They commenced to dismember and disembowel the soldiers’ corpses, and then passed the entrails on a platter to a hysterical mob numbering in the thousands who rejoiced as they literally chewed and swallowed the remains of their hated Jews. What is lesser known is that while eating the flesh and blood of their victims, in satisfaction and triumph, the good citizens of Ramallah chanted, not only, Allahu-Akbar-but the name of Mohamed al Durah!

read it all