Al-Dura - The Beginning of Pallywood

[Teddy Bear]

Many will recollect at the beginning of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, apparent scenes showing a young Palestinian boy. Mohammed Al-Dura, hiding behind his father while bullets were flying around them during a gun battle between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers, which resulted in the 'death' of the boy after both were hit.


Israel initially apologised for the killing of this boy, though subsequently it was proved that Israeli soldiers could not possibly have been responsible for any shooting of this pair, whose location was not reachable from the Israeli position.

Further investigation of the France 2 TV footage (the French equivalent of BBC) showing the 'killing' of this boy, showed clear evidence that this was a staged event by the Palestinians with the willing assistance of the France 2 cameraman to perpetrate a hoax.

Unlike Hollywood, this 'show' has been used throughout the Muslim and Western world to generate huge anti-Israel sentiments, resulting in the deaths of many more innocent lives, whilst further fueling continuation of this conflict, as well as terrorism worldwide.

Until now, France 2 had refused to release the tapes of the whole 'incident', despite numerous requests from Israeli authorities and organisations. Now a French judge has ordered the release.

Having already seen the previous evidence available that clearly shows this to be a staged event, I know these tapes will further damn this media company.

Despite numerous independant analysts and a German documentary showing the travesty of this initial accusation against Israeli soldiers, as well as the impact of Palestinian misuse of Western media, with their willing cooperation, no major media has run this story yet. The BBC still run the Al-Dura incident as fact.

We'll see what the media will cover when the tapes are examined, and what, if any, retractions will be forthcoming.

Al-Dura footage to air
French judge orders television network to screen withheld footage of killing of young Palestinian boy in Gaza in 2000

Yaakov Lappin Published: 09.20.07, 18:18 / Israel News

A French judge has ordered the France 2 television network to screen in court previously withheld footage of the shooting of Muhammad al-Dura, the Palestinian boy shot dead in his father's arms in Netzarim in 2000 during a battle between Palestinian gunmen and IDF soldiers.

The army was blamed around the world for the boy's fatal shooting although an IDF investigation in January 2001 into the incident failed to find conclusive evidence as to whether it was an IDF or Palestinian bullet that killed the child.

The screening has been tentatively set for November 14, Ynetnews has learned, though it is not yet clear whether members of the public will be allowed to view the film.

Wednesday's landmark ruling is set to reignite the explosive debate surrounding the footage. After the images of the young boy's death were first aired seven years ago, the video ignited widespread rage across the Muslim world, and several failed suicide bombers cited the incident as their motivation to carry out a terrorist attack.

Since then, sources in Israel and a number of independent analysts have maintained that Palestinian forces were likely responsible for the killing, and a German documentary aired in 2002 suggested that a Palestinian bullet was the cause of al-Dura's death. Recently, the IDF submitted a formal request to have the footage made available for analysis.

Phillipe Karsenty, head of the French media watchdog Media Ratings, is behind the legal petition calling on France 2 to release the raw footage from that day.

'I hope that this will end smear campaign'

Speaking to Ynetnews, Karsenty said the ruling was "a first step towards a final victory which will lead French authorities to admit they broadcast a huge, anti-Semitic lie, used to justify the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.


"This film has been seen all over the Arab world. Schools carry the name of al-Dura, and children are taught that Israelis kill for no reason. So while you cannot resurrect people who died because of this lie, you can avoid more people dying," Karesenty said.

The media analyst added, however, that "judges and myself will not change this story," and called on French President Nicholas Sarkozy to order a full-scale investigation into the footage.

"France 2 is owned by the French state, which is headed by Sarkozy. He has the power to ask for those images, and have them scrutinized by experts around the world. I now call on Sarkozy to ask for the footage... it's time for French president to tell the truth," Karsenty declared.

Charles Enderlin, Jerusalem bureau chief of France 2, provided rolling commentary on the footage back in 2000. "Here Jamal and his son Muhammad are the targets of gunshots that have come from the Israeli position.... A new burst of gunfire, Muhammad is dead and his father seriously wounded," he said during a broadcast of the footage.

Reacting to Wednesday's court ruling Enderlin told Ynetnews he welcomed the decision. "I am very happy about this decision. From the start, our position has been that we will not release raw footage except through a judicial process. We will not release the footage to militants or private individuals," he said.

"I'm very happy that it will be seen in court. I hope that this is the end of a smear campaign which has gone on for seven years, and which has been difficult for me and my family," he added.

"People have accused us of staging an event which is an absolute lie. I am very happy at last to have the possibility (to show it)," Enderlin said.

Raw footage 'contains clear hoaxes'

At the center of the court battle are several minutes of footage shot by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma. During testimony before the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in 2000, Rahma said: "I spent about 27 minutes photographing the incident which took place for 45 minutes.... I can confirm that the child was intentionally and in cold blood shot dead, and his father injured, by the Israeli army."

According to Karsenty, however, the cameraman's sole purpose is to further Palestinian propaganda causes. "This guy told an American newspaper that he chose to be a journalist so to serve the Palestinian cause," Karsenty said.

According to Professor Richard Landes, who told Ynetnews he had seen the full raw footage, the film contains damning evidence of faked scenes staged for the purpose of making Israel look bad.

Landes has become heavily involved in the battle to make the film available, and produced a film, "Pallywood," based on the shooting.

He has expressed concern that France 2 will attempt to tamper with the original footage, and cut out embarrassing scenes, resulting in a screening of an edited version of the film.

"I saw the tapes three times with Enderlin in Jerusalem," Landes told Ynetnews.

"One scene in particular stands out, in which a guy grabs his leg as if he's been shot, but blood cannot be seen. He starts to limp really seriously. He is picked up by young kids and taken to an ambulance. He looks around and sees no one is looking, and then walks away without a limp," Landes said.


Describing the court ruling as "spectacular," Landes said he hoped it would draw attention to what he described as "an industry" of anti-Israel media propaganda.


"The western media, instead of saying this isn't journalism, says, what can I use?" Landes said. He added that another scene in the withheld footage shows a Palestinian child with makeup made to resemble a gunshot injury in the head running into a crowd of Palestinians, who proceed to rush the uninjured child into an ambulance.


"Yes, terrible damage has been done," Landes said, adding, however, that the world has become "much more receptive" to acknowledging hoaxes "like Kfar Qanna and Gaza beach."


"This can also potentially play a critical role in Muslim world, by providing a weapon to Muslims who realize that the global jihad is a catastrophe for them," Landes added. "If this image is proven fake, it will be a blow against the jihad," he said.

[Teddy Bear]

Following a court order for France 2 to produce yesterday the 27 minute, hitherto missing footage, of the Al-Dura 'murder', Melanie Phillips in The Spectator reports on the outcome. Any doubt that another state media channel has something to hide?

View article online for relevant links.

The al Durah blood libel
Wednesday, 14th November 2007


I am in Paris where I have attended the Court of Appeal special session called to witness the 27 minutes of hitherto unseen footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah which the court had required France 2 to produce. For readers who are unfamiliar with this scandal, I wrote about it here, here and here.

Suffice it to say here that the iconic image of the child Mohammed al Durah, pictured 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 before he was allegedly shot dead by the Israelis, served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities around the world after it was transmitted by France 2 at the beginning of the second intifada. Yet it is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence here which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after the France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead.

After Philippe Karsenty, founder of the French online media watchdog, Media Ratings, accused France 2 of staging the al Durah ‘killing’ and called for the resignation of both Charles Enderlin and France 2’s News Director, Arlette Chabot, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation, and won. In a disgraceful piece of judicial cronyism after the gratuitous intervention of the then French President Jacques Chirac, the court decided against Karsenty and in favour of France 2 and Enderlin. Karsenty appealed; the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of this incident; today it did so.

Well, sort of. What it actually produced was 18 minutes out of the 27 it was required to bring forward. From this footage, which according to France 2’s Palestinian cameraman was filmed during an implausible 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli soldiers, there is no evidence that anyone at all was killed or injured -- including Mohammed al Durah who by the end of the frames in which he figured seemed to be still very much alive and unmarked by any wound whatsoever.

The drama of today’s hearing was enhanced by the appearance of Enderlin himself, who until today had not graced this case with his presence. As the film was shown to a packed and overheated (in every sense) courtroom, Enderlin and Karsenty offered rival interpretations of the images on the screen. If Enderlin thought he would thus demonstrate the inadequacy of Karsenty’s case, he was very much mistaken. On the contrary, parts of his commentary were so absurd that the courtroom several times burst into incredulous laughter.

Enderlin offered only a vague, rambling and unconvincing explanation of why he had only produced 18 minutes of footage rather than the 27 he claimed to have received from his cameraman in Gaza (Enderlin himself was not in Gaza when these events occurred). After the hearing Professor Richard Landes, one of the people who had already seen the contested footage, said that two scenes had been cut out which clearly showed that the violence had been staged -- including one in which a Palestinian preparing to throw a missile is suddenly picked up and carried into an ambulance despite showing no signs of injury. This scene, said Landes, was filmed by Reuters, who actually filmed the France 2 cameraman filming it. Yet there was no sign of it today.

What struck me very forcibly about the 18 minutes overall was that, although this was supposed to have been filmed during continuous firing by the Israelis for 45 minutes, much of the footage consisted merely of a violent demonstration by stone throwing youths, many of whom who appeared to be enjoying the exercise. One child was pictured riding a bicycle through the melee. There was no evidence of any of them being killed or injured. From time to time, to be sure, youths were dragged onto stretchers and into ambulances – but there was no sign of anyone actually being shot, no-one falling under fire, no sign of any blood or injuries whatever. The nearest it got to an injury was a sequence in which a young man coyly pulled his shirt open a little to provide a glimpse of a neat red circle on his stomach, which he claimed was a (rubber?) bullet wound. But since he appeared to be in no pain whatever and was grinning throughout his turn for the camera, this seemed an eminently implausible way for someone who had just been hit by gunfire to behave.

There were many very strange things about this footage which just didn’t add up. When it came to the footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, the following stood out:

* This sequence was not a continuous narrative but was repeatedly broken up and spliced onto footage of other scenes from the demonstration

* Although the France 2 cameraman had told a German film-maker, Esther Shapira, that he had filmed six minutes of the al Durah father and son under continuous Israeli fire, the footage of them lasted for less than one minute

* There was a camera tripod next to them

* There was no evidence of the boy actually being hit

* At one point, people in the crowd cried out that the boy was dead, while he was sitting up large as life clinging onto his father with his mouth wide open

* After he was said to be dead, he moved his arm (the sequence I have already reported which has been available on the web for years).

The Appeal Court is not due to give its verdict in this case until next February. As of today, such are the fresh contradictions and questions thrown up by the showing of this footage it would seem that France 2 has painted itself into a corner from which it will find it increasingly hard to escape.

But this scandal goes far beyond France 2. Soon after it transmitted the 55 seconds which showed the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, it helpfully sent various news agencies three minutes of the footage of this incident – including the frames in which the ‘dead’ child is seen moving, but which of course it had not broadcast. For reasons which invite speculation, not one of these agencies broadcast it either. Had they done so, there would have been no ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah and untold numbers of subsequent deaths would have been avoided.

It is therefore not surprising, but no less shocking, that with a couple of heroic exceptions the mainstream media has until very recently ignored the evidence suggesting that a monumental and deadly fraud was perpetrated here, indicators which have been around for years. As of today, the Karsenty case has been totally ignored by the mainstream French media. It is also deeply troubling that the Israel government ignored this evidence for seven years, that it is only very recently that its press spokesman Danny Seaman said the incident was staged, and that even now certain representatives of the Israel government are playing a most ambiguous role in defending their country against this modern blood libel.

The ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah was swallowed uncritically by the western media, despite the manifold unlikeliness and contradictions which were apparent from the start, because it accorded with the murderous prejudice against Israel which is the prism through which the Middle East conflict is habitually refracted. This scandal has the most profound implications not just for the media, not just for the Middle East conflict but for the western world’s relationship to reason, which seems to grow more tenuous by the day.

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie's recent update to this story makes compelling reading and clearly shows the willing complicity of the media to mispresent or downright fabricate a false version of events.

June 27, 2008
Faking a killing
Standpoint, July 2008

On September 30 2003, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

The footage, with a voice-over by France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead.

That image of the boy screaming in terror before being killed was uniquely incendiary. It portrayed the Israelis as diabolically gunning down a child in cold blood, even as he cowered for his life. It ignited the Arab and Muslim world with apparent proof that the Israelis were deliberately killing their children, inciting a murderous frenzy.

Al-Dura became a poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against Israel and the West. The day after the France 2 broadcast, the second intifada erupted in its full fury; according to the 2001 Mitchell report, the two events were directly connected. Twelve days later, a mob of Palestinians shouting, ‘Revenge for the blood of Mohammed al-Dura’ lynched two Israeli army reservists and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets of Ramallah.

When al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, the video of this atrocity was punctuated with references to al-Dura. After September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden said: ‘Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura.’ Several Arab countries issued postage stamps with his picture. On Palestinian Authority TV and in its school books, al-Dura’s example is used to encourage other children to emulate his spirit of ’sacrifice’.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

It was, in short, a modern-day blood libel, an updated version of the medieval calumny that the Jews target gentile children for murder — which itself caused the murder of thousands of Jews over the centuries.

How do we know the footage was a lie? Because many of us have seen the evidence for ourselves in a French courtroom. Ironically, this blood libel was only exposed to public view because France 2 and its correspondent Enderlin brought a libel suit against a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, for saying that the ‘killing’ was ‘pure fiction’ and that al-Dura wasn’t dead at all.

To begin with, a Paris court ruled in favour of the TV station. But in May this year, the appeal court ruled that Karsenty had every right to say what he said in the light of the evidence. This included the ‘inexplicable incoherence’ of footage, whose images did not correspond to Enderlin’s commentary; the ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ in Enderlin’s explanation; and the lack of credibility of France 2’s Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, upon whose account of the events at Netzarim Enderlin — who was in Jerusalem at the time — had depended.

Denis Jeambar, the director of L’Express, and TV producer Daniel Leconte saw the untransmitted rushes and subsequently wrote in Le Figaro: ‘In the minutes that precede the gunfire, the Palestinians seem to have organised a staged scene. They “play” at war with the Israelis and simulate, in most of the cases, imaginary injuries.’ At the moment when Enderlin declared the boy to be dead: ‘Nothing permitted him to affirm that he was really dead and even less that he was killed by Israeli soldiers.’

The implications for France 2 are shattering. The state-funded TV station is now appealing to the highest court in France. Enderlin has blustered that Karsenty is backed by US and French ‘right-wing’, pro-Israel organisations. This is the desperate flailing of a journalist whose reputation now lies in shreds. For he never imagined that his attempt to silence Karsenty would lead the court to order France 2 to produce the evidence it had hitherto refused to make public — the untransmitted 27 minutes of footage that Abu Rahma claimed he had filmed.

I was in the Paris court on the day France 2 reluctantly complied and I saw the footage (minus a few minutes that Enderlin had excised and which are said to be even more explosive). This showed clearly that the whole thing was a set-up from start to finish.

The cameraman said the Israelis had fired continuously for 45 minutes. Yet the footage did not show people falling under fire. It showed instead Palestinians demonstrating, throwing rocks and so forth, in a positively carnival atmosphere. Youths strutted about, giving declamatory interviews and grinning at the camera; boys rode by on bicycles. And no one showed any sign of injury. There were no wounds; there was no blood. From time to time, demonstrators were pushed on to stretchers and into ambulances — but with no evidence of any disturbance to their anatomy.

Enderlin said he had cut out the scenes of al-Dura’s actual death agony because ‘it was unbearable’. But when the footage was shown, it became clear no such scenes existed. There was no agony and no death. Al-Dura and his father showed no sign of any wound or injury throughout. Supposedly riddled with bullets, their bodies remained totally unmarked. There was no blood anywhere. A red stain on the child turned out to be a piece of red cloth, which suddenly materialised.

You see the boy slumping to the ground. But before he does so, while he is still hanging on to his father and screaming, a voice shouts in Ara bic: ‘The boy is dead! The boy is dead!’ Asked to explain this astounding prescience, Enderlin’s team replied that the Arabic in fact meant: ‘The boy is in danger of dying.’ At this, the courtroom laughed out loud.

After Enderlin pronounces the boy to be dead, the corpse mysteriously assumes four different positions. You see the cameraman’s fingers making the ‘take two’ sign to signal the repeat of a scene. And then you see the lifeless martyr raise his arm and peep through his fingers — presumably to check whether his thespian services are still required or whether he can now get up and go home.

This extraordinary footage was first uncovered by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist in Israel’s defence establishment, who was at the centre of the Israeli army’s own investigation of the incident. Shahaf analysed frame by frame the untransmitted rushes from many TV crews.

He observed, from pictures of al-Dura’s autopsy, that the state of the body suggested he had been dead for at least a day; that this boy was older than 12; and that although there were bullet holes in his forehead, there had been no blood on the ground nor on the wall behind him. He also noted, from pictures of the boy’s funeral on the day of the shooting, that shadows indicated this took place around midday. He was told by two doctors at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital that al-Dura’s lifeless body was brought to them before 1pm. But the incident at Netzarim had not started until 3pm.

Shahaf then discovered from al-Shifa’s records that a dead boy named Rami Jamal al-Dura had been brought into the hospital the day before. According to Palestinian TV and the earliest accounts of the incident, the full name of the boy who was killed at Netzarim was Mohammed Rami Jamal al-Dura.

Shahaf concludes: ‘It was just lie after lie after lie.’ He also found several short films shot in the Netzarim area on and around the day of the incident. ‘They used directors, cameramen and volunteer actors,’ he said. ‘You can see them shooting little horror scenes. Often the director scolds the volunteers for their bad acting. The wounded get up and go back for another take; Palestinian bystanders laugh and applaud.’

The implications of this scandal are enormous, going far beyond a disgraced journalist and his TV station. For France itself, it raises a century-old spectre. In 1894, a Jewish French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted for treason on fabricated evidence that he was a spy, in an atmosphere of institutionalised state antisemitism. The al-Dura libel is being seen in some quarters as a second Dreyfus affair — but with Israel playing the role of the defamed army captain.

This perception of France’s revived shame was given fuel by the extraordinary behaviour of the lower court, which found Karsenty guilty of libel. For most of that trial, it had looked as if France 2 would lose, not least because it had failed to answer any of Karsenty’s allegations. But at the last minute, Enderlin’s team produced a letter to Enderlin from the then French President, Jacques Chirac, extolling him as a brilliant and authoritative journalist. As a result, the three judges promptly found for France 2.

This disgraceful piece of political nobbling and judicial grovelling has now been reversed by the higher court. But few in France would realise this — what scant coverage there has been of this judgment managed to suggest that the integrity of the al-Dura footage remained intact.

It’s not just the French media that is in the frame here. Over the years, Shahaf’s findings made their way into a handful of newspaper articles, TV documentaries and on to the internet; yet this evidence was studiously ignored by the rest of the media.

It is the most egregious example of the animosity towards Israel of much of the Western media, which routinely reports Palestinian or Hezbollah propaganda as fact and refuses to correct the record whenever these falsehoods are exposed. One thinks of the Jenin ‘massacre’ that never was, or the evidence revealing that alleged Israeli atrocities during the 2006 Lebanon war were either staged by Hezbollah or significantly embellished. Indeed, the presentation of theatrical fictions as Israeli atrocities has become so widespread that the practice has been dubbed ‘Pallywood’ — a grotesque new genre of terrortainment.

Why do Western journalists go along with such deadly fabrications? The answer lies in a combination of their dislike of Israel, professional self-preservation, and the fact that they depend on local stringers who are virtually all partisans of the Arab and Islamist cause.

According to Danny Seaman, director of the Israel government press office, almost every stringer now delivering local copy and images from Gaza to Western journalists answers to Hamas. Western journalists know that if they cross Hamas, their lives will be in danger — and British journalists, Seaman says, are the most compliant of all.

Palestinian stringers in general, he says — who all see their role as propagandists for the Palestinian cause — have virtually taken over foreign media offices. The result is that footage from Gaza has long been routinely fabricated or doctored, to which practices Western media organisations turn a blind eye. ‘These were good pictures, always getting on the front pages and eliciting an emotional response,’ says Seaman. ‘ “Bad Jews, poor Arabs” sold papers. Then it became so much the reality that no one ever challenged it.’

What Western dupes fail to realise is that Pallywood is a key weapon in the asymmetrical warfare being waged against Israel and the West. Realising they cannot achieve victory by conventional military means, the Palestinians and Islamists use psychological warfare — psy-ops — as a key strategy both to recruit their army of terrorists, and to demoralise, confuse and suborn their victims.

Israel fails to grasp that it is in a psy-ops war — hence its ineptitude in reacting to the al-Dura claims. Within hours, the Israeli army assumed it must be responsible for the boy’s ‘death’ — and said so without even questioning the commander on the ground. It then set up an investigation, which concluded that its soldiers could not have been responsible. But it left it at that for seven years, despite Shahaf’s discoveries.

Although Seaman said repeatedly during that time that the boy’s ‘killing’ was a fabrication, he was slapped down by Israel’s foreign ministry. It decided that the al-Dura image had taken on a life of its own, and so anything that reminded people of that image would be bad for Israel. It failed to grasp that if left unchallenged, that life of its own would cause the deaths of untold numbers of Israelis and other innocents.

Even after the startling developments in the French appeal court, Israel’s government has said nothing (although it has now quietly let it be known that it agrees with its own spokesman Seaman). Similarly in Britain, at time of writing, no daily newspaper has reported any of this; and around the world, only a handful of papers has done so. So the public is unaware that images that have convinced such a lamentable number of them of Israel’s iniquity are false, and that the iniquity belongs instead to the Arabs and the Western media.

In medieval times, the Christian blood libels led to the annihilation of Jews. Today, al-Dura and other similar libels are promoting the annihilation of the collective Jew in the form of the state of Israel. The Western media have shown themselves once again to be the Islamists’ most powerful weapon against the free world on what few realise is the real battleground of the mind.

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie continues this theme but relates here to how the silence of the media in general to report the distortions and cover-up of France2 makes them also complicit.

The silence of complicity
Jewish Chronicle, 4 July 2008

Last May, the Paris Appeal Court delivered one of the most momentous of all libel judgments. It declared that a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, was entitled to say that television footage by the France 2 TV station purporting to show the killing of 12 year-old Palestinian Mohammed al Dura by Israeli troops in November 2000 was a staged piece of theatre and that the boy had not been killed at all.

This ruling could hardly have been more significant given the iconic nature of that footage and the evidence behind the court’s decision. For the image of Mohammed al Dura clinging to his father moments before he was apparently shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim junction fuelled the intifada, which began in earnest at that point, and led directly to countless terrorist deaths around the world.

Hitherto, public doubts about this event had been confined to whether the boy had been killed by Israeli or Palestinian bullets. But the court saw hitherto untransmitted footage of that Gaza demonstration. This showed clearly that, far from being under continuous fire, not one Palestinian appeared to be harmed at all; indeed, the demonstration was conducted in a carnival atmosphere.

Most astonishing of all, after the reporter on the film, France 2’s veteran Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin, pronounced that the child now slumped on the ground had been killed not only were Mohammed and his father unmarked by any wounds, not only was there no blood at the scene, but the allegedly dead child moved his arm.

To date, not one British media outlet has reported this case (apart from my own piece in this month’s Standpoint magazine). In France, minimal press coverage pooh-poohing the ruling has been accompanied by a petition signed by 300 journalists in support of Enderlin. None of them appears to have seen the courtroom evidence. Enderlin, a national institution, has many powerful friends.

The media silence is not surprising. For those images of the ‘dead’ Mohammed al Dura perpetrated against Israel the ancient anti-Jewish libel of deliberate child killing. This was done by the media, which levelled a charge which anyone looking at the evidence can see was patently absurd. As the Paris judge wrote, there were ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ between Enderlin’s commentary and the images he was describing.

But for the media to admit this is to concede that Israel has been grievously wronged by Palestinian lies. It will not acknowledge this, because that would open up the possibility that Israel might be the victim of Palestinian lies transmitted by the western media as a matter of course.

Some have even said ‘So what if this child wasn’t actually killed? It doesn’t alter the fact that Israel murders Palestinian children!’ Thus a blood libel inoculates individuals against truth and reason.

There is however a further twist to this extraordinary story. Charles Enderlin, who claimed that the boy was killed by the Israelis on the basis of what he was told by his Palestinian cameraman Talal abu Rahma, himself holds Israeli citizenship. Not only that, when he did his own army service he actually served as a press spokesman for the IDF.

Indeed, the IDF trusted him so much that when he reported his sensational scoop it accepted responsibility for killing the child –without even asking the commander on the ground. It was only later that it conducted an inquiry and discovered that logistically it was impossible for its soldiers to have killed him.

So why did Enderlin – who is now spraying around allegations that Karsenty is the tool of ‘right-wingers’ — transmit this lethal falsehood? According to some who know him well, Enderlin believes that anything is justified if it helps force Israel to end its ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories. And ‘anything’, it seems, included transmitting the fiction of the killing of Mohammed al Dura.

This murderous corruption of journalism by France 2 was further exacerbated by the supine response of the Israel government. For seven years, it deliberately ignored the evidence of its own expert, Nahum Shahaf, that the boy had not been killed at all. It said nothing because it thought that it would not be believed, and so it would be counter-productive to focus more attention upon the affair.

During this period its own spokesman Danny Seaman did say that the killing was a fabrication – but was slapped down by the government and his remarks disowned. Meanwhile France 2 has continued to operate inside Israel with no government comeback.

The whole disturbing affair has been in short an object lesson in how the western media acts as the tool of psychological warfare waged by the enemies of civilisation, leading to the murder of countless innocents and the demonisation of a country under siege.