The al-Dura myth?
With the John Simpson "Blame the media?" piece on which I commented last night in mind, I should note that Commentary magazine has a very interesting article this month by Nidra Poller, titled Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair. The al-Dura affair refers to the apparent killing of a young Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, in the summer of 2000, filmed by the French state-owned television station France-2. The images, claimed to be the result of Israeli soldiers targeting the boy and his father, were beamed around the world, sparking anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish violence, and have been cited by some as justification for suicide bombing.
Trouble is, according to Poller’s convincing research, the story told by France-2 is a fraud that is only now coming to light.
Read the article. It is fascinating.
Trouble is, according to Poller’s convincing research, the story told by France-2 is a fraud that is only now coming to light.
Read the article. It is fascinating.
6 Comments:
It's Nidra PoLLer, not PoTTer.
anon,
Right you are. Thanks for the correction. I've fixed the post.
SC
It's still a wizard article!
I'll get my coat then.
The "Jenin, Jenin" documentary appears to be a fake as well.
http://ussneverdock.blogspot.com/2005/01/palestinian-terrorists-spreading.html
when can we expect a TV documentary on this.......or am I being naive?
To anonymous:
I think Frontline (in the U.S.) might do it. Exposes are their specialty. Someone's got to let them know about this though and get them interested.
I read the Atlantic Monthly article about this incident a while ago. I wasn't familiar with the purported incident. Fallows tried pretty hard to get through the deception. He wrote a detailed article about the analysis of others, including the Israeli government. I give Fallows the benefit of the doubt since he probably didn't have access to all of the footage. Poller's article says that Fallows came to the conclusion "we don't know who killed" al-Dura. My memory is he was leaning towards the idea, or showed evidence, that it was the Palestinians who killed him, and that it was impossible for the Israelis to have done it. Oh well, so much for that. Fallows got duped, but I don't blame him. Everyone he interviewed who was researching it was duped as well. He assumed the doctored footage was real, but he had no reason to question it, IMO. The researchers were going off the same footage.
As I recall, Fallows never talked about a Palestinian cameraman taking the footage for French TV. The way he portrayed it, it was a French cameraman who shot it. He just questioned the conclusion that was drawn from it.
I gotta give these Palestinians credit. They played the rest of the Palestinian people and their Arab sympathizers like a harp. They fooled a lot of people.
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