I speak of course of the
al-Durrah Affair. which is in the news again following a French court decision that an Israeli doctor who said that he had treated Jamal al-Durrah (the father) for injuries he claimed to have suffered in the incident, before the incident, did not defame the father. The doctor was telling the truth.
A quick recap and call on the state of play.
Some background.
It is 30 September 2000 and the "Second Intifada" is into its second day. The Camp David Summit convened by President Clinton and to which he has devoted enormous energy and resources has failed just a few weeks earlier after arch-terrorist and corrupt aging homosexual pedophile, Yasser Arafat, walks out because he would not sign a deal, no matter how generous, if it recognises Israel's right to exist. He could not even if he wanted to. It would be, in his own words to the distraught President Clinton, "signing my own death warrant". He orders all the murder gangs, including Fatah's and Hamas's, to resume terrorist business as usual.
So ends the Oslo Fraud. It wouldn't take long to scope the full extent of the betrayal. President Clinton, the United States, the American people, Israel, the Jews and the rest of the good faith civilised world had been taken for the mother of all rides. The Palestinian gangster bosses had a well stocked, well armed, well funded if highly factionalised sub-state authority with the reflex visceral support of the Western left and the Israelis had nothing except another wave of gruesome terrorism and the most vicious campaign of demonisation and illegitimacy against an UN member state in all of history. It was the gangsters who had the legitimacy.
Very soon
the death belts would be strapped to everything from donkeys to women avoiding honour killings and an enormous assortment of misfits, killer martyrs and coerced miserable indviduals in between
just like before. Including
children of course. The killers on the ground are not all inflamed paradise seeking zombies. These are death cults led by pychopaths and they do not baulk at using children as weapons and shields.
The broad facts of the affair are now known but there is still along way to go to uncover all the sordid details. This thing has more legs than the Dreyfus affair with which it bears a striking resemblance. Like Dreyfus they will be writing books about it a hundred years from now.
It is therefore fitting that the main action is now being played out in the French courts.
An incident in Gaza is provoked by Palestinian gunman opening fire on an Israeli outpost manned by eighteen IDF troops. Trouble was expected because of the sudden appearance of ten to fifteen Palestinian cameramen working as stringers for foreign news broadcasters; including one freelancer working for France 2. The Israelis return the fire at the Palestinian positions in adjacent buildings using accurate single shot rounds. At no point in the action do they see Jamal al-Durrah and his 12-year-old son, Muhammad, huddled against a wall behind a barrel outside of the line of fire of their two positions.
The France 2 cameraman films somewhere between 18 and 27 minutes of the action. France 2 has changed its story on how much film there is but in any event has never released all the film they have. Thirty two seconds focus on the boy and his father and France 2 broadcasts the first 29 seconds. Its reporter who was not present, but was relying on the account of the cameraman, reports that the boy was killed; and was killed by IDF troops firing at the two.
This is automatically believed all around the world. It plays and plays and plays. Robert Fisk and the left liberal print jounalists go into multiple orgasms of rage. Their broadcast colleagues compete for the harshest condemnation the language will allow. In Australia one prominent journalist calls it "cold blooded murder" and only an ingrained aversion to thinking or speaking ill of the dead prevents me from naming
Richard Carleton.
The footage acquires the power of a "battle flag". An iconic image parallel to the image of the boy with the raised arms in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The new Intifada is kicked off with hideous brutality. Jewish children in Israel are particular targets. The clip is played over and over again. The image soon appears on postage stamps across the Arab world, streets are named after the boy and the image is in the background of the video of Daniel Pearl's head being hacked off.
It is of course staged. Likely it is an obscene forgery;
a piece of death porn theatre. An actual or faked snuff movie. It is beyond contention that the shooters are not IDF soldiers but Palestinian gunmen; of this there is no longer any serious doubt. The only issues in controversy are whether the French reporter who was not present , and France 2, were or were not willing participants in the blood libel, actively sought to cover it up or were merely dupes too unprofessional to admit they had been sold the journalistic equivalent of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
There is one other startling controvery. Whether the boy was actually killed at all. It seems he was not at least not during the incident. Whether he survived much longer after that day is another question. It does however beg the tantilising question whether he is still alive.
This blog has had an interest in this affair since seeing the clip, or parts of it, on Australian TV news more times than I can remember immediately after the incident. I was convinced it was brutal contrived war propaganda the first time I saw it
and said so. The gunfire was sustained and deliberate. The gunmen had to be looking at the targets. I had the advantage of knowing that IDF soldiers do not fire on a father and child in a predicament like that and it disgusted but did not come as a surprise that so many people around the world, including in the West, chose to believe they do. The blood libel has been with us a long time.
A forensic eye would suggest that the gunfire was coming from behind the camera man. There was no evidence of ricochet, glance or crease and remember we are looking at actual footage of the bullets striking the wall. The bullets were hitting the wall straight on. The cameraman was between the gunman or gunmen and the targets (the timing of the spray would suggest there was only one gunman). Moreover the shooter was probably close behind the cameraman and it beggars belief that the gunman could not see the cameraman.
To capture such images is rare even in an era of sophisticated camera equipment. How many images are there of people actually being killed in combat zones, soldiers let alone civilians? I am not talking about sneaked footage of military attacks on unarmed civilians, such as those coming out of Syria recently, but actual fire fights. Battle zones are dangerous places. They are not easy to film close up.
The whole thing reeks of macabre theatre. The cameraman could not be in a better position to film the action. The bullets fly around the targets for nearly thirty seconds as if the gunman is a sadist toying with his victims like a cat with a mouse. How many soldiers under fire have time to do that?
However it did not occur that the boy was not killed in the incident. After all there was a dead boy at the morgue who was photographed with wounds recorded by a doctor and then buried before sundown in accordance with tradition. True the footage did not actually show the boy being killed, just the tragic aftermath, but I bought the prissy explanations that the instant was too horrific to show. No doubt Arab TV broadcasters were not so squeamish, I thought..
The only question was whether the boy was deliberately killed by the Palestinian gunmen (and team) or was accidentally killed by the Palestinian gunman in monumentally bad shooting in the fire fight. They were aiming at the Israelis across the junction but missed and hit the civilians in front (eventually). I came down heavily in favour of the former. This was a genuine snuff movie deliberately made to create a blood libel to incite hatred against Jews and the world had bought it and broadcast it. There should be little difficulty accepting that those capable of using children as suicide bombers to murder other children are capable of doing that.
Turns out I was likely wrong. When France 2 was forced to cough up the rest of the tape there is
no film of the boy being shot. What were presented as "death throes" too horrific to show were actually the boy raising his hands to peek at the cameraman; and the corpse at the morgue had injuries consistent with knife wounds and not automatic gunfire.
These cases will roll on because of the importance of the underlying issues for the parties but one thing is settled. The IDF did not kill that child in the film.either accidentally or deliberately. But over four thousand Palestinians and over 1000 Israelis were killed in the Intifada it inspired and it is no stretch at all to say those kids in Toulouse were murdered in the poisonous legacy of Jew hatred it has helped to inflame.
There is a deafening silence from the media and the left on this affair that so quickly attacked Israel in the aftermath. They have lost all interest now that they know the Jews did not do it after all. Little wonder. They have blood on their hands.
