Muhamed al Durah, a Fake?

Who can forget the image of Muhamed al Durah, gunned down in a hail of “Israeli bullets” at the very beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada? The impact of this dramatic footage on global culture is close to incalculable. It is one of “the most powerful images of the past 50 years,” one of the shaping images of this young 21st century.

Partisans of the Palestinian cause claim it reveals Israeli malevolence and wanton violence, murdering a defenseless child in cold blood, as telling today as when it happened. For Osama bin Laden, “in killing this boy the Israelis killed every child in the world.” For some in the West, it cancelled out the photo of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, releasing them from residual Holocaust guilt and unleashing a flood of comparisons between the Israelis and the Nazis.

To most Israelis and supporters it was a devastating humiliation, a source of guilt and remorse. Some, however, claim the footage was staged and al Durah was either unharmed, or killed by Palestinians. To them the footage reveals the ruthless propaganda and paranoid nature of PA media culture… the first blood libel of the 21st century.

Faced with such awful alternatives, many retreat to neutrality: “Who knows who did it?” “It illustrates the tragic devaluing of life in this conflict.”

But no case better illustrates the inadequacy of such even-handedness. There are genuine consequences to misjudging a case that provided major inspiration to the suicide terrorism that now plagues the entire planet and, if this is a Pallywood fake, it constitutes one of the greatest media manipulations in modern media history: a lie that has killed many and a shameful MSM cover-up. And therefore, correcting it offers a critrical starting point for both media reform and a reformulation of how we think about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Not surprisingly, the public has yet to see any of the footage in order to make up our own minds. It is now more than five years since the explosive storyline of Israeli child-murder first spread around the globe. Second Draft, which has already posted raw footage from that day, now offers citizens of cyberspace a look at the available evidence specifically about Al Durah, and, as with Pallywood, analyses of the media’s “first draft” of this story.

Come to the site, see the evidence, make up your own mind, and figure out what you want to do about it.