Did the Israeli Army Really Shoot to Death that Boy in 2000?

If anyone wants to start thinking about what has been ailing the world since 2000, there is no better place to start than with the poisonous tale of Muhammed al Durah.

On September 30, 2000, Talal abu Rahma, a Palestinian cameraman working for France2 sent his boss, Charles Enderlin what he claimed was footage of the Israeli army shooting to death in cold blood an unarmed boy. Enderlin edited the rushes, cutting out problematic material, and presenting the boy and his father as “the target of fire coming from the Israeli position.” That evening, around the world, audiences were shown the footage as real, often with announcers warning the viewers about the traumatic scene they were about to see.

The effect was electric. Viewers were stunned; public figures, appalled; Palestinians enraged. The next day the riots that had already broken out in the territories spread to the Arabs in Israel. World opprobrium crashed down on Israeli leaders. Within days, the Palestinians had re-edited the footage, placing an Israeli soldier shooting (at al Durah). This fiction played repeatedly on Palestinian TV – and al Jazeera – throughout the following months, becoming the icon for a ferocious Intifada.

Suicide terrorism became the weapon of choice, done “to avenge the boy Muhammed.” Arafat, elated with the worldwide support, spurned all efforts to get him to rein in the violence. Whatever the broader causes of the “Al Aqsa Intifada,” the doctored al Durah footage gave it its remorseless ferocity. When, months later, the “leaders” wanted to revive a fading Intifada, they produced a music video of Muhammed’s martyrdom.

More broadly in the Arab and Muslim world, Muhammed al Durah opened the floodgates of Palestinian and Arab Jew-hatred. An apocalyptic tone of paranoid hatred came to dominate much of the public discourse. Al Durah was not only the icon of the Intifada, he was the icon of global Jihad, which now entered a new phase, inspiring the Pakistanis who slit Daniel Pearl’s throat and Osama bin Laden. Muhammed al Durah was a warrant for genocide preached from the pulpits of mosques.

But if the first suicide terrorism attacked Israeli civilians, such things rarely stop with the Jews. In the first five years of the new century it has targeted Europeans, Iraqis, Jordanians, North Americans, Australians and others. The tale of Muhammed al Durah and the suicide terrorism it has unleashed haunts the 21st century and the dawning global community.

Muhammed al Durah: The Second Draft

And yet, it may well be that the whole al Durah scene was staged. We have so little firm evidence that no one can state with certainty what happened. But an assessment of the available evidence, which we put before you, and of further evidence that France2 refuses to release, but which some of us have seen, indicates two preliminary conclusions: 1) the story we were told (scenario 1) was the least likely, and 2) the most likely story is that Talal abu Rahma and assistants staged the scene ( scenario 5).

The possibility that the mainstream media gave the 21st century its most poisonous image by mistake is staggering. That the media have resisted reconsidering it for five years while it worked its insidious way into global culture, is tragic. And exploring how this could have happened, raises profound questions about just how much the media has become an Augean Stable of unprofessional practices and consequent failures.

All of these are issues we want to address at The Second Draft and invite you to participate in discussing. In the meantime, if you think this is old news unworthy of attention, consider the impact of al Durah on French society since 2000, and the possible relationship it may have to the current immigrant riots.

The Impact of Al Durah on French Society

The French eagerly took to the Al Durah footage. They played it repeatedly in the following weeks and months. Chirac used it to publicly chastise Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, while urging Arafat to say no at Taba. The image developed mythical power for the French. It helped them resolve their guilt about the Holocaust and their “debt” to Israel. French journalist Catherine Nay proclaimed on Europe1 TV: “The Death of Muhammed cancels out, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air from the SS and the Warsaw Ghetto.” Suddenly, what had been forbidden by post-Holocaust political correctness surged forth. The comparison of Israelis and Nazis became a commonplace in France and widely accepted in many Western circles. The French ambassador’s remark about Israel as that “shitty little country” illustrates the change in tone.

But when the French played these images over and over, they did not perhaps realize that the other audience – their Arab Muslim immigrant population – might respond differently. What soothed French guilt, enraged the Arabs, activating hatreds that had lain relatively dormant. As a Parisian cabdriver said to me, “I grew up in Tunisia with Jews in my neighborhood. I didn’t become an anti-Semite until I came to France.”

“Have you been watching Hizbullah cable TV,” I asked?

“No, French news.”

Within a few days of broadcast of the Al Durah footage, France experienced an outbreak of attacks on the Jews which public figures either ignored or dismissed as understandable hostility to the Israelis.

In the “peace” protests of 2003, the Arab contingents carried signs of Saddam Hussein and Yassir Arafat, shouted Allahu Akhbar, and beat up Jewish groups participating in the rallies. Their fellow protesters and the media looked the other way. In April 2004, gangs broke up a student demonstration in Paris, beating up the students, smashing their cell phones, kicking them while they were down. Why? Because the French students were weak and deserved it: “…to beat people up… [especially] little Frenchmen who look like victims… to take revenge on whites.”

The French Intifada of 2005

Now in late 2005 (Ramadan, 1426) the violence has erupted all over France. And apparently, the French don’t know what to make of it: how to respond, how to talk about it, how to deal with the problem in the long term. And in the inability of the French to even address the problems they face, we find traces of their inability to understand what was going on in Israel and how they contributed to it.

In dealing with their own Muslim violence, the French repeat most of the elements of their coverage of the Intifada. They ignore the religious dimension; insist on the socio-economic aspects of the problem and the “rationality” of the protestors; accuse anyone who disagrees of racism; and argue that concessions (money, schools, jobs) will solve the problem. The French dilemma is that, as with the “Oslo Peace Process,” if you misread the problem, you run the risk of making it worse with your “solutions”.

But what if these macho youths do not want to be Europeans, what if, on the contrary, they despise European civic culture? As with the Palestinian response to Israeli concessions, generosity would read on their zero-sum screens as weakness, and further generosity as proof that aggression works. Those who urge the French authorities to appease the rioters may be counseling disaster. France – and Europe – may think they’re invulnerable, but the odds are not necessarily in their favor.

Will Europeans carry on about Israeli and American “war-crimes” while their own cities burn?

We don’t have the answers. But if we can’t realize what we’re up against then, right-wing, left-wing, liberal, radical or conservative, we are all in for some painful history lessons in the medieval realities of violent warriors and theocratic clergy.

Civil society is rare and precious. It makes high ethical demands, and cannot survive persistent, much less aggressive stupidity. Its fundamental demands are that we judge fairly, and renounce scape-goating.

This time, I don’t think we can get away with moral laziness and stupidity.

And I can think of no better place to start unraveling how we in the West have contributed to our own moral and social failures than in understanding and addressing the tragic failures of our media and our intellectuals in the Muhammed al Durah affair.

(For an extended version of this argument see “Al Durah & French Riots”)