Axe me no questions
The story of the Israel Defense Forces' purported killing of Muhamed al Dura is a modern blood libel. Richard Landes introduces the affair as follows:
People who followed Middle East news in 2000 cannot 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. Its prominence goes far beyond any other image from this terrible conflict and its impact goes far beyond any of its other images, one of “the most powerful images of the past 50 years,” one of the shaping images of this young 21st century.It appears that just about every relevant element of the story originally reported by France 2 is false. Examination of the available evidence shows that al Dura's death was deliberately staged for film. CAMERA has prepared an excellent backgrounder on the al Dura affair.
Nidra Poller's 2005 article "Myth, fact, and the al-Dura affair" provides an invaluable narrative account. Now Poller reports that al Dura's father -- allegedly wounded by the IDF in the events that led to his son's death -- was in fact injured by axe-wielding Palestinian forces in 1992, according to an Israeli surgeon who performed reconstructive surgery on the wounds two years later. Poller comments:
Jamal [al Dura] used the arm restored by Israeli surgeons to act out the blood libel that provoked the murderous rage that killed countless Israeli civilians, including courageous doctors who had treated Palestinians with the same generosity he experienced.Poller's story is suggestive of the upside down version of reality peddled by Arab propagandists and their handmaidens in the Western media.
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