At the New Republic, Richard Landes reports on France 2 television’s increasingly desperate attempts to keep the truth from getting out about one of the biggest media frauds of recent years: How French TV fudged the death of Mohammed Al Durah.

I have become involved for two reasons. First of all, I noted almost immediately that Palestinians and anti-Zionists, insisting that Israel killed the boy on purpose, used Al Durah in a way familiar to medievalists—as a blood libel. This was the first blood libel of the twenty-first century, rendered global by cable and the Internet. Indeed, within a week, crowds the world over shouted “We want Jewish blood!” and “Death to the Jews!”. For Europeans in particular, the libelous image came as balm to a troubled soul: “This death erases, annuls that of the little boy in the Warsaw Gherro,” intoned Europe1 editorialist Catherine Nay. The Israelis were the new Nazis.

And second, when I saw the raw footage in the summer of 2003—especially when I saw the scene Enderlin had cut, wherein the boy (allegedly shot in the stomach, but holding his hand over his eyes) picks up his elbow and looks around—I realized that this was not a film of a boy dying, but a clumsily staged scene.

On October 31, 2003, at the studios of France2 in Jerusalem in the company of Charles Enderlin and his Israeli cameraman, I saw the raw footage of Al Durah from the only Palestinian cameraman who actually captured the scene on film—footage France2 still refuses to release for public examination. I was floored. The tapes feature a long succession of obviously faked injuries; brutal, hasty evacuation scenes; and people ducking for cover while others stand around. One fellow grabbed his leg in agony, then, upon seeing that no one would come to carry him away, walked away without a limp. It was stunning. That was no cameraman’s conspiracy: It was everyone—a public secret about which news consumers had no clue.

UPDATE at 10/17/06 2:10:50 pm:

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