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October 29, 2023

Pallywood is cranking out video propaganda in Gaza

By Andrea Widburg

One of the most powerful weapons the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians ever deployed against Israel was the allegation that Israeli troops killed 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura. The fact that the footage was later proven to be fake was irrelevant. The video went viral, the Arab street exploded, and the bloodbath began. Ever since then, the Arabs fighting against Israel have relied on fake injuries and deaths to push their narrative. Thanks to Elon Musk, though, an open X platform allows crowd-sourcing to prove immediately how much of what comes out of Gaza is fake.

Here’s the thumbnail of the Muhammad al-Dura story. On September 29, 2000, Yassir Arafat launched a terror war against Israel. Conveniently, the next day, France 2 TV played footage purporting to show that Israeli soldiers had shot to death a cowering, terrified 12-year-old boy—the infamous Muhammad al-Dura:

The dramatic voice-over commentary by the station's long-time Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, described how the boy and his father Jamal were pinned down by Israeli gunfire at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. The father pleaded frantically with the soldiers to stop shooting, to no avail. “A last burst of gunfire,” intoned Enderlin, “the boy is dead, his father critically wounded.”

The only problem with that powerful little narrative was that it was provably faked:

As it turned out, the Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, who has won countless prizes for the video, captured less than one minute of the dramatic scene that lasted, according to his sworn testimony, for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of uninterrupted gunfire “from the Israeli position” left the man and boy miraculously intact as far as one can gather from looking at the video. Contrary to what the world has been led to believe, there is no raw footage of the scene. And, contrary to what might be expected, this and other equally embarrassing revelations have left the Dura myth, to all intents and purposes, intact.

You can read here the details of the hoax footage. Suffice it to say that, if the boy died, it wasn’t caught on video during that particular firefight:

At the end of the France 2 film, the boy is not dead. He is raising his elbow and looking at the cameraman. These images are available on Richard Landes' website and on Youtube. If you look at the images, you will see that the boy is clearly not dead. There are no bullet wounds or blood. Those images were never broadcast in France, but they were shown in England on the BBC and in Arab countries. What amazes me is that nobody said, "Wait a minute. There is a problem here." It doesn't make sense. In a news report done one year after his son's alleged death, Dura's father says the first bullet hit his son on the right knee, but the tape shows not a single drop of blood there; it is ridiculous. [Endnotes omitted.]

I thought of the al-Dura hoax when sleuths on X revealed that a “crisis actor” in Gaza keeps showing up again and again in videos. One day, despite an absence of visible injuries, he’s dying in the hospital; the next day, he’s celebrating in the streets; and the day after, he’ll be doing whatever else Hamas needs to feed to credulous, cynical, or actively antisemitic “journalists”:

Israel hasn’t and doesn’t want to pick a fight with the Arabs in her neighborhood—she’s made many sacrifices to live in peace with them—but she’s in a fight, nevertheless. And she’s discovering that, in the 21st century, the most powerful weapon her opponent has is a camera, a bunch of actors, and a world media that is desperate for her opponent’s videos.

Image: Internet meme of “dead” Gaza victim on his phone.

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