Pallywood’s Most Spectacular Success
On September 30, 2000, France2 Middle East Correspondent Charles Enderlin presented about 50 seconds of largely unfocused footage from his Palestinian cameraman Tala abu Rahmeh as the tale of boy and his father caught in a cross-fire, hiding behind a barrel at Netzarim Junction, in the Gaza Strip, targeted and killed “by fire coming from the Israeli position.” Actually, the footage shows nothing of the kind: the fire comes from opposite him (i.e. a Palestinian position), they were not caught but placed there as footage from AP and Reuters reveal, there is no sign of blood on the wall or on the father (11 wounds), and the boy, after he is declared dead by Enderlin, lifts his elbow and looks out at the camera (a scene Enderlin cut from his broadcast).
Nothing in the footage Enderlin used confirms the narrative he, and his cameraman, told the world: a rain of bullets, stomach wound, killed in cold blood, an ambulance driver killed when he came to the rescue. Had he shown a fraction of the professional skepticism he owed such an inflammatory report, Enderlin would most surely have not taken the footage (as CNN had previously done). Instead he did not operate on the principle: “is this believable?” but rather: “what can I make believable?”
And, alas, the story “took” like wildfire. In the Muslim world it became proof positive that infidels – Jews! – were killing innocent Muslims, a justification for targeting infidel “civilians.” In the West it was widely embraced by progressives as “erasing, replacing” the icon of the Holocaust: a “get out of Holocaust shame” card. Holocaust inversion – the Jews are the new Nazis, the Palestinians the new Jewish victims of genocide – went mainstream.
Image from International A.N.S.W.E.R. site, with quote from Nay added.
Al Durah was the patron saint of Durban, the rallying cry for the flood of antisemitism that washed over those proceedings, the presiding presence at the marriage of Western progressives and Muslim supremacists.
This was the first “post-modern” blood libel, the first blood libel to succeed in the West after the Holocaust, the first spread by a Jew (and Israeli), the first spread by modern, professional news media. And yet, to this day, Western journalists, including Israeli, have shown great reluctance to consider that this was staged, that it was the greatest success of Pallywood, that film industry dedicated to accusing Israel of war crimes. It electrified the globe with a hatred that bound Western progressives to Jihadi supremacists.
Like the wound of the Morgul-blade in Lord of the Rings, as long as this shard of Pallywood’s most malicious work remains embedded in the legacy media’s narrative as news, rather than as colossal professional error, the Western coverage of Israel and her enemies is sick with Jihadi war propaganda: Israelis (not Palestinians) target children; Israelis (not Palestinians) are committing genocide. The West is literally blinded, disoriented, morally sickened with this own-goal war journalism and its seemingly bottomless appetite for news of Jews behaving badly.
Israel must forget that the founders of its media were all then very "progressive" Jews with little or no connection to Jews or Judaism. The enemy has been suborning ALL Western Universities for well over 50 years and there is no truth in Jew Hatred. The 12 year old boy incident is one of many manufactured myths. Today's Israel media must focus on the "honesty and integrity" of these myth makers - the creators of more and more fiction to feed the ovens of those whose obly raison d'etre is the non existence of Israel, Jews and Judaism Kalman Bookman Jerusalem ISRAEL
Punchy post. Perhaps there is a follow-up about Pallywood?