|
Trending Topics
|
Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/354621/the-al-durah-blood-libel.html
French Court Screens Al-Durah Video Footage
[Spectator-UK] Melanie Phillips - I attended the Court of Appeal special session in Paris called to witness hitherto unseen footage of the "killing" of Mohammed al-Durah which the court had required France 2 to produce. The iconic image of the child served to incite terrorist violence around the world at the beginning of the second intifada. It is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead. From this footage, there is no evidence that anyone at all was killed or injured - including Mohammed al-Durah, who by the end of the frames in which he figured seemed to be still very much alive and unmarked by any wound whatsoever. Professor Richard Landes, one of the people who had already seen the contested footage, said that two scenes had been cut out which clearly showed that the violence had been staged. Although the footage shown was supposed to have been filmed during continuous firing by the Israelis for 45 minutes, one child was pictured riding a bicycle through the melee. When it came to the footage of the "killing" of Mohammed al-Durah, the sequence was not a continuous narrative but was repeatedly broken up and spliced onto footage of other scenes.