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IDF Demands Uncut Al-Dura Tape

[Jerusalem Post] Caroline Glick - On September 10, the deputy commander of the IDF's Spokesman's Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, submitted a letter to the France 2 television network's permanent correspondent in Israel, Charles Enderlin, regarding Enderlin's story from September 30, 2000, in which he televised 55 seconds of edited footage purporting to show IDF forces shooting and killing 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura in Gaza. France 2 offered the edited film free of charge to all media outlets. Within days, al-Dura became a symbol of the Palestinian war against Israel. His name has been repeatedly invoked by terrorists and their supporters as a justification for killing Israelis, Jews and their Western supporters. Am-Shalom asked for the entire unedited 27-minute film that was shot by France 2's Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu-Rahma that day. The IDF request came against the backdrop of French media watchdog Philippe Karsenty's legal battle with France 2 regarding the network's coverage of the al-Dura affair. Last year, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty, who runs the Internet media watchdog website Media Ratings, for defamation after he accused France 2 of staging the al-Dura story. In his request to Enderlin, Am-Shalom discussed at length the findings of the IDF's probe into the incident, ordered by then Southern Command head Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia. "The general has made clear that from an analysis of all the data from the scene, including the location of the IDF position, the trajectory of the bullets, the location of the father and the son behind an obstacle, the cadence of the bullet fire, the angle at which the bullets penetrated the wall behind the father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF soldiers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed position." Independent probes by various foreign media organizations and Internet activists over the past several years have called the veracity of the France 2 report into serious question. Those investigations demonstrated that purported IDF "attacks" against Palestinian civilians were being openly staged by Palestinian cameramen and locals throughout the day of the alleged shooting of al-Dura.
2007-09-18 01:00:00
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