Article by Elliot Resnick on the affair. Except for the paper’s using the image of the boy before the “shooting” rather than the one when he’s supposedly dead, I have no complaints.

Evidence Mounts: Inflammatory Image Was Staged
By: Elliot Resnick, Jewish Press Staff Reporter
Date Posted: October 10, 2007

It inflamed Arab passions. It appeared at anti-Israel rallies across the globe. Osama bin Laden invoked it during one of his post-9/11 videos.

“It” is the image of young Mohammed al-Dura dying in the lap of his father, struck down by Israeli bullets on September 30, 2000.

But who killed the boy? Or was he killed at all? After reading a June 2003 investigative report in Atlantic Monthly and researching the matter himself, Richard Landes, a Boston University history professor-cum-novice investigator, concluded that Palestinian Arabs staged the entire episode.

The angle of the shots, the absence of blood, movement from the boy after his death, missing footage and evidence from other footage indicating that Palestinian Arabs have previously staged “Israeli brutality” scenes support his claim, Landes told The Jewish Press.

He maintains two websites (theaugeanstables.com and seconddraft.org) and has produced three documentaries on the subject.

His cause may have received a boost last month when a French court ordered France2, the station that first aired the al-Dura footage, to hand over the entire 27 minutes of its cameraman’s footage to the court. Landes, who has seen the footage, said the court will see multiple examples of staged injuries and evacuations on the tape.

Back in 2000, the image of an al-Dura killed in cold blood operated as a “get out of Holocaust guilt free card” for many Europeans, Landes said. Indeed, Catherine Nay of Europe1 said at the time that the image “annuls, erases that of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto.”

“As a medievalist,” Landes said, “I’m familiar with blood libels…. This is the first blood libel of the 21st century…. It opened the door for comparing the Israelis to the Nazis. It mainstreamed it…. It played a huge role in shifting public opinion.”

Noting that the al-Dura episode occurred on the second day of the Intifada, Landes argues that it may, in fact, have caused the prolonged Intifada, which otherwise may have resembled the 1996 Arab riots.

(Interestingly, he remarked, on the Intifada’s first day, another false image appeared – this time in the New York Times, which ran a picture of a bloody-faced man with a caption labeling him as Palestinian when he was in fact Jewish-American.)

“I couldn’t believe that the mainstream media would pass this on as news,” Landes said.

According to French journalist Daniel Leconte, when he questioned France2 about Arab-staged injuries, a representative of France2 smiled and replied, “Yes, but you know well that it’s always like that.”

Landes has made some headway in his work. Roughly 250,000 visitors to seconddraft.org and YouTube have seen his documentary “Pallywood,” – his term for “the systematic staging of scenes to convey the basic framework of Israel Goliath, Palestinian David.”

And although Israel has largely shied away from the issue (apparently in the belief that any coverage of the al-Dura case is bad coverage), the IDF recently asked France2 to release the footage, which may have influenced the French court’s decision, Landes said.

Additionally, last week, Israeli Government Press Office director Daniel Seaman declared the al-Dura affair a “blood libel” and said “that the events of that day were essentially staged.”

Aiming to stop future “al-Dura” scenarios, Landes wants news agencies and the public to be aware “that they’re being manipulated and stop that manipulation.” He urges people to sign his petition (on petitiononline.com) asking France2 to release its footage to the public so that people could see this important illustration of “Pallywood.”

“We will not survive if we don’t get smarter,” he said.