Four years ago, the world saw some compelling television footage of a Palestinian man shielding his little boy from Israeli gunfire. They were crouched against a wall with nowhere to flee. The man was injured but the boy was killed.
Last week, I read an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal Europe that stated it was a fraud. Some cameraman for France 2 television simply invented it. I still have trouble believing that but I want to find out what happened. While poking around in the usual sources, I found similar claims.
Notice the last line: “On October 22, 2004, the Metula News Agency, after reviewing the complete video of the scene, repeated the claim that the incident had been staged.”
Does anyone on this Dope board know what happened? I have trouble believing the cameraman conspired with the boy’s father to kill a child. If the boy did not die, where is he? I doubly doubt the most famous boy in Palestine could simply go unnoticed.
I don’t know anything about the reporters involved. I wonder because the WSJ does not tend to print insane conspiracy rants (even as Op Eds).
This will most likely get moved to Great Debates because not enough facts are known to come to a conclusion. That’s not to say that there are no facts around the issue, though.
Fact - the Mohammed al-Dura event is the Arab equivalent of the Rodney King beatings… an apparent act of brutality that caused widespread outrage and continues to serve as a symbol of racial persecution.
Fact - a videotape exists that shows a man and a boy taking cover from gunfire, with both ending up shot.
Fact - on the day the videotape was shot, a firefight was raging between Israelis and Arabs at the location where the alleged shooting occurred.
Fact - the father and boy were in the line of fire of both Arab and Israeli positions.
Beyond that, it’s essentially speculation. The Israeli position is that the videotape shows the pair hiding behind a concrete cistern that would have blocked gunfire from the Israeli shooter’s position, but not the Palestinian. The cistern and building have since been bulldozed, so the forensic evidence is gone. Other facts are also notably conflicting… no boy named Mohammed Dura was admitted to any regional hospital that day. That afternoon, a child-sized coffin was paraded through the streets as the al-Dura child, but it would have been impossible to get the body to that location in time (provided that the child was taken to a morgue or medical center at any point in time).
Regardless of the truth, the event has taken on a life of its own that is too large to be affected by any emerging facts or investigations. The al-Dura death scene has been commemorated in murals and even an Egyptian postage stamp. The Israeli government realizes this, having officially backed down from a media blitz claiming the shooting was not all that it seemed to be.
We will probably never know what actually happened other than a boy was shot and killed, and it was captured on videotape.
Correction… I tried to hard to avoid bias but I failed in saying “all we know for sure is that a boy was shot and killed.” In fact we don’t know that he was killed… only shot.