Member Board of Directors, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East spme.org
28 September 2000…l never forget that day. I said, “I’ve gone through a sea change.” And added, “There is going to be a big war.” I said these words as if I were seeing the future before my eyes as clearly as I could see my own face in the beautiful big mirror with the gilded frame over the white marble fireplace in my living room that we call “le salon. How did I know that I was then and forever torn out of my modest but elegant salon, separated in one fell swoop from my life in Paris, my connection to France, the future that I had imagined as a continuation of the present? It was not the visit of Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount and the outbreak of Palestinian violence that had been predicted for months; it was the way the French media covered the incident. La provocation de la visite de Sharon sur l’Esplanade des Mosqueés (this is how the French designate it ” -sometimes adding as a sop that the Jews call it the Temple Mount. Looking back four years later, knowing what I know today about France’s Middle East politics, I can spell out the reasons for my irreparable separation from my adopted country. But that day it was a flash of intuition.
Having analyzed French media coverage of the first Gulf War, in 1991, I anticipated more of the same, but worse. Two days later, French public television created the first blood libel of the 21st Century: the death of Mohamed Al Dura, covered live by a France 2 cameraman. I didn’t have TV at the time. I heard about the incident on the radio, saw still photos in the press, read background articles later that week. My emotions were never mobilized by the 2.5-minute news report that France 2 generously donated to any station that would have it, and who could refuse? My initial judgment of the incident was based on my long experience as a novelist. Because I know how to invent believable stories I can easily recognize the clumsy concoctions of amateurs who don’t know how to weave together the major, minor, significant and insignificant details that give body to a story.
Two days after Sharon’s “provocative visit” a French cameraman just happens to be at the right place at the right time to capture the cold-blooded murder of a Palestinian child? On October 11th Le Monde published a gushy article about Mohamed, the little boy from Gaza who loved birds. We didn’t know, at the time, where we were being led, and how. The cameraman initially described as French was revealed to be Palestinian but by then the lie had been generally accepted. I myself thought the boy was killed in a crossfire and said so in a letter published in the International Herald Tribune.
When Gérard Huber ‘s “Contre–expertise d’une mise en scène” came out in January 2002, it confirmed my spontaneous first impression: this was a story concocted by bad liars. Knowing that France 2 would never recognize its error, I decided to give the revelations a trans-Atlantic echo. Tish Jennings suggested I contact David Kupelian of World Net Daily.
Kupelian replied immediately, and we started working together; I wrote an English synopsis of the book, translated a chapter, provided background information. Kupelian’s article, an excellent piece of investigative journalism, was published in Whistleblower Magazine; the online version on World Net Daily went around the world dozens of times.
I have been working on the project ever since. And no matter how many other urgent priorities call out to me, I can’t give up until I wipe out this blood libel. Last year I introduced Richard Landes to the affair. He carried it in new directions, expanded the scope, attracted financial and moral support, brought SPME into the project. We will have concrete results to show for our efforts very soon: a video / DVD “According to Palestinian Sources,” and a website -21st century Media Group.
Today, on the fourth anniversary of the A Dura fabrication, I want to share with you my enduring astonishment that sophisticated 21st century viewers could be fooled by the image of Mohamed A Dura and his father Jamal, crouching in fear, innocent victims of heartless Israeli soldiers OR simply unlucky casualties of an Israeli-Palestinian shootout.
And yet this is what reasonable people believe. When you explain that the whole thing is a cheap fake, they think you are a whacko conspiracy theory nut. Or hopelessly naive for not realizing that unless you can prove that you are a 100% right (some people tell us we need to be 110% right) you can’t say that the rest of the world is wrong.
The whole Al Aqsa intifada was a fake, a manipulation, a crude strategy that backfired. But the phony intifada has caused untold suffering, real death that can’t be undone and, like all Big Lies, it leaves a thin deposit of something that gets travestied into a truth, and endures, and pursues its dirty work over the years, decades, and centuries.
I can’t let the A Dura blood libel stand. I can’t disconnect the media-fabricated fake martyr of September 2000 from the ritual beheadings screened with barbarous regularity in September 2004. I can’t forget the pogroms ignited in European shtetls by crude blood libels and the piguim exploding in Israel, fueled by a 21st century global blood libel.
So I will have to ignore the cautionary tales of reasonable people and continue my quest, sifting through the evidence, constructing the arguments, mastering techniques, and finding the resources to make a case that will cast a strong light on that A Dura image and reveal its pathetic emptiness.
