MELANIE PHILLIPS - FEB 17, 2023
A new book is essential to understanding the lunacy over Israel and the global jihad
One of the mysteries of the war against Israel is the extent to which a monstrously twisted narrative about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs — casting the former as evil and the latter as sanctified victims — has been absorbed by so many people.
Still stranger, this narrative seems to be the driver of progressive politics. It’s not just that “intersectionality” demonises the Jews, but that it is driven by an obsession with Palestinianism.
As Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet: “In queer and women’s studies programs, the topic of Palestine is regularly inserted into the most unlikely contexts, to the extent that one student in a class about queer history told me that they discussed nothing but Palestine.”
The astonishing story of Mohammed al-Durah illustrates just how perverse this is. On Sept. 30, 2000, the French TV station France 2 broadcast footage from Gaza that apparently showed the 12-year-old al-Durah being shot dead by Israeli fire as he clung to his father during a demonstration.
This iconic picture detonated the second intifada, the Palestinian terrorist war waged against Israeli civilians that murdered more than 1,130 of them and wounded more than 8,000 between 2000 and 2005. The footage incited hysteria across the Arab and Muslim world.
Eleven days later, when two Israeli reservists strayed into Ramallah, a mob beat them to death. They threw one body out of a window, mutilating it and parading it through the streets. A gloating Palestinian Arab was pictured waving his hands in the air covered in the Israelis’ blood while the mob screamed “revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durah!”
One year later, at the UN’s sickening anti-Jewish hate-fest in Durban, South Africa, Mohammad al-Durah’s body was paraded in effigy among thousands of demonstrators screaming hatred of Israel. Then Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded by al-Qaeda explicitly for the killing of the child.
The whole al-Durah killing, however, was a set-up and a grotesque lie. As I saw in a Paris courtroom in 2007, previously unseen French TV footage showed that the scenes of battle had been staged with cameras, producers and even make-up technicians visible in a carnival atmosphere.