Bearing false witness

I've blogged here before about media manipulation by Palestinians and their friends (see here about the imaginary Jenin massacre, here about the kidnapped toy, and here about the remarkable coincidence of the exploding car), and now Callimachus, at Done with Mirrors, has this detailed post questioning the footage that supposedly shows 12-year old Mohammed al-Duri being showed by Israeli Defense Forces. This is not the first time I've heard about this story. Back in March 2003, WorldNetDaily was already breaking this story:

The "martyrdom" death of 12-year-old Palestinian Mohammed al-Dura at the hands of Israeli soldiers – which received widespread international news coverage and spurred on the current intifada, inspiring countless "suicide bombers" to attack Israel – was actually a "staged" piece of street theater, according to an in-depth report in the current issue of WND's monthly magazine, Whistleblower. The entire world was transfixed as news broadcasts played the sensational video footage of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy and his father, pinned down in crossfire between Arab snipers and Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza's remote Netzarim junction on Sept. 30, 2000. The image of the boy crouching in terror behind his father, both of them struggling in vain to protect themselves from Israeli gunfire, only to be shot – the boy apparently dying in his father's arms – became immortalized in posters that were later plastered up and down the streets of the West Bank and Gaza. Although the Israeli military initially assumed responsibility for the incident, it soon became apparent that the IDF could not have shot the boy, due to a large barrier between the Israeli military outpost across the remote junction and the location of the boy and his father. Now, a just-completed, long-term journalistic investigation conducted in France concludes that the Mohammed al-Dura affair was actually a piece of Palestinian theater – similar to the dramatic Palestinian funeral processions last April after the Israeli incursion into the Jenin refugee camp. During that public spectacle, a martyred "corpse" twice fell off the stretcher, only to hop back up and retake his place in the procession. The Palestinians had claimed 3,000 deaths in Jenin – the actual toll was 52.

Ironically enough, just yesterday my son and I were watching an old Reading Rainbow episode (it's a kids' show, for those of you who don't have kids) that focused on optical illusions. The episode opened with Levar Burton, the show's host, apparently climbing a mountain in the middle of a blizzard. Levar than appeared in a studio before a blue screen, and carefully explained to his young audience the miracles of hardened-rubber mountains, plastic snow, blowing machines and computer images on blue screens. It appears that our own media could benefit from this same basic information about media manipulation.