Hot on the heels of Solomonia’s interview with Richard Landes on the subject of “Pallywood” – Palestinian manipulation of the Western media – comes this article in Commentary on the most iconic example, the killing of Muhammad al-Dura (via Melanie Phillips, never in danger of understatement: “what might eventually come to be regarded as a racial libel on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in both its malevolence and its contribution to the history of racial hatred”). I won’t extract key passages, as the whole thing needs to be read.
Interestingly, Muhammad al-Dura’s father Jamal, having been given $100,000 to build a new house by a rich Gulf sheik, is trying to back out of the limelight:
After his 12-year-old son died in a hail of bullets in 2000, Jamal al-Dura became the public face of Palestinian suffering as the second intifadah began. He traveled across the Arab world, standing as a symbol of perceived Israeli brutality and growing wealthy from the largesse showered upon him.
Nearly five years later, however, Dura says he has tired of mouthing the counterproductive mottos of Palestinian hard-liners. Instead, with Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last month, he has turned to building a grand new home for his eight surviving children and he has forbidden his eldest son from joining any militant movement, at least until he finishes university.
”One martyr from this family is enough,” Dura, 43, said at his home in Bureij.
He’s only the most famous of a minority of Gaza Palestinians who are rejecting the all-encompassing culture of intifadah, jihad, and martyrdom that has turned camps like Bureij and Jabaliya into locomotives of the Palestinian militant factions.
Update: it strikes me that this would make an excellent subject for a documentary – a Panorama, say. That it’s so unlikely is a sad comment on the state of our television in general, and of the BBC in particular.
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