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- All of the
arguments for staging and against deliberate murder
by the Palestinians work in favor of a staged scene.
- Evidence that the scene was deliberately set up:
- Photographic evidence from three cameramen show the
boy and father behind
the barrel well before the shooting begins, suggesting
a much greater probability that they were deliberately
placed there, rather than chance pedestrians
caught in a crossfire.
- Bullet direction suggests setting the scene for filming.
(Scenario
3)
- At funeral, the mourners already have posters of the
boy: In order for them to have this, they would have
had to go to his home in El-Bureij, get a picture, make
the poster and copy it for distribution all in approximately
one to two hours. In the meantime, his mother claims
that she didn't find out about his death until the later
evening news.
- Motive: Immense PR victory for the Palestinians. This
image provides the Palestinians with superb material for
scapegoating Israel which they rapidly exploited. It permits
them to:
- No blood: Talal claimed
the boy was bleeding for 15 or 20 minutes from a stomach
wound (which normally proves fatal from loss of blood)),
but the tape does not show any blood on the ground where
he lay, even the next day when fresh blood was added under
the father's place at the barrel, but not where Muhammed
lay. Why would Talal not have gotten even a few seconds
of the boy bleeding on the ground?
- No ambulance evacuation: Given how valuable
ambulance evacuations are as footage and how
quickly the ambulances tend to arrive, and the fact
that we know an ambulance is in waiting just behind the
boy and the father, one would expect a real case of evacuating
the wounded to be extremely valuable. Given Talal's perfect
positioning for filming an especially bloody scene of
the wounded father and dead son, it seems incomprehensible
that Talal has not one frame of an ambulance evacuation.
Asked why not by Nahum Shahaf over the phone, he responds
evasively: "because the ambulance driver was shot." Asked
why he didn't take a picture of that, he responded, "because
he was shot before he got to the boy." Aside from the
fact that this contradicts his testimony, it avoids the
more basic question of why he did not photograph the eventual
evacuation. Enderlin replies to both anomalies by claiming
that Talal told him that he was running out of batteries,
although if that were the case, why did he not just run
out his camera on the scene in front of him rather than
film a later, undistinguished
ambulance scene?
- No shot of the boy arriving at the Hospital: And even
if his camera battery were dead, he could have called
ahead to Shiffa hospital to make sure that the arrival
of the father and son would get filmed some half an hour
later. But we have no shots from Shiffa hospital.
- No bullets recovered: Shiffa hospital, despite allegedly
treating two people with a total of 8-12 bullet wounds,
produced no bullets or bullet fragments.
Nor did the
Palestinian police who examined the site the next
day. Perhaps aware that the lack of bullets made his case
weak, Talal
told Esther Schapira "we have the bullets, the kind
of the bullets, I photographed them." When Schapira asks
where the bullets are Talal tells her to "consult the
general… he could tell you." When Schapira points out
that the General does not have any bullets, Talal, the
only employee of France2 at the scene at that time claims:
"France2 collected"). "So you're doing a better job than
the investigators," Schapira responds as Talal registers
the realization that his claim has no credibility. "No,
no, no" Talal answers with a smile as he realizes that
story won't work, "We…we… we have our secrets… we cannot
give anything… just anything
Further evidence comes from a closer look at the actual
footage of the al Durahs behind the barrel.
- There are only 59 seconds of tape of the actual "shooting"
sequence, which further breaks up into 6 separate scenes.
Rather than shooting long sequences of the boy and father
either under fire or bleeding, Talal takes tiny sequences
of only a few seconds each. We will review each one for
evidence of staging:
- Scene 1: Behind the barrel: bullet comes from Palestinian
side
- Scene 2: Israeli Position: no fire from or at Israelis
- Scene 3: Waving the Hand: father looking at the camera,
people yelling the boy is dead while he's still alive.
- Scene 4: lying down body crunched: no evidence of
bullets hitting boy, red on leg, father looks unconscious.
Two fingers passing before the camera immediately before
the image of Mohammed lying flat, almost signaling a
'cut', unusual behavior for a journalistic camera.
- Scene 5: lying down, hand over eyes Mohammed's arm
is also nowhere near his stomach an instinctual reaction
for someone shot in the abdomen, father's head bobs,
he's conscious, but he never reaches for his son
- Scene 6: lying down, looking out Mohammed al-Durra
lifting his elbow and moving his feet, atypical actions
for a dead child, father has turned away from the boy,
still making no effort to reach for him.
- Talal
is a known Pallywood photographer
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- There is no clear evidence against this scenario. Once
one turns off the willing suspension of disbelief and
look at these scenes as potentially staged, one finds
few if any scenes that argue for real acting (with the
exception of the terrified boy as real Palestinian bullets
fly overhead).
- It's a conspiracy
theory: Most people find the idea that the Palestinians
would do such a thing, and that the Western media would
all be fooled by it so preposterous, that they dismiss
it out of hand. As one prominent diplomat involved in
the Camp David process put it: "The Middle East is so
full of conspiracy theories, I'm not going to believe
any of them."
- If it were staged, surely the Israelis would have said
something: Why haven't the Israelis come forward with
this conclusion, especially if their own investigator,
Nahum Shahaf, argued for that position very early on?
It would have cleared them and cast serious doubt on the
account of Talal abu Rahma and the image of al-Durah as
a symbol of the Intifada.
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