One could imagine instead “IDF Hits Weapons Labs, Terrorist Leaders” with subsequent information in the article about civilian casualties—which are, after all, a feature of every war, and especially those waged in built-up areas against terrorist organizations that purposely take refuge among the populace.

Instead, since Israel began stepped-up operations against Gaza terror in response to round-the-clock shelling of Sderot, Ashkelon, and other Israeli communities, most of the Israeli English-language sites have been showing their “Israel kills Palestinians” bona fides. It brings in more readers than dull stuff about weapons depots and shows that the Israeli media keep pace with the rest of the world in Palestinian chic.

Meanwhile at a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “It needs to be kept in mind that the state of Israel is defending its civilians in the south. Nobody has the right to preach morals to Israel for taking basic measures to defend itself and prevent hundreds of thousands of residents of the south from continuing to be exposed to incessant attacks that disrupt their lives…. It should be made clear that Israel has no intention to stop fighting even for one moment.”

Bold words from the man who said in November that he would not negotiate with anyone who negates Israel as a Jewish state and subsequently has kept meeting with Mahmoud Abbas. It was also reported on Sunday that “officials in Jerusalem began preparing the grounds for a large hasbara [information] campaign to try and show the world that Israel’s actions in Gaza were ‘careful’ and the harming of civilians was ‘impossible to avoid’ when Hamas terrorists were using civilian grounds to launch rockets into Israel.”

It will be an even tougher challenge as Israeli news sites keep spewing out Hamas propaganda. And of course even before such explanatory efforts could get under way, the “moral preaching” Olmert referred to was coming fast and furious.

The UN Security Council said it was “deeply concerned about the loss of civilian life in southern Israel and Gaza and condemn[s] the escalation of violence. These events underscore the need for all parties to immediately cease all acts of violence.” A good deal harsher was UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon who thundered, “While recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself, I condemn the disproportionate and excessive use of force that has killed and injured so many civilians, including children. I call on Israel to cease such attacks.”

The European Union weighed in with “The [EU] presidency condemns the recent disproportionate use of force by the Israeli Defense Forces against [the] Palestinian population in Gaza and urges Israel to exercise maximum restraint and refrain from all activities that endanger civilians. Such activities are contrary to international law.” As for the Arab world, an apt example was Olmert’s peace partner Abbas’s statement that the IDF’s Gaza action was “worse than the Holocaust.”

All this was of course de rigueur and predictable as clockwork; did it matter that the usual world bodies and Israel-bashers were confusing attacker and defender, night and day, black and white, equating a democracy with a terror organization, standing morality on its head with the usual mix of cynicism and idiocy? How much it actually does matter was evident in another news item on Sunday.

It turns out that Jean-Claude Schlinger, an independent ballistics expert, has told a French court that the bullets that supposedly killed Mohammed al-Dura on September 30, 2000, “could not have been the result of Israeli gunfire, corroborating claims that the shocking footage was doctored.”

Al-Dura was the Palestinian boy whose alleged death in Gaza at the start of the Second Intifada became an icon of the world jihad movement. He has been invoked, for example, by the Ramallah mob that lynched two IDF reserve soldiers on October 12, 2000, by the killers of Daniel Pearl, and by Muslims attacking Jews in Europe, while featuring prominently in Al Qaeda recruitment videos. 

But in the French court, where media critic Philippe Karsenty has been appealing a libel conviction (for which he was fined a symbolic 1 euro) against the original disseminators of the Al-Dura myth, France 2 and its reporter Charles Enderlin, Schlinger stated: “If Jamal [the boy’s father] and Mohammed al-Dura were indeed struck by shots, then they could not have come from the Israeli position, from a technical point of view, but only from the direction of the Palestinian position.”

He added: “In view of the general context, and in light of many instances of staged incidents, there is no objective evidence that the child was killed and his father injured. It is very possible, therefore, that [the incident was] staged.”
 
This exposure of a twenty-first-century anti-Jewish blood libel is of course both very welcome and very late now that the Al-Dura story has been put to such murderous use. Official Israel, which underreacted to the al-Dura affair and passively allowed the calumny to spread, will hopefully pursue its “information” efforts more seriously now that another confrontation has erupted in Gaza with Israel again portrayed as ruthless killer.