News Being Manufactured: A Graphic Example of How This is Done to Slander Israel

Summary ... The mainstream media is always quick to take any anti-Jewish stance on news stories, even before examining the evidence at hand. It's important to expose these phony reports (aka "fake news") and reveal the truth.

It is understandably hard for people to believe the amount of violence that is staged and stories that are manipulated coming from the Middle East. Here is a bit of video from the eastern part of Jerusalem. The incident occurred in the Arab neighborhood of Silwan.

[Editor's note: This video will be a bit shocking the first time you see it; however, you must review it more than once to actually see what is happening, as detailed below.]

See what happens: Kids are ready to throw stones at passing cars with Israeli license plates, five of them run into the road, blocking it, ready to throw stones at an approaching Israeli automobile. Another car is deliberately parked across the road, partly blocking it. Surprised by the ambush, the Israeli driver slams on his brakes but one of the kids is hit by the car and he flies up and over it.

Note the following:

1. The Palestinian [sic] and other media release a story saying the driver deliberately hit him. Here's a report in al-Jazeera with a photo designed to lie about what happened. [This information has been removed from the al-Jazerra website.—ed] This claim is clearly not true. If the driver had been speeding and wanted to do injury he could easily have hit three or four of the kids. Indeed, I've been told that Arabic-language news media is reporting that the driver killed two children (only one was slightly injured). The response to this could be terrorist attacks to get revenge. This is a common pattern.
2. There are a lot of reporters there filming (you can see them on the left and bottom edges). So this was set up for media coverage, as is so much violence in the West Bank [sic] particularly. Indeed, there are at least seven photographers visible and there are as many journalists, if not more, than there were rock-throwers.
3. At the end there is a very strange scene. The boy does not appear to have been injured seriously. (I was once hit by a car exactly in this manner and walked away. If you are thrown into the air you will just get some bruises, as long as you don't fall under the car.) But there is an ambulance which has just been standing there waiting for something like this to happen, a sign it is being staged.
4. [Editor's note: If you look very carefully at the video at approximately 0:09 seconds in, you will see the young boy literally running straight towards the car instead of trying to jump out of the way (in fact, he even had to make a determined move to the right to hit it). Then, just before he reaches it, he clearly throws up his hands in the air and then places them on the hood (at approximately 0:11 seconds) and, if you look careful, it looks like he might even be pushing himself upward, so as to land on the hood. While this might seem a bit outrageous, it's not really when you consider that 1) the boy is actually running at the car — even aiming for it; 2) he never made any attempt to get out of the way (in fact, another little boy also ran at the car); and 3) and the car is not traveling that fast to begin with. To perform such a stunt would not take much practice — especially for a young, agile boy, and he would have been "tutored" by Hamas terrorists. If you look very close at this video several times — just the part between approximately 0:07 and 0:11 seconds — you will see that there was never really any danger.]
5. Yet the boy is holding onto the ambulance door, trying to avoid being put into the ambulance. Why? It may be too much of a stretch to say he fears being made into a martyr by his comrades, or maybe he just wants to stay with his friends but he looks pretty desperate not to get in [in fact, very desperate—ed]. If I've overreached on this point I apologize.
6. The Israeli driver's back window has been smashed in by a stone [approximately 0:23 seconds]. The driver's young son is also in the car. If the car is trapped there he and his son could be killed by the stones or dragged out of the car and murdered[ as has happened several times before—ed]. As far as he knows, any second guns could start firing bullets through his windows. The reporters and cameramen standing and watching won't lift a finger to help him. The driver eases past the parked car and speeds away. He reported the incident to the police and didn't try to hide that it had happened.
7. Some of the driver's friends suggest that he may have been personally targeted for an ambush because he has been an activist on Jerusalem-related issues [the driver is David Be'eri, director of Elad, a group which support 62 Jewish families living in the area predominantly Arab neighborhood—ed]. They say his car is well-known and he often travels that road. This might be true since there is no evidence of rock-throwing at any cars before he arrived [at the beginning, you can see the children talking to occupants of another car before it drives off—ed]. Here's a technical analysis of the incident.

If you see stories in your local newspapers or on television saying that an Israeli settler deliberately ran down and killed two Palestinian boys you now know the real story. But most of the readers or viewers won't know any better.

Multiply this story by hundreds of such cases, far too many to correct; add the fact that such clear proof of falsification is often lacking; and blend in the sympathy of many reporters with misreporting events. (Even after Israel released footage showing the soldiers landing on the deck of the Mavi Marmara were attacked and beaten, the New York Times implied that this didn't prove anything).

Now you get a picture of the situation regarding media coverage of Israel.

PS: I've been told—though I haven't confirmed it directly—that Canadian Television played the clip with the narration implying that he had run them over on purpose. So even if you see the opposite the viewer is conditioned to accept the anti-Israel propaganda line.

[ Barry Rubin | Published: October 12, 2010 ]