Introducing the Al Durah Project

Mike L.



When the international media slanders Israel it puts all Jews at risk.  What the Al Durah Project and Professor Richard Landes call "lethal narratives" are very much a part of Jewish history.  Prior to every pogrom and prior to every persecution and prior to the Holocaust, itself, were lethal narratives which, in truth, are just contemporary versions of the classic blood-libel.

The Al Durah Project is a website that I have only recently come across, but we definitely need more of this kind of thing and I want to introduce it to you guys:

The filming of a boy under fire becomes… THE BIRTH OF AN ICON

Al Durah: What Happened?

On September 30, 2000, Day 2 of the Second Intifada, the riots spreading across the Palestinian territories reached Gaza. At Netzarim Junction, Talal Abu Rahma -a Palestinian photojournalist working for France 2- filmed Jamal al-Durah and his 12-year-old son, Muhammad, as the pair sheltered behind a concrete barrel. The choppy footage, lasting approximately a minute, shows father and son holding onto each other. (See the video below at 16:58 onward). The boy is crying. The father is seen yelling into a cell phone, then waving. Talal is heard screaming “the boy is dead, the boy is dead!” Then, following a burst of automatic gunfire and dust, the boy appears slumped across his father’s legs. In the final scene, the boy raises his right arm to look out from beneath his elbow.

It was this image, broadcast around the world, that helped launch the Second Terror War against the Jews of the Middle East and that resulted in the murder of well over a thousand people.  Because of this lethal journalism, this toxic lie out of the French media, the Palestinian-Arabs believed that the Jews killed an innocent Arab child and the image above became an icon of hatred.  The international left, of course, was more than willing to justify Palestinian-Arab violence and thus they told one another how, during the very height of the terror war against the Jews, the Jews of Israel were the New Nazis and thus deserving of whatever beating they received.

The Al-Durah hoax is one of the prime examples of what is called cognitive warfare:

Cognitive Warfare constitutes the prime theater of operations for the weak side in an asymmetrical war. Unable to win in the military battlefield, weak-side warriors can only hope to use cognitive war to improve their position. Cognitive warfare seeks to turn one’s own side into patriots eager for conquest and the targeted enemy into pacifists. At it’s finest, cognitive warfare is the art of getting the enemy to surrender without fighting. Unlike psy-ops, which seeks position on the military battlefield, CW uses military strikes (e.g., terror attacks) as a way to position itself to advantage in the public sphere.

Democratic societies, with their open public spheres and legal commitments to fairness, are particularly vulnerable to cognitive attacks, and journalists who cover such asymmetric wars are, whether they acknowledge it or not, viewed as critical assets for the weak side to acquire in its strategies.

In the 21st century, the democratic world has come under a concerted cognitive attack from a much weaker, but highly aggressive, and socially regressive foe. Guardians of the public sphere in the modern democracies who either refuse to or refrain from recognizing this attack, make democracies all the more vulnerable. Recognizing and countering cognitive warfare constitutes a central means whereby democratic societies will respond effectively to the current attack while (indeed, by) preserving democratic principles. Addressing the dilemmas of journalism trying to report on asymmetric warfare, where the weak side must have the support of enemy journalists in order to succeed, constitutes one of the most important agenda facing democracies today.

My only quibble with the above definition of cognitive warfare is that the Arabs are not the weak side in the War Against the Jews.  On the contrary, when it comes to manpower and resources and land and influence, it is the Arab side which is definitely the stronger side by far.  It's not even close.  All the Jews are doing is maintaining a hard defensive posture against a much stronger enemy that outnumbers us 70 to 1 and that brutally crushed our population growth, while persecuting us for religious reasons, over the course of many centuries.

I usually date the War Against the Jews from the riots of 1920 to the present, but the Arab-Muslim persecution of the Jews in the Middle East dates to the seventh-century.

In any case, I am only just beginning to familiarize myself with the Al Durah Project, but it strikes me as something that is vital to our understanding of the Long Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East.

I would encourage you guys to check it out.