I recently gave a talk at a conference on Media and Ethics in Jerusalem, where I presented the case against Enderlin’s version of the Muhammad al Durah story. Apparently, the presentation was relatively convincing since one of the first criticisms I immediately received from a prominent Israeli professor of communications was: "So what? According to reliable statistics, the Israeli army has killed over 800 Palestinian children since the second Intifada. So what difference does it make if this case is staged or not?" His intervention was followed by a round of applause from about a third of the 200-some person audience...

...These conceptual remarks shed a fierce light on the significance of al Durah since this icon was a spectacular and unprecedented event in the history of TV: not only the first "live TV-recorded" death of a child in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but perhaps any conflict, and it was presented to the world as a murder. It thus carried an emotional impact equivalent to a nuclear blast, and became a symbolic matrix that defined the second Intifada and redefined Zionism. The "martyr" Muhammad al Durah became not only the "icon" for the Arab and Muslim world, he became the touchstone of Western perception about the nature of the conflict and the nature of Israel...

...This defenseless 12-year old murdered by Israelis became the symbol of all Palestinian "children" killed in the Intifada, whether they were 18 years old and fighting Israel, or 10 years old carrying a bomb pack, whether, even when killed by Israelis, it was unintentional or not. Muhammad "explained" the terror against Israelis – "What do you expect when you kill their children in cold blood?" – and rendered every Israeli victim guilty. So symbolically speaking, this "one case" not only stands out from all others, but redefines the meaning of the others.

The media – purveyors of this pivotal tale – subsequently remained loyal to the framework they had helped shape, reporting virtually every and any Palestinian claim of Israeli brutality, piling up statistics of Palestinian civilians, children, and non-combatants casualties that made Israeli soldiers look like ruthless mass-murderers, despite the fact that there are no documented cases of the IDF deliberately murdering innocent children. When the real mass-murderers of children, the suicide bombers and struck Israeli domestic sites, the media found few problems empathizing both with the victim and the terrorist. Moral equivalence and the politics of pity had obliterated the difference between firemen and arsonists; indeed for many it had inverted the moral universe: the arsonists were rebel heroes and the firemen hegemonic oppressors.

But his symbolic potency went well beyond even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Muslims around the world the al Durah story became a wake-up call: his image became perhaps this single most recognizable global Muslim icon until (and even after) 9-11. Within months, Osama bin Laden had given his tale a central place in his recruiting video for global Jihad...

...The big losers in this process were the forces of moderation on all sides: many Palestinians eagerly threw themselves into as total a war with Israel as they could muster; moderates could not brake their momentum; they could not even talk with their Israeli partners in dialogue without appearing to betray their people...

...In the history of information warfare, al Durah – the blood libel – was a nuclear blast, strengthening the war-mongering demonizers and paralyzing those working for a consensual peace. And if, as it looks, the MSM, starting with Enderlin, played a key role in detonating the blast rather than playing their proper role of filtering out false news and war-mongering propaganda, then we may have an important insight into the systemic weaknesses of societies committed to freedom in this era of growing authoritarianism and violence. One of the news media’s main tasks is to keep poisons out of the information system like a dialysis machine; with al Durah it pumped – and continues to pump – toxic poisons...