The Anti-Denmark Riots: Has Pallywood Gone Global?

(Welcome to readers from Haveil Havalim #57 via AbbaGav. Please feel free to take a moment to go to the top look around--especially if you also have 18 inches of snow outside...)

Wikipedia has an entry for Pallywood, which it defines as follows:

Pallywood is a pejorative epithet used used to label allegations of propaganda in video journalism to put Israel policies toward Palestinians in an unfavorable light. The epithet is based on allegations that events are staged by Palestinian cameramen and video teams, sometimes using equipment from Western news agencies, and the resulting footage sent on to those agencies.

One example is the famous case of the boy Mohammed Al-Dura who was supposedly killed by the IDF in a crossfire.

But according to James Fallows in his article Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura for Atlantic Weekly (registration required):

"The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf's evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father's lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead?

"Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if "directing" a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear - based on the length of shadows - to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father's shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, "The boy is dead" before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?" (see cached copy of the article here hat tip: Soccer Dad)

A report from France also found that the shooting of al-Dura was staged, as did a report on German TV. See also sources at Palestinefacts.org at bottom of page

Other stagings by Palestinian Arabs have also been caught on video and can be viewed at The Second Draft. Fake Palestinian funerals have been caught on tape and deceptive footage was used in the making of the movie Jenin, Jenin.

That brings us to the current Moslem riots against the 12 Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed. Charles Moore writes for The Telegraph:

It's some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don't remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)

Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of "spontaneous" Muslim rage, the odder it seems.

The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.

It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking. [emphasis added]

The question is: where did those extra cartoons came from? According to The Counterterrorism Blog, the Imams themselves created them:

But these additional pictures were NOT published by the newspaper, but were completely fabricated by the delegation and inserted in the booklet (which has been obtained and made available to me by Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet). The delegation has claimed that the differentiation was made to their interlocutors, even though the claim has not been independently verified. In any case, the action was a deliberate malicious and irresponsible deed carried out by a notorious Islamist who in another situation had said that “mockery against Mohamed deserves death penalty.” And in a quintessential exercise in taqiya, Abu Laban has praised the boycott of Danish goods on al Jazeera, while condemning it on Danish TV.

The American Thinker quotes Counterterrorism and frames the issue this way:

In other words, this was indeed a campaign, planned by important members of the Islamic world’s power structure, intended to force Denmark to comply with Sharia requirements.

Having raised the question of the staging of outrage, riots, and more--Moore also points out that the riots and threats of violence are a deliberate attempt at intimidation. Also, obviously, the intimidation works:

On the Today programme yesterday, Stewart Lee, author of Jerry Springer: The Opera - in which Jesus appears wearing nappies - let the cat out of the bag. He suggested that it was fine to offend Christians because they had themselves degraded their iconography; Islam, however, has always been more "conscientious about protecting the brand".

The implication of the remark is fascinating. It is that the only people whose feelings artists, newspapers and so on should consider are those who protest violently. The fact that Christians nowadays do not threaten to blow up art galleries, invade television studios or kill writers and producers does not mean that their tolerance is rewarded by politeness. It means that they are insulted the more.

Which is why if this is not confronted, the show will go on. And if there are enough successful sequels, others may get it into their head to try their hand at remakes.

Crossposted at Israpundit

Other posts here on the topic of the Danish cartoons:

o The Denmark Cartoons and Moslem Moderation 2/15/06
o The Danish Cartoons and the Hijacking of Islam 2/8/06
o The Timing of the Danish Cartoon Riots 2/8/06
o Comparing the Danish Cartoons to Der Sturmer? 2/7/06
o Translation of the Danish Moslem Delegation Letter 2/6/06
o Cartoon Irony 2/5/06
o Denmark and the Cartoon Defense 2/2/06

Technorati Tags: Mohammed and Muhammad Cartoon and Prophet and Denmark and al-Dura and Jenin.