Where, indeed, are all the voices against racism and for justice in “Palestine”? If they really cared about Palestinians more than they cared about defaming Jews, wouldn’t they be pleased to learn that a Palestinian child had not met such a violent end after all? Wouldn’t they be enraged about the Palestinian “fake-a-death-and-fool-the-infidel” propaganda industry?

Karsenty is sharply critical of the “treacherous” former French president, Jacques Chirac. ”Chirac was more dangerous than any Arab dictator because during his entire career; he provided the enemies of the Jews and Israel with the most dangerous weapons.”

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Of the French media he says, “They have failed to cover this case, except very minimally. As far as they are concerned, I am already on the intellectual equivalent of Devil’s Island” (where Dreyfus was imprisoned).

Karsenty says the staging of news events by Palestinians is both well known and accepted by the French media. He also notes that, with the exception of the president of CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France), Richard Prasquier, the organized French Jewish community has been at best unnaturally quiet about the al-Dura affair. He mentions, in passing, that he has lost most of his friends.

Karsenty also names the names of some heroes, such as Israeli physicist Nahum Shahaf whose work proved the IDF could not have fired the shots and that it was a staged event. He also names the head of the Israel Government Press Office, Daniel Seaman; the French psychoanalyst, Gérard Huber, who first published a book on the case in January 2003; and the American professor Richard Landes, who has worked tirelessly to publicize the truth.

Karsenty also names Pajamas Media and its Paris bureau chief, Nidra Poller, as the only media outlet that “covered my struggle consistently, accurately, and as befit an important, historical case.”

Karsenty is not Captain Dreyfus. He says Israel, not he, embodies the Dreyfus Case today. I agree, but the fact remains that it is Karsenty, like Dreyfus, who has been sued and treated as a criminal by the French state and who, like Dreyfus, is being forced to defend himself. The French, who defamed and punished Dreyfus, are now defaming and punishing the very Jewish state that arose partly because of Herzl’s reaction to the Dreyfus case.

Karsenty is zealous about the truth of this matter. No one is exempted from his high standards, not even his supporters. He asked to see a copy of my 2003 book about anti-Semitism and I quickly obliged him. He pointed out that even I had not “gotten it” right five years ago when I wrote the book.

He is absolutely correct. In The New Anti-Semitism, I carefully noted that many experts and a German documentary filmmaker had begun to question the veracity of the 59-second al-Dura report. I noted that people had begun to suggest that the entire episode might have been staged.

I also wrote: ”I do know that Israel has been permanently damaged both by the footage and by the initial presumption of Israeli guilt [because] second and third interpretations two years later do not carry the same emotional resonance.” I noted that it was unlikely the Israelis had killed him. But I still wrote that “I do not know whose bullets killed the child. Perhaps we will never know.”

Thus, like nearly everyone else, I assumed the boy had indeed been killed.

I did the best I could at the time with the information we had. I even went further with it than most others did. Nevertheless, if someone like me could be taken in, it goes a long way in explaining how the entire world was fooled – a world not nearly as vigilant as I try to be concerning the truth about Jews and Israel.

We simply cannot trust Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian media. We know too much about the staging of events, the doctoring of footage, the documentation of fake massacres. But we also cannot afford to trust the international media, which kept replaying this staged footage without asking any questions.

Karsenty assures me that three independent journalists who viewed the raw footage “saw a series of staged events, casual passersby, a man riding a bicycle, and no death agony, as was claimed.” He said that two of these journalists were “pressured not to go public.”

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Dr. Phyllis Chesler is a professor emerita of psychology, a Middle East Forum fellow, and the author of sixteen books including “The New Anti-Semitism” (2003, 2014), “Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews, 2003-2015 (2015), and “An American Bride in Kabul” (2013), for which she won the National Jewish Book Award in the category of memoirs. Her articles are archived at www.phyllis-chesler.com. A version of this piece appeared on IsraelNationalNews.com.