An official Israeli government report declared Sunday that Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old boy whose picture convinced the entire world that the IDF had killed him, not only did not die but also may never have been shot.

Now, 13 years after the supposed killing that incited the senseless murders of Israelis as well as Jews throughout the world, the Israel government report categorically concluded that the France 2 report was much more of a hoax than thought several years ago.

For a close look at the footage, click here.

“Contrary to the claim that the boy was dead, the committee’s review of the raw footage indicates that at the end of the video – the part that was not broadcast – the boy appears to be alive,” according to the report by the Ministry of International Affairs and Strategy.

“The probe has found that there is no evidence to support the claims that the father, Jamal, or the boy Mohammed, were shot. Furthermore, the video does not show Jamal being seriously wounded. On the other hand, many signs indicate that the two were never hit by the bullets.”

The panel was comprised of officials from the Defense and Foreign ministries, experts from outside the government and the police, and it was headed by Yossi Kuperwasser, former director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

The revelation puts another nail in the coffin of the “Al Dura news report” that was challenged by a French Jew, Philippe Karsenty, who charged that France 2 journalist Charles Enderlin created a media lie by broadcasting edited footage that alleged that the IDF killed the boy.

An emotionally wrenching photo that was seen around the world shows Mohammed supposedly crying out as he and his father took cover during a gun battle between the IDF and Palestinian Authority terrorists at the beginning of what has been termed the Second Intifada, also known as the Oslo War, in 2000.

The alleged shooting of Mohammed Al Dura was filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian Authority photographer who free-lanced for France 2. The film lasts for 55 seconds and shows the boy screaming before the sound of gunfire, followed by a scene of the boy apparently dead over his father’s legs.

Enderlin told viewers the boy was killed and had been the “target of fire from the Israeli positions.” The gunfight occurred on the second day of the Oslo War and spread venom throughout the Arab world, inciting terrorist against Israel.

To make matters worse, the IDF apologized within 24 hours even though the military had not verified the alleged shooting.

The timing of Sunday’s government report is astounding because a French court is to rule later this week on a libel suit filed by Enderlin against Karsenty, who previously was backed by a lower French court, which stated that Karsenty presented a “coherent mass of evidence” and that the Palestinian Authority cameraman for France 2 was not “perfectly credible.”

Karsenty’s investigation revealed that France 2 had edited the film and it was not clear whether the boy died from Israeli or Palestinian Authority fire. At the same time, media watchdogs began documenting “Pallywood” productions that the Palestinian Authority staged for journalists, who gobbled up faked scenes of supposedly wounded Arab victims of IDF gunfire who magically were later seen walking around freely after having been shoved into ambulances.

From a further perspective, the Israeli report punctures another Big Lie that has haunted Israel ever since the Six-Day War in 1967 way.

A small sample of other lies includes:

–   Israel  occupied Judea and Samaria, most of which were in fact taken over by Jordan without any international authorization;

–   Children of Arabs who were chased out of Israel or who fled Israel are ”refugees,” a second generation status that the United Nations does not grant to anyone in the world except Arabs who claim Israel as their home;

–  Israel aggressively attacked Lebanese “guerillas” who pulverized northern residents before the “Peace for the Galilee campaign, now known as the First Lebanese War, in which Israel established a security zone in southern Lebanon to defend the north;

–  Israel committee war crimes for years, especially during the Operation Cast Lead counterterrorist campaign in the winter of 2008-2009. The United Nations Goldstone report claimed Israel for dozens of war crimes but the report’s author, Judge Richard Goldstone, later admitted that had he known then what he knows now, he would have reached different conclusions;

–Israel built an “Apartheid’ Wall that creates a separation between Jews and Arabs. In fact, most of the “wall” that runs for more than 200 miles is a fence, which has helped reduce the number of suicide terrorist attacks against to near zero. The fence also does not “keep out” Arabs because Israel operates checkpoints at numerous gates to make sure that Arabs who are not terrorists can travel freely into the rest of Israel; and

–  Israel “degrades” Palestinian Authority Arabs at checkpoints, even though it uses the same search methods that the United States and other Western countries use at airports and borders.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said after the new report was released that the France 2 film in 2000 “was an example of the deceitful delegitimization that we are constantly subject to. There is only one way to battle lies – by telling the truth.”

The supposed killing of the boy has been cited as the catalyst for the grizzly and barbaric lynching IDF reservists the following month in Ramallah, where they had arrived by mistake. The “Al Dura incident” also was said to have incited the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl as well as Osama bin Laden.

The question remains whether Mohammed al Dura was ever wounded, or if he even was a real person.

There is a less of a question concerning the credibility of international coverage of Israel.

Day by day, reports covering the “peace process” and the “Palestinian struggle” show fatigue in continuing to report Arab claims that have become so ludicrous that they simply are ignored.

Without media support, and without media incitement, the Palestinian Authority is increasingly being left with an audience of one hand clapping.

One other question arises: Can France 2 can be accused of inciting war crimes against Israel?

The international Dan David Prize will be awarded  June 9 at Tel Aviv University to an American Jewish philosopher, a research doctor at Johns Hopkins and a French economist.

The Dan David Prize awards three $1 million to individuals with proven exceptional excellence in the sciences, arts, humanities, public service and entrepreneurship that have made an outstanding contribution to humanity.

Leon Wieseltier, American intellectual and philosopher and Literary Editor of The New Republic, will be given the award in the in the present time dimension category of Ideas, Public Intellectuals and Contemporary Philosophers.

Dr. Alfred Sommer of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health, who is known for his striking discovery in demonstrating that vitamin A has the power to save children’s lives, won the prize in the future time dimension field of Preventive Medicine.

Also in the future time dimension, and the only woman to win the prize this year, is French Economist Esther Duflo, whose research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health and policy evaluation.

She was recently appointed by President Obama to the President’s Global Development Council.

Israel’s senior intelligence analyst  said on Tuesday that Syrian President Bashar Assad has used chemical weapons against the rebels, but U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insisted there is no proof.

“To the best of our understanding, there was use of lethal chemical weapons. Which chemical weapons? Probably sarin,” Brigadier-General Itai Brun told a Tel Aviv security conference.

President Barack Obama has said that he would order military action in Syria if chemical weapons are used.

Videos of Syrian civilians, many of them children, suffering from the effects of chemical weapons have surfaced at least three times this year. Britain and France also have said that they have been used.

But the American government wants documented proof and whatever else they can come up with to get out of acting on its word. Obama talked himself not a corner because it has become clear that no matter what happens in Syria, everyone loses in  the nears-term.

Kerry not only rejected Israeli intelligence but also tried to throw the responsibility on NATO.

“We should also carefully and collectively consider how NATO is prepared to respond to protect its members from a Syrian threat, including any potential chemical weapons threat,” Kerry said at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

That is a clever way of taking the monkey off of Obama’s back, but it is pretty nervy to reject Israeli intelligence. First of all, Israel and Syria are next –door neighbors. Secondly, you can bet your bottom shekel that Israel has more intelligent agents than the United States who know Syrian turf and speak the language.

Thirdly, the United States has a history of making itself look silly by rejecting Israeli intelligence. Several years ago, Israel warned American officials that Iran was secretly working on its nuclear power program, but Washington categorically rejected the information. Its own bright-eyed experts knew 100 percent that Iran had dropped its plans for making a nuclear weapon.

Around two years ago, the U.S. government said, well, y’know, it looks like the Israelis are right again. And now the world is paying the price.

But just to be sure, how does General Brun know for a fact that Assad’s forces have unleashed the unthinkable?

He showed previously published pictures of a child, either dead or wounded, and said foam seemed to be coming out of the mouth.

But that still is not the hard proof the United States is demanding.

Brun is certain he is right. “The very fact that they have used chemical weapons without any appropriate reaction is a very worrying development, because it might signal that this is legitimate” he said.

Enter John Kerry. He knows that Israel has no proof of the use of chemical weapons because he talked with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who “was not in a position to confirm that in the conversation that I had.”

“I don’t know yet what the facts are,” Kerry added. “I don’t think anybody knows what they are.” Not even Gen. Brun?

No one knows what the context of the Prime Minister’s remarks were. Nor does anyone know if Prime Minister Netanyahu would prefer not to fall into a trap of telling the Secreatru of State and than being told to keep quiet. Or perhaps Netanyahu does not want to put Obama in a corner right now, despite Gen. Brun’s comments.

Meanwhile, the White House keeps pounding the podium that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable and continues to wag fingers, saying woe to Assad if he is proven to have deployed them.

Back in the State Department, reporters are siding with Israel’s version.

At Tuesday’s daily media briefing, reporters peppered acting spokesman Patrick Ventrell with questions.

Asked about General Brun’s statements and about British and French claims of the use of chemical weapons, Ventrell said, “The bottom line is [to] continue to support an investigation of all credible allegations of chemical weapons used to establish the facts of exactly what did or didn’t happen. ”

The reporter shot back, “You are saying that we are supporting these investigations, but we all know the Syrian regime has been refusing UN team. How you are going to able to investigate it if the regime is not allowing you to do that? Or how long you are going to use this rhetoric even though nothing is happening on the ground?”

An assailant, reportedly a mental patient of Iranian origin, stabbed a rabbi and his son as they entered a Paris synagogue, the French newspaper The Local reported.

The assailant was said to have escaped from a psychiatric hospital near Lyon two weeks ago, but police have not confirmed the report.

The 49-year-old rabbi, who was identified only as “Rabbi Baruch,” was going into the Beth El synagogue around 7:30 a.m. with his 17-year-old son, apparently for morning prayers, when the attacker lunged for the rabbi’s throat with a utility knife or a box cutter. The rabbi suffered light to moderate wounds as did his son, who was stabbed in the neck. Onlookers quickly overpower the Iranian, and police took him into custody.

French television reported that the assailant was wearing hospital clothes.

Flora Cohen presently lives in Nahariyya, Israel. She has three children and 16 grandchildren. However, she was born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco. Flora was born and spent her childhood living under French colonial rule. Under French rule, Flora claims that Morocco was a modern European state, full of cafés. However, in other respects, the Moroccans did not enjoy the same opportunities that the Europeans did. Living as part of the Jewish minority there was not easy, since being a Jew was a dirty word both in French and Arabic.

While the situation on the whole was tolerable when the French were still in control of Morocco, Flora does not believe the situation was good in retrospect. Flora recalled that not every one was permitted to attend school; that required having the right connections. In her family, all of the boys managed to go to school, yet out of all of the girls in her family, only she was able to go to school. One of her sisters tried to go to school, yet was continuously rejected and thus was forced instead to go to a vocational school where she learned how to sew, instead of learning how to read and write.

Kindergartens only existed for the very rich and women thus had to stay at home to raise the children, despite the fact that it was very difficult to finance having nine to ten children without the woman working. Eighty percent of the students in Morocco were forced to quit their studying following the 8th grade because their families needed them to work for financial reasons. Flora blames the French for this, since they were the ones in control of the country, not the Arabs.

While the French were still in control, Jews were able to coexist for the most part with Arabs peacefully. Flora knew Arabs in her area who were very good people and got along with the Jews well. But there still were incidents.

Flora’s grandfather and his brother were murdered by Arabs, thus leaving her grandmother a widow with two children. The family wasn’t even able to retrieve the bodies for a proper Jewish burial. In June 1948, bloody riots erupted in Oujda and Djerada, resulting in the death of 44 Moroccan Jews while many more were wounded. An unofficial boycott was initiated against the Moroccan Jewish community that same year. Eighteen thousand Moroccan Jews went to Israel during that period. But since the situation was still not as bad as in other Arab countries thanks to the French, most of the Jews stayed in Morocco a bit longer than in other Arab states.

Nevertheless, it was a common practice in Morocco for some Muslims to abduct young virgin Jewish girls, forcefully convert them to Islam, and to make them marry Muslims. Indeed, one of Flora’s relatives suffered this fate and thus did not come to Israel from Morocco with the rest of the family. In addition, Flora mentioned that one woman from Fez also was going to be forced to marry a Muslim and she decided to commit suicide rather than endure this fate. Many Moroccan Jews who participate in Jewish heritage trips to Morocco visit her grave. For this reason, Jewish girls were married off at a very early age, in order to avoid that horrible fate. This had the negative effect of inhibiting the development of Moroccan Jewish women.

Once Moroccans rose up against the French in their struggle for independence, the situation dramatically deteriorated for Moroccan Jews. Terrorism was widespread within the country and Jews were also the victims of such violence, not just the French, since the Jews supported the French. Flora claimed that the situation in Morocco was very much similar to the situation in Israel during the Second Intifada. There were explosions everywhere. Supermarkets were blowing up. People were scared to go out.

Flora said that her brother was almost murdered by Arabs, but that another Arab saved his life by lying and claiming that he was an Arab Muslim from Fez. Soon after this incident, the family decided that they had to leave Morocco and make Aliyah to Israel, even though they weren’t allowed to bring more things with them than what could fit into just one suitcase. This is when most of the Jews in Morocco made Aliyah to Israel.

It took time for her family to leave the country. They spent two months stranded in a special camp in Casablanca, before they were permitted to leave. In August 1956, Flora and her family were able to fly to France, where they were forced to stay for another month before they were permitted to move to Israel. When they arrived in Israel, they were placed on trucks and taken to Moshav Barak. In the moshav, there were no paved roads and no indoor bathrooms. Since they were assigned to create the moshav, they had to do much physical labor. It took a couple of years for her family to get established, yet in the end, her life significantly improved upon making Aliyah to Israel. 

In the moshav, her family had a house and was treated with dignity. The Ashkenazim and Mizrahim got along well together. She was very happy to come to Israel. In the end, she married an IDF soldier and raised her family near Haifa, before moving into a bigger house in Nahariyya. She reports that she is very happy with her decision to come to Israel.

Visit United With Israel.

A French Jewish group which last month sued Twitter for hosting anti-Semitic content has lodged a fresh complaint against the company and accused it of lying.

The latest complaint by the Union of Jewish Students of France, or UEJF, was filed on April 12 with the Paris Public Prosecutor’s office against Twitter President and Director Dick Costolo. UEJF and another group, J’ACCUSE, said in the complaint that Costolo was “responsible for racial defamation and publicly inciting to discrimination, hate or violence toward Jews.”

The complaint concerns tweets which appear on Twitter and which call for killing Jews and praising the Holocaust. UEJF last month sued Twitter for $50 million after Twitter failed to honor a ruling from January by a French judge who ordered the company to divulge within 14 days details of users who posted anti-Semitic statements. The ruling was on a lawsuit brought by UEJF against Twitter, an American California-based company.

France and other European countries have laws against hate speech that are considerably stricter than in the U.S., where the First Amendment to the Constitution is more lax on free speech.

In its ruling, the Paris court also ordered Twitter to set up a system for flagging and removing such messages, but UEJF said Twitter has not complied.

Additionally, UEJF accused Twitter of lying when it reportedly announced in October that it will remove similar tweets. The tweets are still available to any user who does not self-identify as being French, UEJF said.

Despite the tweets still being available, Le Nouvel Observateur reported in October that Twitter announced it had removed the tweets. It followed public outrage that erupted after the phrase #UnBonJuif (meaning “AGoodJew”) became the third most popular hashtag on French Twitter thanks to what Le Monde termed “a competition of anti-Semitic jokes” that evolved around it.

Twitter did not respond to JTA’s request for a comment on the latest Union of Jewish Students of France complaint.

We just received the G8 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting Statement, and here’s what they have to say about the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP).

Well, first of all, I love the name: MEPP. Sounds like the way Israelis pronounce “Map.” Is it a hint?

So, here’s the press release, by the foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia:

G8 Foreign Ministers confirmed their commitment to a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace in the Middle East… The Ministers welcomed President Obama’s visit to the region and his statement that peace between Israelis and Palestinians is necessary, just and possible.. The Ministers stressed that a long term solution to this conflict can be achieved only through direct negotiations, taking note of the 23 September 2011 statement of the Middle East Quartet. Ministers called on parties to refrain from unilateral actions and to create an atmosphere conducive to peace. They strongly reaffirmed that unilateral actions by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, we interrupt this press release to examine the information therein: they “called on parties to refrain from unilateral actions”? But one of the sides, the PLO, in a stunning unilateral act, breaking the very foundation of the Oslo Accords, applied to the UN general assembly last year, to receive an “upgrade” to statehood – and guess who supported the move? France, Italy, Japan and Russia. And two other G8 states, Britain and Germany, abstained. Only the U.S. and Canada out of this bunch voted against.

Do they really think our memories are that short? Is this a planet populated largely by goldfish?

OK, go ahead with the press release, but I must register my profound dumbfoundedness.

Ministers expressed grave concerns about the poor state of the Palestinian economy, and the impact this has on Palestinian state-building efforts. Ministers affirmed their support for the Palestinian Authority and encouraged Arab countries, as well as emerging economies, to extend the fullest assistance possible to revitalizing the Palestinian economy.

Do you know who revitalizes the Palestinian economy? I’ll tell you a story:

In late 2012, former Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz halted the transfer of tax revenues collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, to pay the Palestinians’ debt to the Israel Electric Company. But following US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel last month, Prime Minister Netanyahu decided to release the withheld funds as a goodwill gesture to the Palestinian Authority.

The debt is estimated at $125 million.

As my friend Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu reported in this space in late March, the IEC spokesperson stated that “if there is no alternative, the utility will have to record the debt in its books as lost debt and ask the Public Utilities Authority to recognize it as an expense to be covered by electricity tariffs.”

Rates will have to be increased approximately 3 percent for one year to cover the debt, but that is only for electricity and does not cover other PA debts.

Tzvi commented: “Three percent would not be so bad by itself, but it would come on top of a 6.5 percent hike that was approved” earlier.

So now you understand who is revitalizing the Palestinian economy? The very people whose children they firebomb and stone on the highways.

Back to the G8 press release (in case you haven’t lost your breakfast yet):

The Ministers welcomed the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire of 21 November 2012 which ended hostilities in Gaza and southern Israel, condemned rocket attacks in contravention of this and urged all sides to uphold their commitments.

What commitments? The Hamas has no commitments, other than the vow to destroy Israel. I’m starting to suspect that this is what the G8 is expecting them to uphold.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is urging European nations to follow the example of France’s declaring Hizbullah a terrorist organization.

“We welcome the French government’s decision, [which] follows the declaration by the Bulgarian government of Hizbullah’s responsibility for the attack in Burgas in July, 2012 and the conviction of a Hizbullah operative in Cyprus,” said Richard Stone, Chairman, and Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference.

“During the Conference of Presidents Mission to France, we had extensive discussions about this issue with President Hollande, Prime Minister Ayrault, and Foreign Minister Fabius, and found them responsive to the arguments we put forward,” they added.

Declaring Hizbullah a terrorist organization would impose restrictions on Hizbullah’s dealings and would “send an important message about the determination of Europe to deal with terrorism seriously.”