French Blood Libel

The Corner has an interesting letter from a psychiatrist commenting on a piece detailing the killing of 12-year old Mohammed al-Durra by Palestinians that was blamed on Israel:

The image is as disturbing and iconic as any seen during the many decades of the Arab-Israeli conflict: Mohammed al-Durra, just 12 years old, caught in a cross-fire in Gaza, trembling against a wall, his father desperately attempting to shield him. And then, heartbreakingly, Mohammed al-Durra, shot and killed by Israeli gunfire.
His death, in September 2000, inspired poems -- and suicide bombings. According to the 2001 Mitchell report it was one of the events that set off the intifada.
A poster of Mohammed al-Durra is in the background of the video of the butchering of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Osama bin Laden used the boy's image in recruitment tapes and began a list of indictments against America by saying that President Bush “must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Durra and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and Iraq.”
But there is something most people don't know about this story: It didn't happen the way I described it above. It may not have happened at all.

...What's still not clear is whether Mohammed al-Durra's story was a tragic misunderstanding – or a spectacular fraud, intended to stoke the fires of anti-Israeli hatred and establish, in the public mind, a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers.
The original footage of the incident was produced and distributed to news organizations world-wide – at no cost -- by the government-owned France 2 television network. Only one cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian, filmed the incident. None of the other cameramen and journalists present that day witnessed it. The France 2 reporter on the story, Charles Enderlin, was not at the scene. The information for his voiceover came exclusively from Rahma.
At this point, at least, Enderlin does not claim to be sure of his facts. Instead, he says that his assertion that Israelis killed al-Durra “corresponded to the reality of the situation, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank.”
Put otherwise, whether Israeli soldiers murdered al-Durra is irrelevant because Enderlin believes that other Israelis have killed other Palestinians. An astonished Leconte told CBN: “I find this, from a journalistic point of view, hallucinating. That a journalist like him can be driven to say such things is very revealing of the state of the press in France today.”

Emphasis mine. The reporter wanted it to be true so it must've been true. Just as the Rachel Corrie incident was portrayed as the intentional killing of an intifada supporting social worker, so has the press deliberately manufactured this story to suit their beliefs.