Mick Hartley

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to be impressed by Yassir Arafat’s reaction to 9/11 – in particular the pictures of him giving blood. Well, according to this post at Guide to the Perplexed (via), it was all faked:

France 2 TV journalist Charles Enderlin told a small audience at Harvard’s Center for European Studies today that Yasser Arafat had faked his blood donation to the victims of the September 11th attacks. Enderlin said the event had been staged for the media to counteract the embarrassing television images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

The blood donation story made headlines around the world. It was reported by esteemed news agencies like the BBC, and photographs of Arafat lying with an outstretched arm ran on many front pages. But the whole scene was staged, Enderlin said. Arafat didn’t like needles, and so the doctor put a needle near his arm and agitated a bag of blood. The reporters took the requisite photographs.

Charles Enderlin is the journalist at the centre of the Al-Dura affair, currently the subject of an appeal court hearing in Paris.

It’s amazing that Enderlin can recognize that news events were being faked at the highest levels of the Palestinian leadership, and yet refuse to allow that the al-Dura killing may have been similarly staged. The obvious explanation is that Enderlin’s name is on one and not the other. The Arafat blood donation story may be rather harmless, but the al-Dura story continues to create hatred and death.