September 29, 2011
One day in 2007, Israeli Border Police officers swept into the in the village of Anata just north of Jerusalem and began firing rubber bullets at a group of children who had thrown rocks at them. One Israeli bullet landed in the skull of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl named Abir Aramin, tearing the back of her head off and killing her. Aramin was the daughter of a prominent Palestinian activist named Bassam Aramin, who helped lead the group Combatants for Peace, a group that fosters dialogue between former combatants on both sides of the conflict. The little girl's death sparked international outrage, generating headlines around the world.
The Israeli government went into damage control mode, denying any wrongdoing in connection with Aramin's death and insisting without evidence that she had been struck in the head with a rock.
Meanwhile, the pro-Israel media watchdog group CAMERA claimed that the uproar surrounding Aramin's death was a plot to inflame anti-Israel opinion and that all media reports suggesting that the Border Police killed her were categorically false. CAMERA declared that "stone-throwing Palestinians, as opposed to Israeli border police firing rubber bullets (as initially reported), may very well have been responsible for the death of Aramin." Staffers from CAMERA called Haaretz reporter Danny Rubinstein to demand that he "clarify" his reporting on the killing by noting that "the Israeli border police are not necessarily to blame."
Israeli state pathologists refused to perform an autopsy on Aramin, forcing her family to pay for their own examination, which proved she was shot by a rubber bullet. Though an officer testified that he may have shot Aramin, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the family's demand to put him and a colleague on trial. The whitewash continued until this week, when an Israeli court conceded the Border Police's guilt in the young girl's killing by ordering the state to pay the Aramin family $432,000 in damages.
Though the cover-up has unraveled, CAMERA has yet to correct its baseless claims. Since the group's staffers are so accustomed to complaining to the media about supposed falsehoods, they surely would not mind fielding demands to correct their own bogus assertions, especially those they made to whitewash the killing of a little girl. CAMERA can be reached here and at (617) 789-3672.
Update: CAMERA has posted an extremely defensive, intellectually contorted semi-clarification of their original piece on Aramin's killing.
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