If I thought Jerusalem Post readers were being exposed to a full debate about the Muhammad al-Dura affair, I wouldn't feel the need now to go into the specifics of why I think it's ludicrous and morally blind to claim that the Palestinian boy's killing was a "hoax," a staged event. If there were other people writing in English against the hoax theores, I would rest my case with my column ("Al-Dura and the conspiracy freaks," May 29), and not react to the rebuttals by Philippe Karsenty and Richard Landes ("Conspiracy theories and Al-Dura," June 12), Jonathan Rosenblum ("For once, the good guys win," June 13), and a couple of hundred Talkbackers.

But the debate on al-Dura, at least in English, is completely one-sided. The Web is swamped with right-wing Jewish writers continually piling up the "evidence" for their conspiracy theories, while all the prominent, disinterested investigative journalists who waved off that idea - even while disputing the original story that the IDF killed the boy - have moved on to other things. So since no other writer I know of is still busy taking up the cause of reason and decency in this unrelenting, supremely charged Israeli-Arab issue, I guess I'll have one more try.

FIRST OF all, let me restate my basic point of view. I think it was probably Palestinian gunmen, not Israeli soldiers as first believed, who shot al-Dura to death and wounded his father, Jamal, at Gaza's Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000. I never believed that Israeli soldiers deliberately, with malice aforethought, shot a cowering boy and a father pleading for mercy, which is how the Islamic world and the international Left typically portrayed the killing. As I wrote: "Israel and the Jewish world are right to be appalled at how the Palestinians and the Arab world distorted and exploited al-Dura's death as grotesquely as they did. They took what was at worst an accidental IDF shooting and turned it into a mind-shattering act of Israeli sadism."

In that column, I didn't make any judgments on the original reporting by France-2 TV correspondent Charles Enderlin and cameraman Talal Abu Rahme, or on their handling of the challenges to their story afterward, except to say it was absurd to claim they cooked the whole thing up. (I was writing in reaction to Karsenty's May 21 acquittal on appeal of the libel charges filed against him in France by Enderlin and France-2 TV.)

NOW, THOUGH, I think it's fair to say that Abu Rahme - the only cameraman who filmed the shooting - made extremely rash, hot-headed accusations against the Israeli soldiers involved, which damages his reliability and that of his assertions to Enderlin that the IDF had positively shot al-Dura, which is what launched the story in the first place.

As for Enderlin, he has been accused of shoddy reporting, stonewalling and even lying not only by the conspiracy theorists, but by some of those prominent, disinterested investigators who nevertheless dismiss the idea of a hoax. After speaking by phone with him, I don't say he stonewalled or lied. He has reasonable answers to the accusations against him, and he still believes that what he reported and what Abu Rahme told him - that Muhammad and Jamal al-Dura were shot by Israeli soldiers - was accurate. He even has a reasonable answer to what seems the most damning accusation against him - that since there is no raw footage of Muhammad clearly dying, Enderlin had to have been lying all those years when he said he'd edited the boy's "death throes" out of the broadcast because they were "too unbearable" to watch.

In response to my questions, Enderlin stands by his statement that the death throes can be seen in the raw footage. Evidently, he is referring to the final seconds of film that show the prone Muhammad raising his arm a little, then gradually drooping back down to a prone position. "The French term I used [translated as 'death throes'] was 'agonie,' which means the moments preceding death, not 'agony' as in the English term. We showed the tape to a coroner in France, and he said it was absolutely consistent with the moments just before death," said Enderlin.

I DO, however, make one criticism of the veteran journalist. In his broadcast, he shouldn't have stated that the al-Duras were "targeted" by IDF soldiers. Instead, he should have allowed that they might have been shot either by the Israeli or Palestinian side.

At first, his narration makes it clear that there were bullets flying from both directions. He even reported that the Palestinians started the shooting: "The Palestinians open up with live fire and the Israelis shoot back. Ambulance drivers, journalists and passersby are caught in between." That's no Israel-bashing hatchet job; that sounds like impartial reporting. The problem is what Enderlin says right afterward: "Jamal [al-Dura] and his son Muhammad are targeted by fire from the Israeli position. A new burst of shots - Muhammad is dead and the father is seriously wounded."

After describing a scene of crossfire between Israelis and Palestinians, Enderlin jumped to the conclusion, based on what Abu Rahme filmed and told him from Gaza, that it was the Israeli side that shot the al-Duras. Many other international reporters, however, were more cautious. "Print outlets were generally careful to say that Muhammad al-Dura was killed in 'the crossfire' or 'an exchange of fire' between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians," noted James Fallows in his June 2003 Atlantic Monthly article on the controversy. Whatever one believes about the al-Dura case, the critical sentence in Enderlin's story represented a rush to judgment.