The United Nations should have thought of this one. They wouldn’t have to work so hard at spinning the oil-for-food scam investigation. There wouldn’t be any investigation at all. You just ask the public prosecutor to sue anyone who dares to question the integrity of U.N. officials. And it’s shut their mouth and business as usual.

That’s what is happening in France as the Mohamed Al Dura scandal finally hits the mainstream press. French public television channel France 2 is suing, or threatening to sue, anyone who questions the integrity of its journalists. And questioning the truth of one of the most unsubstantiated news reports ever to hit the screen is considered questioning the integrity of the journalists who produced it. Even if the whole thing was a fake. It was reported, so it has to be true. Something like the Koran. You don’t question it.

It all started on September 30, 2000, at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. The Al Aqsa Intifada was a gleam in its Abu’s eye, President Clinton was trying to piece together the shreds of the Camp David negotiations, and a Palestinian stringer working for French public TV channel France 2 just happened to capture the scoop of the Middle East conflict: the death in real time of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, targeted by heartless Israeli soldiers who shot at him for 45 minutes until they managed to mangle his father and kill the boy. Mohamed Al Dura became the poster boy shahid, spurring an unprecedented wave of atrocities against Israeli civilians while an unhealthy swath of public opinion sat on the sidelines and applauded the brave Palestinian desperados.

The Al Dura legend is a story that deserves to be covered in full.

But it is urgent to put a few salient details on the table today, because the current outbreak of articles, interviews, chats, and forums may soon wash up on American shores – most likely in a rehash of the mishmash of misreporting poured out in the past two weeks. Agence France-Presse, Le Monde, le Nouvel Observateur, Telerama and all the little ducklings that follow in their tracks have been clucking and cackling something terrible. And all of this noise is being made to protect France 2 from the wily foxes who could eat it up alive. Vindictive anger is aimed straight at Metula News Agency (www.menapress.com), a prickly French-language Israeli news service operating up in the Metula hills overlooking Lebanon, with an excellent track record and particular tenacity in denouncing the Al Dura blood libel. But Metula is not alone in asking for the truth.

While many reasonable people in the Western world have forgotten the Al Dura image, it is indelibly engraved in the Arab mind – template of accusations of Israeli cruelty; an icon of Palestinian innocence. Osama bin Laden rallied jihadis to his cause in a pre-9/11 recruitment tape that includes a long passage on Mohamed Al Dura. Many Arab language TV stations open the day’s programs with an Al Dura cameo in a corner of the screen.

Daniel Pearl’s murderers pasted an Al Dura sticker on the video of the journalist’s beheading.

Now, France 2 news director Arlette Chabot is giving interviews all up and down the town, pouring into the ears and microphones of naive journalists who haven’t done their homework a flood of explanations that would be laughable if they were not so utterly dismaying.

The sheer number of factual errors published in the French press on this subject is mind boggling. And yet it’s not the worst of the story. The real problem is that the idea that one should judge the case on the facts is banished as if it were too evil to even be considered in private.

Did it happen? Did Israeli soldiers fire for 45 minutes at a man and a boy crouched behind a concrete culvert? Where was the Israeli position? Were the man and boy in the range of Israeli gunfire? Was the boy shot dead and the man seriously wounded? What was happening that day at Netzarim junction? Are the witnesses reliable? The Palestinian stringer, Talal Abu Rahmeh, declared under oath that the Israelis shot the man and boy intentionally, in cold blood. France 2 Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin, who was in Ramallah when the incident took place, clearly stated in the voiceover commentary that the man and boy were targeted by gunfire coming from the Israeli position. The father, Jamal Al Dura, says he was shot in the hand, the arm, and the leg (by high-power military rifles), and his elbow and pelvis were crushed. He claims that a bullet ripped through his son’s stomach and came out through his back.

Mr. Abu Rahmeh says he filmed the scene for 27 minutes. He says the boy bled for 15 or 20 minutes. Well, there’s no blood on the victims, no blood on the ground. And the 27 minutes of footage turn out to be under three minutes.

These and a hundred other precise allegations are duly recorded and analyzed. I have studied massive documentation, screened dozens of hours of visuals. The conclusions of every single honest investigation of this case are the same: there is no convincing evidence that the incident took place. The eyewitness testimony is incoherent and unsubstantiated by verifiable evidence, the filmed “news report” does not show anything that could corroborate the drastic allegations.

Which leaves us with a news report of an incident that never happened.

Or, if it did happen, it happened out of range of the journalist’s camera, in the absence of eyewitnesses, under conditions that no one has ever hinted at or even elucidated. In short, something was reported without a shred of proof. And when the veracity of the report is questioned, the questioners are slandered and the incoherent unsubstantiated evidence is reshuffled and dealt out again as proof of the proof. And the entire French press corps, Jewish press included, seems to be buying it.

What do you do when the facts of the matter are judged on the basis of total ignorance of the facts?

This is done to the point that they illustrate their articles with this penultimate frame of the news report, where we see the father just a few seconds before his son is felled with a single bullet, marking the end of the incident. Look at the man’s arm. According to his testimony, he has been shot in the hand, the forearm, the shoulder, and the leg. His elbow and pelvis are shattered.

Much has been said about the wily power of images to shape ideas. The Al Dura case will one day be recognized as a demonstration of the power of words to convince our eyes that a pale nothing is the image of a stunning reality. Death captured live.

Maybe France 2 will bring it off on its home turf where the press is above suspicion. Can they bring it off worldwide? The unforgettable Al Dura death scene was given free of charge to all the press that would have it. Bob Simon did a memorable “60 Minutes” in September 2000, based on the Al Dura martyrdom and dozens of lesser Netzarim junction fabrications.

Someone might get the idea to check the facts in a safe place where you don’t get sued for questioning the accuracy of a news report.

Unless, of course, France 2 plans to take the issue to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

Ms. Poller is a novelist living in Paris.