As reported here on Pajamas Media, Arid Uka, who shot and killed two American servicemen at Frankfurt Airport on Wednesday, has told German police that he was motivated in part by a video that he saw showing American soldiers “plundering a house and raping a girl” in Afghanistan. According to Germany’s deputy Attorney General Rainer Griesbaum, Uka is supposed to have viewed the video on YouTube.
An Islamist propaganda video roughly matching Uka’s description is in fact to be found on YouTube. On November 20, 2010, a German-language YouTube user going by the name “24jasmina” uploaded the video under the title “American Soldiers Rape our Sisters! Awake Oh Ummah.” (Update: Shortly after the publication of this article, the video was removed by YouTube. It can currently be viewed on The Daily Caller here.) See the below screen-capture:
The video begins with roughly 80 seconds of footage apparently showing American soldiers marauding in a family’s home and raping a teenage girl. The footage appears to be filmed with a night vision camera and comes complete with vulgar and incriminating dialogue. At one point during the rape scene, gunfire can be heard off-camera and then a soldier on camera says: “I f****** killed them all.”
The same footage can also be seen on YouTube under the English-language title “Footage of Abeer Qassim.” The description specifies “rape footage of Abeer Qassim.” Unlike the German-language YouTube page, however, the English-language page indicates that the footage comes from the Brian De Palma film Redacted. In addition to the rape scene, the propaganda video on the German-language YouTube page contains three further scenes from Redacted.
De Palma’s 2007 release was largely made to look “as if” it was filmed by an amateur cameraman documenting real events. A disclaimer that is shown at the beginning of Redacted states that the film is “entirely fiction,” but “inspired by an incident widely reported to have occurred.”
The incident in question occurred in Iraq, not Afghanistan. The allusion is to the 2006 rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim al-Janabi near Mahmudiyah, Iraq, and the murder of three other members of her family. Five American servicemen have been charged and convicted for their roles in the crime by American civilian or military courts. The principal suspect, Steven Dale Green, is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
A second related video was uploaded to a German-language YouTube account on February 21, just nine days before the Frankfurt Airport shooting. This clip was posted by a YouTube user going by the name “IslamDwR,” which apparently stands for “Islam, the true religion” [Die wahre Religion]. The title given to the clip is “American soldiers: a girl raped and shot dead.”
The clip consists of a German television report on the Mahmudiyah incident. The report was first broadcast in August 2006 on Germany’s ARD public television network. Ironically, it appeared on the television news magazine Panorama: the very program that first reported Arid Uka’s claim that he had been motivated to kill by a video he had seen of American soldiers raping a girl.
Like De Palma’s Redacted, the Panorama report also contains “re-enacted” segments. In comparison to Redacted, the re-enacted segments in the Panorama report are merely suggestive. When the rape is mentioned, for example, a girl’s hand is shown being pinned to the floor. Moments later we see close-up images of the barbecue that the soldiers, according to the narration, are supposed to have prepared for themselves shortly after the crime.
The report, moreover, presents the crime of Steven Green and his fellow soldiers as somehow emblematic and explicitly suggests that it was not merely an isolated incident, but rather a “foreseeable” outcome of U.S. government policy. This view is reinforced by the testimony of an “expert” who, among other things, explains that “all Iraqis” hate the American soldiers and that “fifteen percent” of the latter have criminal records. The “expert” in question is none other than Marc Garlasco, then of Human Rights Watch. In 2009, Garlasco would be famously suspended by Human Rights Watch, after it was revealed that his “hobby” was collecting Nazi memorabilia.
The Panorama report has been posted several times on YouTube, each time provoking a torrent of anti-American bile from German-speaking commentators. For example, the two “highest rated” comments on a May 23, 2008, posting of the report run as follows:
First of all, I’m German. But what I would do with this Green and the other sons-of-bitches is hang them, shoot them, and skin them. F*** war. F*** Amerika. becouse amerika is war [sic. – in English in the original].
And:
Now I hate the Americans [die Amis] even more.
The author of the last comment, incidentally, goes by the name “Stop the Jews” [stopptdiejuden].
It should be noted that German public television itself makes a regular practice of “illustrating” supposed news reports with footage taken from pseudo-documentaries like De Palma’s Redacted or Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo. The technique is especially favored by the “second” German public television network, ZDF. (For one example, see here.)
A third video posted on a German-language YouTube page on February 26 is titled “American soldiers rape Iraqi women.” It shows a veiled Arabic-speaking woman recounting the details of her alleged rape by American servicemen. German subtitles have been added. The source of the clip is Al-Jazeera.
(Editor’s note: Also read about the NBA owner who financed Redacted, at the Tatler.)
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