When France2 first broadcast the footage of Mohammad’s death in September 2000, the worldwide reaction was immediate, and seismic. Among Palestinians he became the icon of the Intifada, justifying apocalyptic hate-speech and suicide terror. Osama bin Laden’s used him to call for global Jihad. Daniel Pearl’s Pakistani executioners had Mohammad’s image behind him in their execution video. The story was headline material in the West: Mohammad was one of Time magazine’s “People of the Year” in 2000. In Europe “le petit Mohammad” provided a “get-out-of-Holocaust-guilt-free” card. “The death of Mohammad cancels out, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air from the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto,” intoned a respected French anchorwoman. His image justified silence on the explosion of the “new anti-Semitism” among Europe’s Muslim minority: “One shouldn’t necessarily be surprised,” commented Hubert Védrine, the Foreign Minister, “that young French people from immigrant families feel compassion for the Palestinians and get agitated when they see what is happening.” http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=19b6e943-7866-4d39-a357-8ff98d8cdae9