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Haaretz- High Court Justice Eliahu
Mazza ruled Monday that Mohammed Bakri's controversial movie "Jenin
Jenin" may be shown in theaters and on television. 
He turned down appeals requesting further deliberations on the
issue, effectively canceling the temporary injunction issued 10
months ago that banned the movie from being screened and reinstating
the court's earlier ruling permitting the screening.
The ruling comes in the wake of Mazza's failed
efforts to mediate between the film's creators and representatives
of soldiers who fought in the West Bank refugee camp and the
families of those felled in the 2002 battles, which took place as
part of the army's Operation Defensive Shield.
Mazza attempted to bring the sides to agreement on
omitting certain scenes from the film, but to no avail.
"I pinpointed five segments that I would describe
as especially troublesome," Mazza wrote in his decision.
"One of them talks about IDF soldiers
intentionally killing children, elderly women, the disabled, the
mentally ill, and detainees," he wrote.
"Another scene claims tanks intentionally trampled
live people and corpses; the third scene claims that soldiers
slammed the heads of children against the wall or shot at them; the
fourth scene talks of soldiers who tied up a Palestinian terrorist
and later shot him in the head twice; and in the fifth segment,
soldiers are said to have executed prisoners and run over the body
of one of them with a tank."
Bakri said on Monday that with all due respect to
the court's remarks about the many inaccuracies in the film, it has
no monopoly over the truth.
Mazza noted that despite the decision to turn down
the appeals and allow the film's screening in its entirety, "it
appears that the director also comes out sullied as a result of the
failure to come to an agreed-upon understanding. Showing the
unedited film, which has already been proven to be a veil of a
documentary combined with libelous lies, will undoubtedly not earn
him respect."
"If Bakri had agreed to a
compromise, including omitting some scenes and adding subtitles to
others, he would have removed the blemish with respect to the film
being a propagandistic lie."
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