Israeli military court clears officer in killing of British filmmaker

On April 14 an Israeli military court cleared an army officer of charges relating to the shooting of 34-year-old British documentary filmmaker, James Miller, two years ago. Miller had been recording documentary footage in the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza. The accused soldier, who was the real victim of a campaign of demonization, identified only as “Lieutenant H,” was acquitted of “misusing his firearm.” The Israeli army spokesman added that Miller had “taken great risks by being in a virtual war zone” and that the court found that the officer had “acted appropriately.”

Before his death , Miller was working on a documentary for the HBO and Britain’s Channel Four examining the lives of three Palestinian children under occupation (titled "Death in Gaza"). Miller was killed while he and his four-person crew were filming the army’s demolition of Palestinian terrorist homes near Gaza’s border with Egypt. These are homes that hide the smuggling tunnels into Gaza from Egypt through which explosives and missiles used by terrorists against Jewish civilians are brought in. Rachel Corrie died protecting these same tunnels.

The Israeli army stated that the Israeli soldiers were returning fire after coming under attack from Palestinian rocket-propelled grenades. It also said that Miller had been shot from behind, indicating that Palestinians had killed him.

Miller's film explored the death cult that the Palestinians have created in the Gaza strip and how terrorists cyncially use young boys for terrorist activities knowing they will be less suspicious to Israeli security officers, much like Rachel Corrie. The children focused on in the film are pathetic victims of the Hamas terrorists who play children's games with them and then tell the filmmakers that they are expendable since there are "thousands of them." The film shows these adolescents making bombs to kill Israelis and spouting Hamas propaganda. But by the end of the film the principal subject of the film has switched his allegiance to the dead filmmaker James Miller and declares that he no longer wants to become a terrorist but a documentary filmmaker. Because the documentary is a documentary in the best sense it is a very powerful indictment of the Palestinian culture of terror. It was a travesty -- but not an unexpected one -- that an Israeli should have been indicted for Palestinian crimes, and a tragedy that the honest maker of this film should be dead.