evolution

LGF has a link to a video that appears to show French troops in Ivory Coast shooting at a crowd of unarmed Ivorian civilians. Two words of warning: First, it’s a long video — it’s 10 minutes long and about 100MB in size. Second, it contains graphic images of wounded and dead Ivorians.

The beginning of the video shows a large gathering of Ivorians who appear to be doing nothing in particular. None of them appears to be armed, and none appear to be involved in violent activity. About 30 seconds in, you begin to hear the reports from French firearms, and the person with the camera turns and runs like hell, along with most of the crowd. The rest of the video is shots of the Frenchmen packing up and driving away together with efforts to help the wounded and dying. Some of the Ivorians who were clearly dead appeared to be women, and at least two were clearly younger than 16.

This was tough to watch — but it needs to be out there. One of America’s chief enemies has been using a “holier-than-thou” diplomatic strategy in order to undermine American security; this puts the lie to their claims.

UPDATE: I’ve just learned that the video described above is the second half of a longer video. I’m busy downloading the first half now.

UPDATE [16:45] I’ve just seen the first half of the video, and I’ve seen nothing that indicates that anyone in the crowd of Ivorians attacked any French troops. In fact, I saw what I made out to be a Frenchman taunting the crowd, and then firing his rifle into it.

And you won’t see or hear a peep out of the networks or the newspapers. The vaunted Instapundit, though, is on the case, so at least a few thousand people will know about it.

UPDATE [11/22 19:08]: The blog Free Will (a new natural selection) has more analysis.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 21st, 2004 at 11:53 and is filed under war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.