In an interview full of contradictions, Turkish television producer Saljuk Trubanulad, whose anti-Israeli TV drama led Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to summon the Turkish envoy for a meeting, told Israel Radio on Thursday that the soldiers depicted in the drama "are not Israeli soldiers" and stressed that all of the program's staff love the Israeli people.
"The show is not about IDF soldiers, we also wrote this in a warning that appeared on the screen at the beginning of the program," the Turkish producer said.
In the first episode of a series on a Palestinian family living in the West Bank, which appeared Tuesday evening on prime time on the government-controlled station TRT1, IDF soldiers are seen killing a baby and a young girl, and lining up Palestinians to be shot before a firing squad.
In Thursday's interview, Trubanulad stressed that "all of our staff loves the Israeli people, that is, this show isn't about Israeli soldiers but rather about a specific group that is responsible for all the murders. We love the Israeli people."
"These soldiers are not Israelis, we know the Israeli public does not justify the operation. It's just a small group of soldiers who murdered Muhammad al-Dura, the Palestinian boy," he explained, referring to a 12-year-old Palestinian boy whose footage cowering next to his father during a firefight and then slumping dead became the symbol of Palestinian suffering in the early days of the Second Intifada, despite it being entirely unclear that the cause of the child's death was indeed IDF bullets.
"These are not Israeli soldiers, their uniforms aren't Israeli uniforms. It's a small group that killed all the people and all the children. We say this group is not of Israeli soldiers, neither in Gaza nor in Beirut," he told the radio station.He went on to stress that the production team based the screenplay on historical facts. "We sent our script to Israel, we checked it," he said.
