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| FILMMAKERS AND WRITERS SEEK TO CENSOR ISRAELI FILM Alan M. Dershowitz Jerusalem Post BlogCentral, September 6, 2009 A group of hard-Left filmmakers and writers from around the world have been using their celebrity to try to coerce the Toronto International Film Festival into banning Israeli films. Their petition, which is filled with misstatement of facts and rewriting of history, describes Israel as "an apartheid regime." It focuses not so much on Israel's occupation of the West Bank since 1967, but rather on Israel's very existence since 1948. It characterizes Tel Aviv, a city built by the sweat of Jews largely on barren coastal land, as illegitimate. It never mentions the fact that the Palestinians were offered and rejected statehood in 1938, 1948, 1967 and 2000-2001. It fails to mention that when Israel ended its occupation of Gaza, the result was rockets being fired at Israeli schoolchildren and other civilians.... As Rhoda Kadalie and Julia Bertelsmann, two black South African women whose families were active in the anti-apartheid movement, wrote recently: Israel is not an apartheid state ... Arab citizens of Israel can vote and serve in the Knesset; black South Africans could not vote until 1994. There are no laws in Israel that discriminate against Arab citizens or separate them from Jews. ...South Africa had a job reservation policy for white people; Israel has adopted pro-Arab affirmative action measures in some sectors. Israeli schools, universities and hospitals make no distinction between Jews and Arabs. An Arab citizen who brings a case before an Israeli court will have that case decided on the basis of merit, not ethnicity. This was never the case for blacks under apartheid."... The ill-informed signers of the censorship petition ignore these realities, and in wrongly exploiting the apartheid analogy, they have devalued the anti-apartheid struggle itself.... JANE FONDA IS MISGUIDED Jon Voight National Post, September 10, 2009 Letter Re: Protesters Object To Spotlight On Tel Aviv, Sept. 4. Jane Fonda is backing the wrong people again. She is getting into the mix of a very serious situation that many Israelis have given their lives for. Her whole idea of the "poor Palestinians" and "look how many Palestinians the Israelis killed in Gaza" is misguided. Does she not remember what actually took place in Gaza? Did Israel not give the Palestinians of Gaza the hope that there could be peace? In response, did Hamas not launch rockets from Gaza into Israel, killing many innocent people? This seems to me to be another one of Jane Fonda's misplaced "patriotic" duties toward the wrong people. I was in Israel. I saw the rockets coming down on Sderot, and visited many families who lost their loved ones. How long can a democratic country keep from defending itself? I accuse Jane Fonda, and all those who signed the letter with her, of aiding and abetting those who seek the destruction of Israel. After six million people were brutally slaughtered in the Holocaust, the Jewish people took a barren desert and cultivated it into a magnificent oasis. Time and again, they offered the Palestinians land. The Palestinians always refused. They don't want a piece of the pie; they want the whole pie. They will not be happy until they see Israel in the sea. People like Jane Fonda and all the people whose names are on that letter are assisting the Palestinian propagandists against the State of Israel. Tell me, my Canadian and American friends, would you give up land you lived in for 3,500 years, just because someone decided they want it? ENOUGH IS ENOUGH Robert Lantos Globe and Mail, September 12, 2009 I am not a professional agitator and I don't write political missives for a living. I am a filmmaker, however, and I have a very long history with the Toronto International Film Festival, which I have had the honour of opening 10 times. I write this from the set of Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version, whose hero, Barney Panofsky, would undoubtedly share my view: Enough is enough! There is a difference between most people and professional propagandists. The latter serve their cause by repeating a false statement of "fact" so often and with such emphasis that decent people think there must at least be a modicum of truth to it. This age-old but effective propaganda technique has, as of late, given rise to such blatant falsehoods as "Israeli apartheid," or, to quote Naomi Klein's open letter to TIFF last week, "The city of Jaffa [was] Palestine's main cultural hub until 1948." This seemingly factual statement fails to mention the detail that...[t]he city of Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 in what was then a Turkish colony, later a British colony and once upon a time a Roman colony, consisting of lands from which the indigenous Jewish population had been forcefully -- though never fully -- evicted. The headline of last week's open letter, protesting the focus on films by Tel Aviv filmmakers, was "No celebration of occupation," which incorrectly implies that Tel Aviv is occupied territory. We are not talking about the West Bank or the Golan Heights here, but the biggest population centre in the heart of Israel, where the first neighbourhood was built in 1887. If that is disputed territory, then Ms. Klein and her armchair storm troopers are clamouring for nothing short of the annihilation of the Jewish state. They are effectively Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's local fifth column. The Toronto festival is showcasing movies made by filmmakers from Tel Aviv. This foul and coercive attempt to disrupt the display of their talent simply because they are citizens of the Jewish state is not just an Israeli issue. It is a Canadian issue. It is an assault on our most cherished values, on the very reason why my family chose to immigrate to this country. In Canada, we hold our freedom of expression sacred. Filmmaking is free of political censorship and festivals are free to program whatever they wish. TIFF's independence was hard won. In 1978, when my first movie, In Praise of Older Women, was shown at the opening-night gala, the Ontario Censor Board attempted to prevent it from being shown, demanding cuts. The fundamental logic of censorship is premised on the principle of in loco parentis: that the censor knows better what's good for people than they know themselves. We defied the censors and...[i]n the 30 years since, the festival has operated without interference or sanctions. Until now.... Ironically, the boycott Tel Aviv affair began over filmmaker John Greyson's decision to withdraw his short documentary Covered to protest the presence of Israeli films. His film documents the disruption, by local homophobes, of the Sarajevo Queer Film Festival. As Mr. Greyson, Ms. Klein and their mob know perfectly well, Israel is the only country in its region where a film like his could be made and shown without government interference, and where no one is persecuted or discriminated against because of his or her sexual persuasion.... Let us be clear. If Ms. Klein was truly interested in justice, she would be alarmed by the screening of films from countries such as China and Iran, where civil liberties are in short supply.... But their crusade is against a tried and thoroughly tested target: Jews. Today, it is Jewish filmmakers from Tel Aviv who are in their sights, but their ultimate objective is far more ambitious and devastating. So I repeat -- enough is enough. Their brand of censorship is at odds with our society's fundamental values: freedom of expression and freedom of individual choice. Incitement like theirs has no place at TIFF. (Robert Lantos is an award-winning film producer.) THE STRANGE, ENDURING RAGE OF NAOMI KLEIN Hillel Neuer National Post, September 15, 2009 Supporters of liberal democratic values may have a hard time understanding why anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein has recruited Jane Fonda and other stars to boycott the Toronto International Film Festival for the crime of showing films from Tel Aviv, a symbol of tolerance in a region of tyranny. Klein has never called for a boycott of films or any other products from the dozens of Arab and Islamic countries that systematically subjugate their women, torture dissidents and persecute religious and ethnic minorities. She was not moved to protest when the city of Toronto twinned with Chongqing, nor when it established a "friendship relationship" with Ho Chi Minh City, despite the widespread human rights abuses in both China and Vietnam. Nor has she ever called for the boycotting of films from the many Western democracies, including Canada, whose soldiers are fighting Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan or Iraq. Klein's singling out of Israel -- particularly its most liberal city and cultural sector -- has no rational basis. This should come as no surprise. For while Klein's statements and writings on Israel pose as sober analysis, the truth is that she has always acted on this subject out of intense emotion, hysteria and anger, rather than rational thought, facts or logic. "This is, I think, the most emotional event I have ever done," she recently told an audience of 500 Palestinians in Ramallah. "I have never had this feeling before, this feeling of overwhelming emotion." This was how she opened her speech that accused Israel of committing "apartheid," and Jews, except the tolerant few like her, of using the Holocaust as "a kind of get-one-genocide-free card."... At first glance, Klein's targeting of Israel seems a newfound passion. The subject was absent from her first two books, as well as from her columns in the 1990s. In 2007, however, Klein devoted a chapter of The Shock Doctrine to her theory that Israel seeks war for financial gain. In January, when Israel fought to end Hamas rocket attacks, Klein called for a global boycott -- against Israel, not Hamas. And now, in a cover story for this month's issue of Harper's Magazine, Klein offers a revisionist whitewash of the anti-Semitic Durban conference of 2001, laments the collapse of this year's Durban II conference and portrays Jewish organizations as lying profiteers who sabotaged this UN cure-all for racism. As she did in Ramallah, Klein accuses my organization, UN Watch, of "misinformation," yet fails to name a single example.... But Klein has certainly succeeded in becoming today's leading opponent of Israel in the Western world. While this is a new role for someone famous as an anti-capitalist crusader, the truth is that Klein has nurtured a strange rage against her own people, faith and national cause, from a remarkably young age. At 12, as Klein has proudly recounted, she wrote her Bat Mitzvah speech "about Jews being racist."... As a college student in 1990, Klein wrote an editorial...for the University of Toronto's student newspaper The Varsity, entitled "Victim to victimizer"... In her various accounts, Klein describes a simple op-ed that urged Israel to "end the occupation not only for the Palestinians, but also for its own people, especially its women." To organize a response, she claims, no less than 500 Jewish students gathered for a "lynch mob" meeting. However, she showed up herself, unrecognized, and stood up and told them off.... The facts, though, tell a very different story. Klein's article was anything but normal. Its thesis sentence and blaring headline: "What Israel has become: Racism and misogyny at the core of its being." "Israeli men," she said, "reach maturity by brutalizing and degrading Palestinians." Then there was "Israeli men's misogyny toward Israeli women." Most disturbing, said Klein, "is something known to Israeli women as 'Holocaust pornography,' where images of emaciated women near ovens, shower heads, cattle cars and the like are used to sell clothing and other products." Jewish women, she informed her readers, "are sexualized as Holocaust victims for Israeli men to masturbate over...." If such aberrant ads or magazines ever existed, they were well hidden. But Klein was looking to demonize -- not only Israel, but Judaism, and Jews. "A Jewish education is an education of fear," continued Klein. "Jews made the shift from victims to victimizers with terrifying ease." "I wish to be saved from Israel," she concluded. "I am a Jew against Israel -- just as Israel repeatedly proves itself to be against me." Interestingly, all this Goebbelslike venom -- Israel as wicked, racist and depraved in its essence -- as well as the article's hysteria, rage and paranoia, are erased from Klein's later accounts.... Two decades ago -- in the "Victim to victimizer" article that she continues to revere, even as she has been hiding its true contents -- Klein asked Toronto to hate Israel on the grounds that "racism and misogyny" were "at the core of its being," a society sick on "Holocaust pornography." In her recent op-ed calling on Toronto to boycott Israeli films, Klein attacks the Jewish state for objecting to the Goldstone inquiry on Gaza created by the UN Human Rights Council -- in which the Arab-controlled body declared Israel guilty in advance. The path to Middle East peace requires mutual dialogue, recognition and compromise -- not irrational boycotts motivated by selective morality, anger and rage. (Hillel Neuer is executive director of UN Watch in Geneva.) ACADEMIC & CULTURAL BOYCOTTS: SELECTIVE, SORDID AND PLAIN SILLY Teddy Leifler Jerusalem Post, September 9, 2009 John Greyson's decision to pull his film, Covered out of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is a shameful example of the appalling double-standards being used to single-out and vilify Israel and Israeli film-makers. Firstly, the Toronto International Film Festival should be praised for standing by its decision to go ahead as planned with a program of films dedicated to Tel Aviv. TIFF was thrown into an uncomfortable situation and in the face of aggression and an awkward kind of publicity, the festival's directors have shown strength and great integrity. John Greyson argues that his decision to withdraw his film is because of Israeli government and Israeli businesses' financial contributions to this year's festival. On this basis shouldn't he also boycott going to see Israeli films themselves? Waltz with Bashir, for instance, could not have been made without the state funding provided by the Israeli Film Council. Screened at TIFF this time last year, that film was a challenging, highly critical portrayal of the IDF's role in Lebanon. Israel is the only country in the region where the government provides state funding for film, and other artistic output that sometimes rigorously criticizes the state. Yet that point seems lost on Greyson.... Sadly, the only likely outcome of this course of action is the alienation and discomfort of Israeli filmmakers on the sole basis of their nationality. That's a horrible side-effect and couldn't be more counterproductive. Those who work in the arts in Israel, and indeed in other troubled regions, are precisely the people who need to be made to feel included, not excluded.... John Greyson is aware that there are many fearlessly independent films produced by Israeli filmmakers, often with the support of Israeli state money, and that Israel's finest directors are able to say exactly what they wish with no fear of repercussions. A mature democracy breeds a liberal artistic output. Why would anybody want to push those artists away? Sadly, I fear, John Greyson's decision is more about John Greyson than anything else. Dressed up as a political and ethical statement, it is in fact merely a publicity stunt. Presumably for maximum effect (he is kindly still exhibiting his film online), he waited until just before TIFF commenced to withdraw his film, although for months it seems he has known (and objected to) the sponsorship from Israeli sources. It isn't too late for him to change his mind, take his work to TIFF and engage with the issues. I won't hold my breath though. Some seem all too committed to the intellectually negligent, blanket demonization of one particular country, even if that means singling out for condemnation its most liberal, creative and progressive elements. (Teddy Leifler is the managing director of RISE films, a boutique Television, Film and New Media production company and the co-chairman of RISE foundation, a charity set up to run education programs for underprivileged children in South Africa.) |
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