The best I can say about this movie is that some of these speakers seem potentially well-meaning, but it almost adds more to how sinister the big picture appears.
The illusion of objectivity is what makes this such dangerous propaganda. Equalizing the testimony of a student’s fear that most people could probably empathize with (even if still clearly misguided) with the lies of a genuinely unstable man who tweets about “”Palestinian” thugs” and “Judea and Samaria”, neutrally labelling someone as a “writer” despite him literally being the former spokesman for an imperialist US-backed puppet government in Iraq, featuring people like Michael Rapaport as legitimate voices, covering the threats some people received as being attacks on a random jewish person while leaving out the inflammatory statements many of these people have made, never even addressing claims of genocide, even directly dismissing more general claims of the oppression of Palestinians, moralizing constantly about the innocence of all children and acceptability of genuine criticism of the Israeli government while often still actively aligning themselves with those committing these atrocities every step of the way, using phrases like “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas” to describe protestors, and betraying its own purpose by barely mentioning (even dismissing) the true bastion of American antisemitism: the Christian right; all of these glaring issues reveal this as, not a documentary, but a propaganda piece, the peak of liberal Hasbara, even down to the Kahanist stances that are not openly embraced but quietly tolerated. One of the most interesting moments was one of these “experts” accusing Hamas of presenting the Palestinian cause in a way that would appeal to Americans, somehow entirely ignorant of this movie being one of many examples of pro-Israel institutions doing the same, somehow ignorant of the irony of it being commonly known that Israeli propaganda in English often talks of human rights while Israeli propaganda in Hebrew often talks of killing arabs. There’s no attempt at journalistic integrity—this movie probably wouldn’t exist if this wasn’t the case—just an overload of empty, emotionally evocative rhetoric.
It’s a real shame that in a time where antisemitism is legitimately exploding, this movie is what we’re given to address it, muddying the waters rather than being a potent attack on jew-hatred
The best I can say about this movie is that some of these speakers seem potentially well-meaning, but it almost adds more to how sinister the big picture appears.
The illusion of objectivity is what makes this such dangerous propaganda. Equalizing the testimony of a student’s fear that most people could probably empathize with (even if still clearly misguided) with the lies of a genuinely unstable man who tweets about “”Palestinian” thugs” and “Judea and Samaria”, neutrally labelling someone as a “writer” despite him literally being the former spokesman for an imperialist US-backed puppet government in Iraq, featuring people like Michael Rapaport as legitimate voices, covering the threats some people received as being attacks on a random jewish person while leaving out the inflammatory statements many of these people have made, never even addressing claims of genocide, even directly dismissing more general claims of the oppression of Palestinians, moralizing constantly about the innocence of all children and acceptability of genuine criticism of the Israeli government while often still actively aligning themselves with those committing these atrocities every step of the way, using phrases like “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas” to describe protestors, and betraying its own purpose by barely mentioning (even dismissing) the true bastion of American antisemitism: the Christian right; all of these glaring issues reveal this as, not a documentary, but a propaganda piece, the peak of liberal Hasbara, even down to the Kahanist stances that are not openly embraced but quietly tolerated. One of the most interesting moments was one of these “experts” accusing Hamas of presenting the Palestinian cause in a way that would appeal to Americans, somehow entirely ignorant of this movie being one of many examples of pro-Israel institutions doing the same, somehow ignorant of the irony of it being commonly known that Israeli propaganda in English often talks of human rights while Israeli propaganda in Hebrew often talks of killing arabs. There’s no attempt at journalistic integrity—this movie probably wouldn’t exist if this wasn’t the case—just an overload of empty, emotionally evocative rhetoric.
It’s a real shame that in a time where antisemitism is legitimately exploding, this movie is what we’re given to address it, muddying the waters rather than being a potent attack on jew-hatred
