They’re blacklisting people in Hollywood again. Only this time it’s not Commies who are being cold-shouldered – it’s people whose only crime is to have been born in the world’s only Jewish state.
A gaggle of turbo-smug luvvies have announced that they will henceforth boycott Israeli cinema. We will not sully our pure and perfect souls by “appearing” or “working” with any Israeli film institution that is “implicated” in Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, they say.
For the good of humankind – or at least for their own moral standing on the dinner-party circuit – they promise to forswear all Israeli film festivals. Freeloading thesps turning down the chance of a free gown and bucketloads of champagne? Things must be bad.
Their preening missive is titled “Film Workers Pledge to End Complicity”. It’s been signed by national treasure turned gurning irritant, Olivia Colman, and all the usual pontificating suspects: Tilda Swinton, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon.
Ken Loach is in there, natch – that withering propagandist of community-hall Leftism never turns down an opportunity to remind the world how much he hates Israel.
Ab Fab’s Julia Sawalha is in there too. She says Israel’s “annihilation of the Palestinians in Gaza” has “splintered the depths of me”. As for the “unrelenting silence” on Gaza’s suffering – it’s “unconscionable”.
What is she going on about? People never shut up about Gaza. The only thing that’s “unrelenting” these days is the Israelophobic yapping of the keffiyeh-adorned worthies of the cultural establishment. A period of silence would be quite welcome.
Or they could try talking about something else for a change. Like the cruel famine gripping Sudan. Or the fact that hundreds of thousands of kids in northeast Nigeria currently face starvation as a consequence of the savage warmaking of the crazed Islamists of Boko Haram. That’s my question for these puffed-up denouncers of Israel: why are you so obsessed with this one tiny country?
Where is your pained letter promising to boycott Iranian film festivals following the regime’s slaughter of hundreds of its own citizens for the “crime” of thinking women are human beings too? Where’s your showy snubbing of China’s film industry following the CCP’s ruthless crushing of the Uyghurs?
These poundshop moralists are more than happy to earn big bucks in the US and the UK despite the fact that these two nations – great as they are – have launched wars in the Middle East that have been far more destructive than Israel’s just pursuit of the tyrants of Hamas.
Explain that to us, Ms Colman. Why is British arts money okay despite what we did in Iraq, but Israel must be dodged like the plague? Hypocrisy, thy name is Olivia.
These luvvies have been struck down by that most bourgeois of maladies: Israel intolerance. It’s the new gluten intolerance. Only now the sickly middle classes forswear not only wheat but also the wares and ideas of that most wicked of nations: Israel.
The consequences of this posh disorder are dire, especially for artistic liberty. Let’s be clear: it is profoundly illiberal, deeply philistine, for film-makers to turn their backs on the film industry of an entire nation.
Their missive says “complicity” with Israel’s actions includes “justifying genocide”. So even Israeli directors and actors who think their nation is justified in going after the monsters who carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust are fair game for boycotting.
That is cruel, unfair, dogmatic and, in my view, bigoted. Such chauvinistic intolerance for foreign creatives who simply have a different opinion is the very antithesis of cultural freedom. These Philistines for Palestine bring shame on the film world.
When literary bigwigs, including Sally Rooney, proposed a boycott of Israeli publishing houses, other writers, including the brilliant Lee Child, took them to task.
You’re behaving like a “self-righteous cult”, they told the haughty Israel-avoiders. To “persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate” those you disagree with is wrong and tyrannical, they said.
That’s how I feel about these film people. They imagine they’re being cool and progressive when in truth they’re behaving like a neo-McCarthyite gang punishing Israelis for being Israelis. They’re bullies dolled up as radicals.
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