Monday, November 09, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
On October 25, at a screening of NAZA at Glasgow Film Theatre, an audience member reportedly stood up during the closing credits and launched into an antisemitic tirade, calling Jews an "accursed race" and declaring that "Hitler was right."
The audience vocally condemned him. A witness named Peter said the reaction made him "proud to live in Glasgow." Glasgow Friends of Israel also saw the audience's response as a positive development.
Of course it is better that the audience condemned the man than agreed with him. But I am not quite ready to congratulate them.
The documentary NAZA, made by Israeli Jewish filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is itself an antisemitic propaganda film. It presents Israel's efforts to calculate and minimize civilian casualties as evidence that Israel is deliberately murdering civilians, even committing genocide.
As Sarit Zehavi explained, the filmmakers interviewed people involved in one compartmentalized part of the IDF's targeting process and presented their accounts as though they represented the entire decision-making system. They ignored the multiple levels of review, intelligence assessments, legal considerations and precautions that go into approving strikes.
The very existence of a department dedicated to estimating collateral damage is evidence of an effort to comply with international humanitarian law, which requires precautions to minimize civilian harm. Yet NAZA turns this evidence on its head, portraying it as proof of genocide. As I wrote previously, the accusation of genocide has become so casual that apparently no serious evidence of genocidal intent is necessary anymore.
There is something deeply self-congratulatory about an audience watching a film that demonizes Israel through distorted evidence, and then feeling morally reassured because they rejected someone praising Hitler.
Condemning someone who says "Hitler was right" is about the easiest test of antisemitism imaginable. It requires no self-examination, no questioning of one's assumptions, and certainly no examination of whether the film one just watched relies on prejudices against the Jewish state.
In fact, such incidents can have the opposite effect. By loudly rejecting the most blatant antisemitism, people give themselves moral credentials. They have demonstrated to their own satisfaction that they oppose antisemitism, making it less likely that they will recognize subtler manifestations in their own beliefs.
And there is something revealing about the antisemite himself. He apparently saw no distinction between the demonization of Israel in the film and hatred of Jews. All the careful distinctions that leftist anti-Zionists make between their beliefs and antisemitism made no impression on him. He watched the film and got so angry at Jews - not Israelis, not Zionists, but Jews - that he couldn't stop himself from making an impromptu, pro-Hitler speech.
He recognized the hate in the film and saw his own hate as the same.
Meanwhile, Glasgow is hosting a Palestinian arts festival this week called From the Rivers to the Seas, promoting anti-Israel narratives dressed up in academic jargon about colonialism and even the supposed colonial nature of linear time. The organization behind it has received £911,950 in Scottish public funding over three years.
When nearly a million pounds of taxpayer money supports an organization promoting this kind of anti-Israel ideology, perhaps antisemitism is a little more deeply embedded in Glasgow's respectable cultural institutions than a theater audience congratulating itself for rejecting a Hitler admirer would like to believe.
The real test of opposing antisemitism is recognizing it when it appears in ideas you already agree with. That is much harder than shouting down a Nazi.
