Monday, March 11, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Feeding Their Fellow Jews to the Crocodile
Seth Mandel: Feeding Their Fellow Jews to the Crocodile
Then on Sunday, we got a pretty rough preview of what was to come. As Hollywood stars were deciding how to accessorize their outfits for the Oscars that evening, many chose—stick with me here—a bloody hand celebrating the lynching of two Jews. Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Ava DuVernay, and Ramy Youssef were among the actors who wore a pin of a bloody hand, modeled after a particularly grisly episode. In 2000, two Jews wandered into Ramallah. They were taken into Palestinian police custody, presumably to protect them from the shrieking mob trying to rip them limb from limb with their bare hands. But the mob stormed the building and did its thing, as Kamala Harris might say. One of the killers showed off his blood-drenched hands to cheers from his compatriots outside. The pin is known as the Palestinian “hand of resistance.”John Podhoretz: I Refute His Oscar
Now, the defense of these fiends is that they didn’t know what the pin meant. On some level, that is believable: Eilish is 22 years old, and rose to music fame during her teen years, so it is possible that she doesn’t know much of anything.
But even in Eilish’s case, it is unlikely. As some have pointed out, a bloody red hand is pretty universal. You would not be surprised to learn that Billie Eilish Baird O’Connell comes from an Irish family, who surely are familiar with the Red Hand of Ulster. The well read among the public probably recognizes the red right hand from Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which it signifies God’s vengeance.
The bloody hand pin did not seem to bother anyone, and I suppose in that atmosphere—one in which feted industry leaders were parading around alongside a celebration of lynching Jews—Glazer’s weak-kneed grand finale was almost inevitable.
Glazer was awarded an Oscar for his film Zone of Interest, which is about a man who, as I mentioned last night, attains professional success thanks to his ability to ignore the suffering of the Jews around him. It is not, however, autobiographical. The film is about Rudolph Hess living as a Nazi commandant next to Auschwitz. Though after last night, it’s unclear whether he’s meant to be the villain or the hero of Glazer’s film.
Hess is actually a perfect subject for a discussion about Jew-devouring crocodiles, and Glazer should know why. The Nazis demonstrated their efficiency and ingenuity by devising a system in which the crocodile actually could eat all the Jews last—or at least at once. In Hess’s world, the world Glazer was rewarded for depicting, there was no need for the crocodile to take it one at a time.
One could say The Zone of Interest win was the Oscar way in 2024 to punch the Holocaust card, and boy did Glazer punch it. Standing aside his two producers (one of them a Russian oligarch named Len Blavatnik), and visibly trembling with what appeared to be terror, he took out a piece of paper and read out:Jonathan Tobin: ‘As a Jew’ Oscar moment shows how woke antisemitism works
"Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?"
We can, if we wish, debate the meaning of this poorly written set of sentences for a couple of seconds, or until there’s another anti-Semitic attack somewhere that is the direct result of October 7th, whichever comes first—and guess which will come first. Any way you look at it, it’s disgusting.
First, let’s take it literally and take it to mean Glazer and his producers "refute their Jewishness." Obviously this is bad, because they are refuting their Jewishness as they accept an award for a movie about the effort made 80 years ago to destroy all Jewishness. Anti-Semites are falling all over themselves to defend Glazer from the charge that he has "refuted his Jewishness." Rather, they say, he refutes that Jewishness offers a defense for Israeli actions after October 7, or for the "occupation," or for whatever argle-bargle these putrid preachers of self-satisfied vanity decide is the "root cause" of things they don’t like.
His defenders include such notable champions of Zion as the former Bernie Sanders aide cum Koch-funded scholar Matt Duss once pictured posing in a Hamas tunnel, Mehdi Hasan, the recently axed MSNBC host and Hamas apologist, the Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, a onetime radical magazine journalist who turned out to be winsome on TV, to his immense good fortune. One of his qualities is that he loathes Israel almost as much as he loves his $5 million salary paid by the Robertses, the Jewish family that owns Comcast. It’s blood money, Chris! Give it back! Otherwise it might get into the hands of occupiers!
Hayes should know to stay out of this. Like, don’t opine on what is and what isn’t anti-Semitic, smart boy, especially after hosting Al Sharpton for years on your show, whose contributions to Jewish refutation have included rallying people against a business in Harlem that was then set on fire by one of Sharpton’s fan boys, killing seven people while Sharpton continued to skate through life by scaring Democratic politicians and eating their souls rather than the fatty foods that used to define his rotund shape.
Not to mention you can refute your Jewishness all you like, Glazer, but if a terrorist arrived at a Golders Green synagogue where your nephew was becoming bar mitzvah and decided to bomb the place, you’d be as dead as you would have been had you not "refuted" it. This is the problem: They want to kill Jews. You’re a Jew. They want to kill you. Your refutation is immaterial.
Which is to say, the issue is not whether Glazer is comfortable with his status as a Jew but rather that he is living a life of existential risk after October 7 because of it. And he should know this all better than anyone, since his movie is about how merely to be a Jew is to be subject to efforts at mass extermination.
It is the story of Jewry since the very beginning: Can this small tribe survive the world’s efforts to do it in? And how are we to understand the unimaginable miracle that it has not only survived but has returned to its homeland and turned a subsistence-level desert life into the world’s 27th wealthiest nation?
Ah, but there’s the rub for Jonathan Glazer. He doesn’t like that country, apparently. It’s a country of "occupation," and it "dehumanizes" the other apparently just as the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. Forget for the thousandth time that Israel hasn’t "occupied" Gaza since 2005, and what it’s doing now is not an "occupation"—it’s a war in which it is hunting down the enemy army of Hamas in order to destroy it.
That’s not "dehumanizing." It’s something else. It’s no more dehumanizing than the destruction of Germany to get rid of the Nazis, which I assume Jonathan Glazer supports in theory, as without it, he wouldn’t have the Oscar he can shove right up his ass forever.
Oh, it’s good Oppenheimer won, even though the real Oppenheimer was a Communist.
It is no small irony that the only way the mass murderers who are depicted in “The Zone of Interest” were defeated and brought to justice was by Allied soldiers and airmen who were presented with the same dilemma faced today by Israel. In 1945, as American, British and Soviet troops closed in on the last Nazi strongholds, the Germans refused to acknowledge their inevitable defeat and fought to the bitter end. As they did elsewhere, they made the Red Army fight for every street and house in Berlin. Two million German civilians were killed in Allied bombing campaigns and the conquest of the Third Reich, and as many as 125,000 were killed in the last weeks of the war in Berlin alone.
As horrible as those numbers may sound, decent people everywhere understood that the future of civilization required the defeat of the Nazis, and if that meant German civilians must die, then so be it. They knew that massive civilian casualties—far outstripping even the dubious figures supplied by Hamas of those killed in the current war—were the price that the German nation had to pay for allowing itself to be led by a genocidal movement that most of its citizens had supported so long as the Nazis were winning the war.
The Palestinians and Hamas are in a similar position today. Their ideology of hatred for Jews is hardly different from that of the Nazis depicted in Glazer’s movie. Their crimes on Oct. 7 were committed with a shameless embrace of barbarism that those who administered Auschwitz actually sought to conceal from the world. But because woke ideology deems the Palestinians to be intersectional victims and Israelis as their oppressors, fashionable opinion is adamant that the war to eradicate Hamas must stop and the Jews must be subjected to more atrocities in the future, if not killed and robbed of their homeland “from the river to the sea” as the pro-terror mobs demand.
Sadly, in 2024, there was no proud Jew who would refute and denounce Glazer later in the ceremony as Chayefsky did to Redgrave in 1978. Steven Spielberg had the chance to say something but chose to stick to his script. In contemporary Hollywood, complaints that Jews are being erased by the woke catechism that is inextricably linked to antisemitism in the new Oscar “diversity” rules going into effect for next year’s awards are ignored. It is the “as a Jew” celebrities who have the bully pulpit and those who would speak for the justice of Israel’s cause who are marginalized.
Those, like Glazer, whose efforts are aimed at helping contemporary practitioners of Jewish genocide survive and win—and do so “as Jews”—are a disgrace and deserve to be remembered throughout history with opprobrium along with the worst examples of those who betrayed their own people. They also illustrate the moral depravity of artists and intellectuals who have been captured by an ideology that enables a virulent form of antisemitism that masquerades as advocacy for human rights.
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