How the Oscars got hijacked by Israel hate

Every year when the Oscars comes around, we prepare ourselves for headlines about who won big on the night, the fashion on display on the red carpet, and indeed talk of the captivating performances of the actors, both on screen and as they feign happiness at someone else winning that precious golden figurine.

This year, the Monday morning headlines were quite different. Oscars 2024 news was awash with controversy surrounding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Celebrities wore anti-Israel pin pages with a sinister message behind it and one director chose to use the platform for such a bad take on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that he drew the rebuke of a Holocaust survivor which put his stunt to shame.

So let’s get down to business. Why was the 96th Academy Awards drenched in anti-Israel hatred?

The red pin badge of terror support

An unwanted accessory on the red carpet was a red pin badge featuring a red hand and black heart in the middle. It was in support of Artists4Ceasefire, a group that claims to be seeking a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict but has used symbology linked with support for Palestinian terror.

The group claims it is seeking a “permanent ceasefire” including the “release of all hostages” and for aid to reach the Palestinians. On the surface this looks good. We all want an end to this conflict, for Israel’s hostages to be freed, and for Palestinian civilians to have their humanitarian needs met.

The problem is the group isn’t exactly supporting that. “All hostages” doesn’t specify they are Israeli civilians held in Gaza by Hamas. This may include convicted Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisoners that Hamas claims are “hostages” held by Israel. Likewise, the group calls for an end to the conflict by putting pressure on President Biden to pressure the Israelis to stop fighting. They are using inclusive language, but they fail to call on politicians to pressure Hamas to put down their weapons. If they truly wanted peace, they’d stand against Palestinian terrorism, but they aren’t doing that, they’re standing against Israel.

Likewise, if the badge was a neutral symbol to promote peace between Isreal and the Palestinians, it could have been designed to be in the shape of a peace symbol, like a dove or the dual flags of Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, they chose a symbol that is one sided, it is blaming Israel for having blood on its hands (or at least, that’s what they claim).

The truth, however, is that this symbol has an entirely different meaning when looked at from the lens of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The red hand symbol has become an icon of so-called ‘Palestinian Resistance’, known to the rest of us as terrorism.

Most celebrities wearing red pins don’t know that the image of red hands is associated with one horrific event imprinted on the minds of
Israelis and Palestinians.

The 2000 Ramallah lynching of Israelis.

This symbolism isn’t a coincidence. pic.twitter.com/N8JGWpAkc6

— Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 (@Israel) March 11, 2024

It dates to the 2000 Ramallah Lynching when two Israeli men, Yossi Avrahami (38) and Vadim Nurzhitz (33), drove down the wrong road and were arrested by Palestinian police. Whilst held in the police station a mob of Palestinian men forced their way into the police station and brutally murdered them simply because they were Jewish. One of the murderers of these men smeared his hands with their blood and held them up to a window, displaying to the crowd that the men had been murdered. This prompted jubilation from the crowd who celebrated the death of these Jewish men.

The event was witnessed by journalists. British photographer Mark Seager attempted to photograph the event but the mob physically assaulted him and destroyed his camera. After the event, he stated, “It [the lynching] was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places… I know they [Palestinians] are not all like this and I’m a very forgiving person but I’ll never forget this. It was murder of the most barbaric kind. When I think about it, I see that man’s head, all smashed. I know that I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

(Side note: The Israeli victims of the 2000 Ramallah Lynching are often described as ‘soldiers,’ which is technically true but is misleading. Both men were unarmed, in civilian clothing, and driving a civilian vehicle. They had yet to be trained as soldiers as this would have been their first day of basic training if they had not been killed on their way there. Yossi was a toy salesman and Vadim was a truckdriver and they were called up by the IDF as reservist drivers.)

The red hand symbol has since been used by Hamas supporters and other Palestinian terrorist factions to promote their aim of shedding the blood of more Israelis. It is similar to how the paraglider images have been used by Hamas supporters to celebrate the 7 October Hamas Massacres of Israeli civilians. They celebrate these barbaric crimes because they are fuelled by antisemitic hatred towards the Jewish people.

Whether the celebrities knew what they were supporting is unclear. However, the connection to this hand symbol in the context of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is undeniable. Israel’s official Twitter account has even pointed out this fact (as linked above).

Also, Alex and Alastair from CUFI UK have broken down all the information on the Oscars 2024 controversy. Watch the latest podcast below:

The director who shamed himself, and the Holocaust survivor who put him in his place.

One of the winners on the night was The Zone of Interest, a film about the Holocaust which won the best international film award. Unfortunately, the comments of its director meant that one of the losers of the night was the fight against antisemitism.

In his acceptance speech, director Jonathan Glazer, standing next to his producer, James Wilson, said, “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 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”

As you can see from his statement, he is saying that Israel has “hijacked” the Holocaust. He is blaming Israel from the Hamas 7 October 2023 attacks and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

We must point out that Israel is not ‘the occupation.’ Israel is the Jewish nation living in the Jewish homeland that was given to them by God thousands of years ago. Jews do not occupy the land, they own the land. Also, Israel is not responsible for Hamas’s murderous rampage. Think about that for a moment, Glazer is saying that Israel, not Hamas, is to blame for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Disgraceful.

The Anti Defamation League (ADL) said: “Israel is not hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Glazer’s comments at the Oscars are both factually incorrect and morally reprehensible. They minimise the Shoah (Holocaust) and excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.”

This sentiment was echoed by László Nemes, the director of acclaimed film Son of Saul, who – like Glazer – won the foreign language Oscar for a film about the Holocaust; in Nemes’ case his 2015 movie Son of Saul, was about a Jewish prisoner forced to work in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

“The Zone of Interest is an important movie,” Nemes wrote. “It is not made in a usual way. It questions the grammar of cinema. Its director should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust.

“Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”

Powerful words from clearly a much wiser director.

Now, we could say more, but it turns out all you need to counter foolishness is the wisdom of a Holocaust survivor, in this case, 94-year-old David Schaecter.

Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA Open Letter to Jonathan Glazer (11 March 2024):

“I am 94 years old and the only member of 105 souls in my family to survive the Holocaust. I miraculously survived nearly three years in the hell of Auschwitz and one year in the hell of Buchenwald.

I watched in anguish Sunday night when I heard you use the platform of the Oscars ceremony to equate Hamas’s maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defence in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.

Your comments were factually inaccurate and morally indefensible.

The ‘occupation’ of which you speak has nothing to do with the Holocaust. The Jewish people’s existence and right to live in the land of Israel predates the Holocaust by hundreds of years. Today’s political and geographic landscape is the direct result of wars started by past Arab leaders who refused to accept Jewish people as their neighbours in our historic homeland. Now that several Arab countries are making peace with Israel because security and prosperity are better for all people, Iran and its terrorist proxies started another war, abetted by too many who, through naivete or malice, blame ‘the occupation.’

Worse is that you chose to use the Holocaust to validate your personal opinion. You made a Holocaust movie and won an Oscar. And you are Jewish. Good for you. But it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for the six million Jews, including one and a half million children, who were murdered solely because of their Jewish identity.

And it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for those of us who personally saw the world stand silent as our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were murdered. We actually had nowhere to go – no possible place of refuge. No country would accept us even though world leaders knew full well that thousands of Jews were being murdered every day. There was no Jewish nation to which we could flee.

You should be ashamed of yourself for using Auschwitz to criticise Israel.”

Wow!

We have nothing more to add to that.