Remember this ghastly business which brought shame on the Edinburgh International Film Festival? Well, the equivalent festival in Melbourne, Australia won’t be intimidated by Ken “Antisemitism is Understandable” Loach. Responding to a demand from Loach that the festival refuse Israeli funding, festival director Richard Moore said: “I wouldn’t do it. The festival wouldn’t. It’s like submitting to blackmail.” Well said.
Read the story here.
Ginnie Atkinson - Managing Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival - are you reading this and learning from it?
Calling Ken Loach’ attempt to blackmail Jewish filmakers blackmail is a start.
There is an even more urgent need to deligitimize people like him who are trying to make antisemitism respectable and even cool.
Ken Loach is an antisemitic bigot and he shouldn’t get a pass because he is on the left.
As Bernard Henri Levi has shown much contemporaty antisemitism in Europe from Holocaust denial to anti-Zionism is being driven by leftists like Loach.
Congratulations Melbourne !
Leftist Jews who traffic in anti-zionism and would like to give a pass to people like Loach need to read this review:
“Claude Lanzmann’s liberated memories”
“Claude Lanzmann belongs to a breed of Jew rare in England: defiant rather than discreet. At once Parisian and globetrotting, he combines remnants of leftist sympathies (the Soviet Union was for a long time “comme un ciel sur ma tête”) with defence of Israel. His films Pourquoi Israel? and Tsahal (about the Israeli Defence Force) celebrate both Jewish survival against the odds and the reappropriation of manliness after centuries of sufferance, study and “huckstering”, as a famous apostate put it. Lanzmann’s reference to “drones” – the unmanned aircraft used in modern warfare – as “une merveilleuse invention israélienne” is just the kind of remark to nettle the bien-pensants.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6665894.ece
As a passionate cinephile, I’m disgusted by Loach’s actions and statements which, to me, seem to betray what is best in cinema as a medium.
Loach’s actions are digusting. Well done MIFF for not bowing to this antiSemitic shill.
EIFF could learn a big lesson here.
On the subject of blackmail, isn’t that all a boycott with political aims is? Isn’t it merely a threat to do or not do something until the other party changes? Perhaps blackmail is the most appropriate term to use in countering those who advocate the boycotting of Israel on any level and in any forum.
I love Ken Loach. The right approach!
It’s disgusting that the MIFF is accepting money from war criminals. Do you all support the murder of Palestinian civilians?!
It’s a bit naive to label anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. Many Jews have been opposed to Israel, and a lot didn’t support its creation. As if all Jews are Israeli, or even all Israelis are Jews.
“It’s a bit naive to label anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. Many Jews have been opposed to Israel, and a lot didn’t support its creation.”
One logical fallacy and false assumption after another.
“Do you all support the murder of Palestinian civilians?!” Benjamin Solah
So, you’re advocating against Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields?
Or are advocating against Hamas tunneling under the Philadelphi corridor immediately adjacent to U.N. schools?
Or are advocating Hamas not store their munitions in civilian centers, in mosques and schools and private homes?
Or are advocating Hamas not enculturate their entire population in hatred from the earliest ages and forward, throughout their society?
Or are advocating against Hamas & Co. firing their munitions from within civilian centers?
Or are advocating against Hamas firing into Israeli civilian centers over a protracted period, over a period of years?
Other questions still, come to mind, but that’s a beginning.