Debbie Schlussel: "Waltz With Bashir": Anti-Israel Propaganda Made by Israelis; Shame on Oscar
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At Sunday's Academy Awards, "Waltz With Bashir" is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
And while the foreign language it is in is Hebrew, it might as well be in Arabic or Farsi. That's because while neither Ahmadinejad nor the Muslim world could possibly make something more anti-Israel . . . and, frankly, anti-Semitic, they'll simply love this movie. And that's why I'm betting on it to win the Oscar. It's high quality Bin Laden cinema.
Since we already have an annoying actress cleaning up in the movie awards biz for playing a semi-pornographic, hot SS guard as the good guy (Kate Winslet in "The Reader"--read my review) for sending Jews to the ovens, while the two Jewish Holocaust survivors who testified against her are the insensitive bitches of the movie, why not round out the Nazi anti-Semitism with a little anti-Israel anti-Semitism to keep up with the times?
This movie and "The Reader" would make for a great double feature at the next SS/Gestapo reunion.
And it's no surprise that "Waltz With Bashir" is made by Israelis--in particular, director Ari Folman doing his best Leni Riefenstahl. Goebbels would be proud. As I've often noted on this site, the Israeli left and the Israeli movie industry make our left and our Hollywood look like centrists and moderates.
I saw in this animated piece of garbage virtually every canard that HAMAS, Hezbollah, and Israel's enemies around the world have hurled.
Jews as Nazis . . . Check.
Arabs killing Arabs, but it's the Jews' fault . . . Check.
Jews as murderers of "innocent" Muslims . . . Check.
Terrorist Muslims as innocent victims of the Jews . . . Check.
Jews as the Michael Vicks of the Middle East, killing dogs and Arabian horses . . . Check.
Israelis as porn and sex addicts . . . Check.
Israelis as drug addict slackers . . . Check (well, that part is true about the Israeli left, like the scum that made this movie).
Check, Check, Check, Check, Check.
The only thing missing from this vile celluloid exercise in the sickening are the traditional blood libels of Jews cooking Arabs and using their blood in pastries. The Israeli filmmakers--nice guys that they are--want to leave at least something as the exclusive domain of the Arab world and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The movie follows Folman, the director of this film, a middle-aged former Israeli soldier who served in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in the early 1980s. Let's not forget what Folman goes to great lengths to omit from this movie: Israel entered Lebanon in the early 1980s at the invitation of the majority of the Lebanese people --both Shi'ite Muslims (the same ones who now support Hezbollah) and Maronite Christians. As I've written, most of the Lebanese people welcomed the Israelis as heroes for liberating them from Yasser Arafat and his P.L.O., who took over their houses, raped their daughters, and murdered their sons. No less than David K. Shipler, the New York Times' anti-Israel then-correspondent detailed this, and I've summarized much of it on this site, as well as given other examples from my own knowledge and research over the years.
There's a reason that much of Lebanon was known as "Fatahland" at the time. None of that exists in the vacuum of this lie-filled movie.
At the beginning of the movie, a friend and Folman are at a bar. The friend says he has nightmares about 26 dogs trying to kill him. These are the 26 dogs he shot as Israel invaded South Lebanon. The killings were necessary because the dogs would bark and alert wanted Palestinian terrorists that the Israelis were coming to capture them.
But since this is an anti-war, anti-Israel movie, the Israelis are as bad as Michael Vick. Because shooting dogs to save people from Islamic terrorists is just a vile thing to do . . . according to PETA and these Israeli self-hating filmmakers who produced this trash.
While his friend tells of his guilt over the dogs, Folman tells him he can't remember a thing about his service in Lebanon. It's "not in his system," he says. Of course, those inhuman Israelis--it's just not in their system to care about--or even remember--war.
Folman seeks out his former unit members from his time in Lebanon to remind him what happened there. The whole rest of the movie is spent rehashing and blaming Israel for the events at Sabra and Shatila--Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where Maronite Christian Phalangist soldiers killed Palestinians, some of them terrorists (but they don't want you to know that in this movie). What Ari Folman also doesn't want you to know is that these camps were not only the subterfuges for Yasser Arafat's P.L.O., but they were the breeding and training grounds--much as all Palestinian refugee camps remain today--for Islamic terrorists.
Frankly, while--unlike the message of this movie--the Israelis (the movie also singles out Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin, in addition to soldiers and commanders) have no blame in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, I can't blame the Phalangists for slaughtering the Palestinians there. What would you do if Sunni Muslim terrorists under the leadership of Arafat ravaged your country, took over your homes, raped your wives and daughters, and executed your sons before your eyes? Would you look the other way? Or would you seek the only justice available in the Middle East?
But the movie only shows us one group of people taking over Lebanese homes . . . Israeli soldiers. And it shows them watching vile, obscene porn, lounging in their bathtubs, and drinking their alcohol. Uh, thanks, Ari Folman, but you have the wrong ethnicity. Not that a minor detail such as that would get in your way of vilifying Israel and the Jews.
And you wouldn't know that it was the Phalangists--and not Israelis--who "massacred" these terrorist-monger Palestinians, unless you sit through the entire movie. It implies the Israelis did it, until the last third of the movie. You know, they wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression--i.e., that Israelis didn't massacre anyone, but that their Arab brethren who were forced to live with them were driven to it.
On the subject of the Phalangists, the movie is named for their dead leader, Bashir Gemayel--a charismatic, pro-Israel leader who was about to recognize Israel and, for the first time ever, create real peace in the Israeli-Lebanese relationship. Sadly, he was assassinated by the Syrians, shortly after becoming Lebanon's leader, for that very reason.
But instead of wishing he had taken over, director Ari Folman vilifies the dead Gemayel. The people in his movie describe the Phalangists' admiration of him as homo-erotic, a claim he'd never dare make about the real homo-erotic admiration actually going on in Lebanon . . . for Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
Unlike Mr. Folman, the dead Bashir Gemayel's family (excluding his Syrian-allied brother Amin Gemayel) continues to sacrifice its family members even in recent times, as victims for trying to free Lebanon from the puppets of foreign Islamic rule based in Iran and Syria.
And Folman does exactly what we've seen from the supporters of HAMAS and Hezbollah. In a 1.5 hour movie, I counted at least three comparisons of Israeli soldiers to Nazis and the situation to the Holocaust--that's one per half hour. They were called "Nazis." And their entrance into and activities in Lebanon were called both "Auschwitz," and the "Warsaw Ghetto." So let's compare: Innocent Jews rounded up and cooked in ovens versus Palestinians who raped, tortured and murdered the people versus Lebanon getting a tiny deserved taste of their own medicine. Hmmm ... sounds exactly the same to me. How' bout you?
In addition to being Nazis, cruel dog-killers, porn addicts, and home invaders, we're told that Israeli soldiers killed an entire field of Arabian horses. "The horses never did anything to anyone. They didn't deserve to die," Folman tells us.
Yup, that's what you want to do when you go to war against Palestinian terrorists who are shooting down on your country and using the country to your north as a base of attack: Worry about guard dogs who protect them . . . and Arabian horses who might get in the way of bombings and gunshots. The PETA plan of attack--I'm sure it works wonders . . . in the cartoon land of the vegetarians and Ari Folman.
We are also shown scenes of Israeli soldiers landing on a Lebanese beach and shooting up a car carrying a family, just for the heck of it. Oh, and then there's that porn again. We are constantly shown scenes of naked Israeli soldiers, with full-frontal penile nudity on the water off the coast of Lebanon, and full-frontal naked women who are the fantasies of pot-smoking Israeli soldiers. And then there are the scenes of Folman and one of his former unit-mates in Holland smoking pot.
Perhaps Mr. Folman should have stuck to pot-smoking instead of filmmaking, because clearly his vision of what really happened in Lebanon is drug-addled.
The only part of this movie that isn't animated is the end, during which the audience is treated to gruesome footage of Palestinians' bodies at Sabra and Shatila and piercing screaming of crying Palestinian women. Hmmm . . . too afraid to show us the crying and screaming and far more gruesome pictures of what the Palestinians living in those camps did to Lebanese Shi'ites and Christians all over the country?
Yeah, why give the complete picture when the goal is to destroy Israel from within? It was a civil war between Christians trying to save their once civilized and beautiful country and Muslims trying to savage it and wrest control. Israel had far less business interfering in this alleged "massacre" of its enemy by its ally than it did interfering--which Israel did not--in the many, far larger Palestinian massacres of Lebanese Christians and Shi'ites.
As I left the theater, a noblesse oblige ignoramus-ette said to me, "Oh, the inhumanity of those Israelis and Jews."
To her, I said,
Lady, if you had a clue, you'd know that the Lebanese people were raped and murdered by these Palestinians, that they welcomed the Israelis in to rescue them. Too bad they didn't bother to show you that in this propaganda film.Oh the inhumanity of those Israelis and Jews that they didn't let the Maronites finish the job.
Look for Oscar gold, Sunday Night, for the new Goebbels-esque filmmaker, Ari Folman and his "Waltz with Bashir."
FOUR MARXES PLUS
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**** UPDATE, 2/22/09: Fortunately, "Waltz with Bashir" did not win the Oscar. Glad to be wrong in this case. ****
Posted by Debbie on February 20, 2009 04:53 PM to Debbie Schlussel