Posted on 09/06/2009 9:25:53 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Some 50 celebrities, artists and filmmakers, including actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, musician David Byrne and filmmaker Ken Loach, have accused the Toronto International Film Festival of "complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine" over its spotlight this year on Tel Aviv.
The 2009 festival will present 10 films by local filmmakers on the Israeli metropolis, for its City to City program, which each year focuses its lens on a different city.
The choice led to protests that the film festival was "staging a propaganda campaign" on Israel's behalf, given "the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program," said an open letter to festival organizers, AFP reported.
The program "ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories" after a "mass exiling of the Palestinian population" in 1948, according to the letter.
"Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city's past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto," AFP reported the letter as saying.
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
“Entertainers! Is there anything they don’t know?”
—Homer Simpson
Actors become activists when they can’t find work.
Where's that list? I need to add these people to my personal boycott.
“...former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area...”
It’s nothing more than a reflex anymore, isn’t it? Had Israel built a city on the bottom of the Dead Sea, somebody would still claim for the “former residents and descendants”; of course, non-jews that lived before on the bottom of the sea.
Whenever conservatives raise objections about some offering at a film festival, they’re told “it’s just a movie” or “you can’t criticize it if you haven’t watched it”.
“I’m gettin’ too old for this #$%^.”
As Alice Cooper said,
Anyone who gets their information from a celebrity is a bigger fool than the celebrity.
O.K., but you have to toss out the lime green triple knit leisure suits.
Jane Fonda. Isn’t she somebody’s ....grandmother??
Was Henry an anti-semite too?
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