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PA Leaders Appropriate the Holocaust as Crime Against Palestinians – Algemeiner

Posted By on March 13, 2024

For years, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been defining its situation as a Holocaust-like tragedy that is happening to Palestinians.

Now, senior PA leaders are invoking the Holocaust to say that the Palestinian experience is on a level worse than the atrocities committed against the Jews. This is all in an effort to demonize the Jewish people, and thus to incite violence against them.

In an interview with the Voice of Palestine posted on Facebook on Feb. 10, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who is PA leader Mahmoud Abbas Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, said:

It may be that what the Palestinian people is experiencing now was not experienced by humanity in World War II, and was not experienced by humanity during [any] war. The tragedies, massacres, and holocaust in the operation by Israel, the occupation state, in the Gaza Strip did not happen even in World War II, which they speak about all the time, about the Holocaust that they underwent. Now they are committing a worse and more criminal holocaust against the Palestinian people. [emphasis added]

In another post on Facebook, the same Al-Habbash, who is also the PAs Supreme Shariah judge and the chairman of the Supreme Council for Shariah Justice, introduced another video of his with text that said:

The Gaza Strip is being subjected to a holocaust and famine as a result of the Israeli aggression and the war of annihilation that Israel is carrying out under American auspices. [emphasis added]

In the video of his interview with Egyptian Extra TV News on Feb. 24, Al-Habbash went on to say:

We stand before a holocaust, facing a massacre, facing a human tragedy that is taking place before the eyes of the world, and there are still those, and more precisely the US, who are continuing to give a green light for this aggression to continue claiming more lives. [emphasis added]

Another PA official of significance, Mundir Mari, who is a Palestinian National Council member, said in a YouTube video posted on the Falestinona channel, which serves Fatahs Information and Culture Commission in Lebanon:

I compare Netanyahu to [Joseph] Goebbels, who was the Nazi propaganda minister Now we are going in the same direction and on the same path. Goebbels was the propaganda minister, and now he has parallels in the form of Benjamin Netanyahu, [Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel] Smotrich, and [Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben Gvir. [emphasis added]

The Palestinian National Council, which is the legislative body of the PLO, made further use of the term Nazi in a statement:

March 8 [2024] [i.e., International Womens Day] is arriving this year at a time when the women of Palestine are experiencing the darkest days in modern history, both in the West Bank and in Jerusalem [sic., apparent intent is and in the Gaza Strip], and are suffering at the Nazi military checkpoints. [emphasis added]

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 9, 2024]

These statements follow a CBC interview with Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub in which he said:

The scope of the aggression against the Gaza Strip is unprecedented in history. In other words, there has been no precedent to the scope of the victims, the scope of the destruction, and the scope of the killing and genocide, even in World War II. [emphasis added]

[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Feb. 3, 2024]

The attempts by these PA officials to reframe the Holocaust as a Palestinian experience is part of their subversive campaign to paint the Jewish people as the monster, and thus to justify terror. By drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, the campaign reveals itself as one of the manifestations of antisemitism described by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

It is time for the world to recognize the Palestinian Authoritys antisemitism, and to begin condemning it.

The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.

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PA Leaders Appropriate the Holocaust as Crime Against Palestinians - Algemeiner

Who dares to hijack the Holocaust? – The New Statesman

Posted By on March 13, 2024

Jonathan Glazers profoundly subtle and disturbing film, The Zone of Interest, no sooner won an Oscar for Best International Feature than its director delivered an apology for his Jewishness so grovelling in its emotional simplicity it would have made the angels of any religion weep.

I wanted The Zone of Interest to win an Oscar. Quite frankly I would have been delighted had it won them all. Based freely on Martin Amiss dark-delving philosophical novel, it is a marvellously subtle film that addresses the greatest of moral conundrums how it was that an educated and refined society could live cheek by jowl with barbarism. To say that the film didnt flinch from the most vexed contradictions in human nature is not the half of it. To a soundtrack that could have been the music of the20th centuryimploding, it minutely examined the thing we call normality and left it in shreds.

Maybe there is no explanation for the coexistence of themostjarring behaviouralcontrarieties, the mechanism that makes it possible to love ones family and care not a jot about the destruction of other peoples.Unless it was something as demeaning as the desire to please, there is no explaining how such a subtle and unusual artist as Jonathan Glazer could, with the richly deserved Oscar in his hand, deliver such brutally sensational and commonplace thoughts.

Right now, we stand here, he said, as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.

There is disagreement about the meaning of this clumsy formulation. Is Glazer refuting his Jewishness full stop, or refuting his Jewishness being hijacked to justify an occupation? Because I want to give him every benefit of every doubt I will accept the latter explanation. So thats all right then.Hes holding on to his Jewishness after all. Whew!Except that its not all right. What and where is this hijacking of which he wants no part?I have not myself heard any serious, thinking moral Jew adducing the occupation to the Holocaust, though I have heard it said by those for whom discrediting Jews is a passion that this is the sort of moral blackmail Jews routinely employ.Jews, it is said, cry anti-Semitism only to silence criticism of Israel, just as they help emergency relief efforts in other countries only to harvest the organs of the dying, just as they selectively murder children because thats what theyve been doing for centuries

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Such are the canards deployed to rob the Jews of any lingering sympathy they might yet enjoy as victims of that inhumanity The Zone of Interest depicts, and so to downplay, as just another gambit in Jewish subterfuge, the Holocaust itself.Hijack!Consider the import of that word.So despicable are the Jews, they will steal from themselves the most hellish events in their history to justify visiting hell on others.

Why would Jonathan Glazer, of all people a man who has been immersed to an unusual degree in recent Jewish history give the slightest weight to this libel?

I dont say he should have stood before a televised audience of millions and cheered on the Israeli Defence Forces. Indeed, he had no need to invoke his Jewishness at all. But since he chose to do so, could he not have used the opportunity to uniteratherthandivide, to explain, to speak wisely about a tragedy that is tearing all parties to it apart? Could he not have spoken of the horror felt by every Jew on 7 October, not just on account of the violence done but the approving reactions to it, and the horror felt today by every Jew at the death toll in Gaza, and allow no one to suppose that the heartbreaking scenes there somehow give succour to a fictional Jewish blood-lust justified by the Holocaust?

I dont accuse Jonathan Glazer of being selective in his compassion. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, he said, all the victims to dehumanisation how do we resist? But resistance to dehumanisation does not necessitate divesting oneself of Jewishness, however one interprets that, whether as the hijacking of it to win a false legitimacy or in seeking any other advantage that being Jewish might confer. For a Jew to concur in this fashionable defamation that Jews are moral profiteers, and that it is only by shedding such Jewishness that a Jew can feel pity is doubly despicable.

As a serious, thinking Jewish man, Jonathan Glazer must have read the late Amos Oz on the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which both parties could be said to be in the right, and then, when the situation worsened, both parties could be said to be in the wrong. The occupation didnt just happen one day to satisfy Holocaust righteousness.It was a child of history, born of a mutual intransigence that pre-dated the Holocaust, the consequence of mistakes and violent obduracies on both sides. A tragedy does not entail blame, but if Jonathan Glazer must buy into Jewish blame he must buy into Palestinian blame as well. It would have taken real moral courage to pursue that line; right now it takes none to castigate Jews.

In my years teaching English literature I had frequent recourse to DH Lawrences dictum, Never trust the teller, trust the tale. That Dickens was a bad husband, I was forever telling my students, no more made him a bad novelist than beating her dog made Emily Bront a bad novelist. We will no more fathom the nexus between art and moral intelligence, than that between a normal family life and savagery.

Jonathan Glazer made an ambitious, important film. I salute the artist. But his abject mea culpa debases him as a man.

[See also: The price of private education]

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Who dares to hijack the Holocaust? - The New Statesman

Israeli minister Amichai Chickli blasts Oscar winner for antisemitism – Israel News – The Jerusalem Post

Posted By on March 13, 2024

Jonathan Glazer, the director of the Best International Feature academy award winning Holocaust film, "The Zone of Interest," was "vile" and "auto-antisemitic" for saying during his award speech that belonged to those who "refute their Jewishness and [refute] the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation," Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli (Likud) said to the Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Glazer was the "next useful idiot who stuck a knife in the back of his people and in the backs of women who were raped and then shot in the head afterwards, in children who were slaughtered in their beds, in entire families who were burned alive," Chikli said.

"There is no forgiving such vile types auto-antisemitic Jews, from Judith Butler until last night's idiot, but there is no reason to get excited over the phenomenon, it has accompanied us for generations," Chikli said.

Chikli continued, "As one of Israel's greatest leaders, Yigal Alon, said, 'Amongst the Jews there are always groups of people whose past weighs on them, and they are the first to conduct plastic surgeries to their spiritual-national physiognomy, in order to adapt it to the latest cosmopolitical fashion. Granted, it is true that Jews had multiple reasons to tire from 'bearing the burden', but they [also] had and have all of the reasons to treat with respect their past and themselves, to be as they are in the annals of culture. Because only he who has courage to be himself, contributed the largest contribution to universal culture."

Hadash-Ta'al MK Ahmad Tibi later on Monday commended Glazer, saying in a press conference ahead of his party's weekly meeting on Monday that they he was "brave" and had exhibited "high morals" in mentioning the "dehumanization" amidst the "images of atrocities" coming out of the Gaza Strip.

Llikud MK Danny Danon, who served as Israel's Ambassador to the UN, also addressed the comments.

"This is an important film. It's a shame that a Jewish director took advantage of the stage that he was given to make antisemitic remarks comparing the Holocaust to the war of no-choice that was forced upon us. This is not new - during the Holocaust also there were Jews who acted against the Jewish people," Danon said.

In a daily briefing, Ms. Ilana Stein, Spokesperson at the National Public Diplomacy Directorate, also addressed the issue.

"To think that we would exploit the Jewish catastrophe that is called the Holocaust where six million people died in the most awful ways, is despicable," Stein said.

"Hamas showed how it massacred us. And this is what we are fighting against. A massacre. A terror organization that says that it wants to be from the river to the sea, and that means that they want the whole state of Israel to be free of Jews. Does that remind you of somebody, saying that a whole area should be free of Jews? That is what they are saying. And for that to happen they want to kill and murder and slaughter and rape so that this whole area will be free of Jews. So, this is the right context to look at the Holocaust and October 7, [at] some similarities that they have," Stein said.

Glazers German-language film is about the family of the commandant of Auschwitz living on the death-camp grounds.

After thanking the Academy, his cast and producers, and Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Glazer read from a written statement, although he was clearly emotional, as he spoke about the war in sentence fragments, saying, All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say that what they did then, rather than what we do now. 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 for so many innocent people.

At this point, Glazer was interrupted by applause, and after a pause he went on to say, 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?

Hannah Brown contributed to this article

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Israeli minister Amichai Chickli blasts Oscar winner for antisemitism - Israel News - The Jerusalem Post

The Netherlands, home to the Nazis’ most famous victim, has never had a Holocaust museum until now – JTA News – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Posted By on March 13, 2024

(JTA) The Anne Frank House in the heart of Amsterdam is one of the Netherlands most-visited tourist destinations. Outside of the city a memorial commemorates the Westerbork transit camp, where the Franks were sent on their way to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Several other museums tell the story of Dutch resistance against the Nazis.

But no museum has chronicled the full story of the countrys role in the Holocaust until now.

Amsterdams National Holocaust Museum, which opened to the public on Monday, is the first institution dedicated to the overarching history of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, where three in four Jews were killed.

The museums leadership believes it offers a necessary corrective to narratives that have prevailed over the 80 years since the Netherlands was liberated from Nazi occupation.

Weve all been very happy with 1.2 million [annual] visitors to the Anne Frank House, but at the same time, it is one of so many different personal histories, Emile Schrijver, director general of the Jewish Cultural Quarter, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. As the Franks were a relatively well-to-do family of German refugees in Amsterdam, their story was in a way very untypical of what went on here with the clause, of course, that they were killed like all the others.

The Holocaust museum was nearly 20 years in the making, originating in 2005 as a proposal from the Jewish Cultural Quarter, which runs Jewish cultural institutions in Amsterdam. For decades before that, the notion that the Holocaust was an integral part of Dutch history faced broad resistance.

The Dutch have cherished the false notion that we were a country of resisters, that we became the victim of Nazism the occupier versus the occupied and that the war was difficult for everybody and there was no reason to give the specific Jewish experience a special place in memorialization, said Schrijver.

The exterior of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, as seen on March 10, 2024. (Pierre Crom/Getty Images)

The National Holocaust Museums head curator, Annemiek Gringold, said even in the process of establishing the museum, she often fielded questions about the projects necessity. Some Dutch audiences suggested that since memorials to Dutch victims of the Holocaust already existed, this museum should broaden its scope.

In the public debate and academia, we had discussions saying that the museum should deal with genocides in general, or be a museum about human rights, Gringold told JTA. Our argument was always that this history, in which more than 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands were persecuted, deported, robbed and murdered, should be firmly part of our national collective memory.

That history, which is detailed in the museums main exhibition, might find a more receptive audience now than in the past. The museum launches amid widening openness to discussing Dutch collaboration with the Nazis, seen as crucial in making Hollandthe Western Eurpean country with the highest per capita number of Jewish victims.

Next year, the country will open its archives about Dutch collaboration with the Nazis to the public for the first time. And last week, historians revealed that GVB, the Amsterdam public transport company that still operates today, sought compensation even after the war for transporting local Jews including Anne Frank to trains that would take them to concentration camps.

Ronald Leopold, the executive director of the Anne Frank House, said he welcomed the museum as another entry point for education about the Holocaust in the Netherlands. He argued that the full story is impossible to tell, with every museum offering a different window to history.

The new Holocaust museum in Amsterdam will not paint a full picture of the Holocaust when you look at how the Holocaust played out in Eastern Europe, he said. I dont think any one of us will be able to paint that full picture. We always put a certain light on certain aspects of it.

The National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, located in a former teachers college that played a crucial role in the Dutch resistance, includes the escape corridor which was used to smuggle small children away from the Nazis. (Nick Gammon/AFP via Getty Images)

The museum stands across the street from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater that was popular with Jewish performers and audiences before the Nazis turned it into a major deportation center. In this building, 46,000 Jews were forced to await their transit to Westerbork.

The museum building was converted from a former teachers college that played a significant role in resistance against the Nazis. The school was next to a nursery, torn down after the war, where the Nazis placed children who could not fit in the overcrowded Hollandsche Schouwburg. Thousands of children waited at this nursery for deportation.

But the nurserys director, Henritte Pimentel, helped about 600 children to escape. On her direction, children were lifted onto the schoolyard of the teachers college and handed to members of the Dutch resistance. These people, mainly young non-Jews in their twenties, took the children to a safe house and then to hiding addresses throughout the country.

In just a few hundred square meters, we have two very important sites, said Gringold. One extremely burdened, sad, guilty landscape the main site of deportations where most people who were imprisoned were deported and murdered. And on the other side, we have this site where 600 Jewish lives were rescued.

The museum contains 2,500 items, including hundreds donated by survivors. Its installations include mementos from unknown victims along with stories of the Jewish and non-Jewish resistance. One exhibit is dedicated to the deluge of bureaucratic regulations that progressively restricted, segregated, robbed and finally deported Jews.

Schrijver said it was important to him that the museum feel much like its predecessor during the war: a bright, airy school building with sun streaming through the windows.

A large majority of Holocaust museums worldwide, especially from the past, are dark places where the walls are dark gray or dark brown to transmit a feeling of narrowness whereas the persecution and murder of the Jews happened during full daylight, he said. So you want this to be a light place and, if you put it bluntly, the darkness comes from the content.

Though Schrijver and Gringold pushed for years to dedicate a museum exclusively to Holocaust history, they have not escaped the shadow of the present. As they prepared to open a museum about the impact of exclusion and dehumanization, the organizers said they were compelled to issue a statement on Israels war in Gaza, which began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

In a statement, the Jewish Cultural Quarter said it supported a just and secure resolution for all those directly involved, including Israels right to exist and Palestinians right to autonomy.

The presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog during a dedication ceremony the day before the museums opening drew more than 1,000 pro-Palestinian protesters.

Gringold said she is heavy-hearted about the war in Israel and Gaza and the pall it cast over the museum opening. But she said she believed the museum she has labored over for 20 years would prove to hold a message that lasts beyond any particular moment.

I didnt work so hard on this museum for an opening event, I built this museum for a long-term event, a trend that we have been witnessing for many years that knowledge about the mass murder of Jews in occupied Europe is diminishing, that we take democracy, the order of law, European cooperation and human rights for granted, said Gringold. Its important that we know what the alternative was just over 80 years ago. We seem to forget that slowly as a nation, and when we dont know about what humans are capable of, we are at risk of repeating history.

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The Netherlands, home to the Nazis' most famous victim, has never had a Holocaust museum until now - JTA News - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

He won the Oscar for his Holocaust film, but the Holocaust his people experienced on Oct. 7 does not interest him – Ynetnews

Posted By on March 13, 2024

In 1938, the film "Olympia" by the famous director Leni Riefenstahl was released in Germany. The film documented the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and was intended to market the idea of white supremacy as a continuation of the muscular athletes in ancient Greece. The film and the director won countless praises and awards. However, during her visit to the U.S. half a year later, the events of Kristallnacht broke out and many of the Jews and members of the filmmaking community in Hollywood were less forgiving of the message.

Since then, things have changed, and today the trend is the complete opposite of the one that dominated Hollywood 86 years ago. While in Eastern European countries you can still find deep-rooted, religious antisemitism full of stereotypes, in the West, the lexicon has long been changed. Jew hatred OUT, Zionism hatred IN.

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Jonathan Glazer, winner of the Best International Feature Film award for 'The Zone of Interest'

(Photo: Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images)

Members of Congress refuse to condemn the Hamas attack on October 7, and the presidents of the most prestigious universities stated that the attacks on the Jewish students on their campuses are "context dependent." None of them will admit that she or the organization she belongs to hates Jews, but they and their institutions have no problem opposing Zionism. Hatred of Jews is interpreted as racism that belongs to the "old" world, while hatred and the opposition to Zionism are welcomed in the West today, marketed as a compassionate flavor of romantic and righteous opposition to colonialism. All antisemites must do is change the language a little, deny Israel's right to exist and these same old ideas will be embraced by the entertainment and media elite.

In our current climate it is not easy to be a Jewish or pro-Israeli artist, as evidenced by the events of last weekend in the U.S,: the Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu was forced to cancel a performance in Chicago due to threats of demonstrations against him; and pro-Palestinian demonstrators broke into the artist Michal Rovner's exhibition in New York. These acts are a direct result of the violent pro-Palestinian protests currently taking place.

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Cars left behind by Nova music festival-goers on October 7

(Photo: Yuval Chen)

Still, it is impossible to understand the statement of the Jewish-British director Jonathan Glazer, when he went up to give an acceptance speech at the Oscar ceremony on Sunday, after his film "The Zone of Interest" won the best foreign film award. It was an extraordinary example of bowing to the standards of the entertainment world.

"Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst," Glazer said. "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, this humanization, how do we resist?"

In other words, here is irony at its best in that a Jewish director, who earned the highest of honors in filmmaking thanks to a Holocaust film full of superlatives, designed to illustrate the juxtaposition between the comfortable life of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hess and his family and the horrors that happened right across the yard of their home, then draws a line between that time and present-day Israel. If in the movie the Nazis are the ones who are clearly responsible for the dehumanization, it is quite clear, reading between the lines, who embodies them in today's reality.

Not only do Glazer and his co-creators "refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked," but he also refuses to identify with Israel at this time and points an accusing finger at her. The victims of the October 7 massacre and the victims in Gaza are the same as far as he is concerned. What is happening in the Gaza Strip is not Israel's just war of existence but a "continuous attack," and the whole war was created in the first place because of the Israeli "occupation."

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Pro-Palestinian protesters in Greece

(Photo: AP / Yorgos Karahalis)

In a different time, this could have been considered another harsh yet legitimate criticism of Israel. But, in the days when the anti-Israel demonstrators call for its complete destruction - "from the river to the sea" - and the dehumanization of innocent citizens who were abducted from their beds into the tunnels in Gaza, is precisely where the moral courage of Jewish artists in the Diaspora is needed.

The problem is that if you want to continue to be a relevant and respected artist, you need to align yourself with those who call for an immediate cease-fire and call out Israel. In stark contrast to his film, at least in one way Glazer made us miss 1938, the days when Hollywood knew the difference between good and bad.

Raheli Baratz -Rix is head of the Department for Combating Antisemitism and Enhancing Resilience at The World Zionist Organization

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He won the Oscar for his Holocaust film, but the Holocaust his people experienced on Oct. 7 does not interest him - Ynetnews

‘The people of Israel live’: President Herzog comments on protest outside Dutch Holocaust museum – The Jerusalem Post

Posted By on March 13, 2024

During a visit to the Rosh Pina Jewish School in Amsterdam on Monday, President Isaac Herzog, accompanied by the leaders of the Dutch Jewish community, commented on the mass anti-Israel, pro-Gaza demonstration that took place during the inauguration ceremony outside the ancient Portuguese Synagogue where it was held.

He said the demonstration was very aggressive, but it did not frighten anyone attending the ceremony inside.However, he felt that his Dutch hosts were angry and embarrassed by such violent and disrespectful behavior, especially during the inauguration of a National Holocaust Museum.

In an open conversation with the students, Herzog was asked whether he had a message for them.

He replied that he had more than one. The people of Israel live. Dont forget that. We are a nation that has experienced hell and the most shocking atrocities. Yet we rebuilt ourselves and the beautiful State of Israel, which we defend. We have to keep on building, and we must safeguard Israels open, multicultural democracy and the Jewish tradition.

Herzog also met with presumptive Dutch prime minister Geert Wilders, who promised that the Netherlands would fight terrorism in all its forms.

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'The people of Israel live': President Herzog comments on protest outside Dutch Holocaust museum - The Jerusalem Post

America and the Holocaust InkFreeNews.com – InkFreeNews.com

Posted By on March 13, 2024

Warsaw Community Public Library is one of 50 U.S. libraries newly selected to host Americans and the Holocaust, a traveling exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association that examines the motives, pressures and fears that shaped Americans responses to Nazism, war and genocide in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

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America and the Holocaust InkFreeNews.com - InkFreeNews.com

At Oscars, ‘Zone of Interest’ director calls out ‘Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked’ by Israel – St. Louis Jewish Light

Posted By on March 13, 2024

By PJ Grisar, The Forward

A24

The historical drama The Zone of Interest focuses on the SS Nazi Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hss who lives with his family in a home next to the concentration camp.

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forwards free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

Director Jonathan Glazer denounced Israels prosecution of the war against Hamas in his acceptance speech for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards on Sunday night, linking what he called dehumanization in the ongoing attack in Gaza and in Israel during Oct. 7 to the Holocaust setting of his film The Zone of Interest.

The film, which tracks the daily lives of the overseer of Auschwitz and his family, Glazer said, was made to reflect and confront us in the present not to say, Look what they did then, rather, Look what we do now,

Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present, he said, adding that he resents 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?

Glazer, wearing glasses, read from a paper and appeared anxious. The audience responded with applause, and the lead actress in Zone of Interest, Sandra Hller, watched him in tears.

A number of stars wore red lapel pins from the group Artists for Ceasefire during Sundays ceremony, including Mahershala Ali, Mark Ruffalo and Billie and Finneas Eilish, and Ramy Youssef, who explained the button on the red carpet.

Were calling for peace and justice lasting justice for the people of Palestine, Youssef, star of the hit show Ramy, told Variety. And I think its a universal message of just: Lets stop killing kids. Lets not be part of more war.

Later in the evening, Mstyslav Chernov, the Ukrainian journalist whose 20 Days in Mariupol took the Oscar for Best Documentary, spoke similarly about the tragedy that unfolded there.

I will probably be the first director on this stage to say that I wish I had never made this film, Chernov said. I wish to be able to exchange this for Russia never attacking Ukraine, never invading our cities. I wish to be able to exchange this for Russian not killing 10,000 of my fellow Ukrainians.

Glazers speech marks the highest profile invocation of the Israel-Hamas war and the first to be rooted in Jewish identity during this awards season. It was notable, too, for calling out dehumanization also directed at the victims of Oct. 7.

At the Grammy Awards, Annie Lennox called for a ceasefire after her tribute to Sinead OConnor.

At previous awards shows, members of Glazers team have mentioned the dehumanization central to the film. His producer, James Wilson, also tied the film to innocent people killed in Gaza or Yemen at the BAFTAs the British Oscars. Composer Mica Levi, accepting their award from the London Critics Circle last month called for a ceasefire and change in the Middle East.

Numerous articles about The Zone of Interest, notably one by David Klion last week in The New York Times, saw in the film a parable for the suffering Gaza and the numbness onlookers might feel in the face of it.

Glazer dedicated his win to a woman named Alexandria who he met while researching the film. An unnamed character in the film, a Polish girl who planted fruit for prisoners in the trenches outside Auschwitz, was based on Alexandria, who told Glazer she had done just that when she was 12.

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At Oscars, 'Zone of Interest' director calls out 'Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked' by Israel - St. Louis Jewish Light

Why the director of ‘One Life’ wasn’t afraid to make a feel-good Holocaust movie – Haaretz

Posted By on March 13, 2024

News Life and Culture Columnists and Opinion Haaretz Hebrew and TheMarker Partnerships

Haaretz.com, the online English edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, gives you breaking news, analyses and opinions about Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved

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Why the director of 'One Life' wasn't afraid to make a feel-good Holocaust movie - Haaretz

Guardian of Vatican secrets: Pius XII took his reason for Holocaust silence to the grave – ROME REPORTS TV News Agency

Posted By on March 13, 2024

Few know that the organization behind the 1922 conclave faced serious financial difficulties. Or that inside the Vatican there were cardinals who became Mussolini's spies. Or that Galileo contrary to what many believewas not tortured.

These are just some of the stories known to the Vatican archivist, Bishop Sergio Pagano. He has been organizing the thousands of documents in the Vatican Apostolic Archives for decades and knows the ins and outs of many controversial episodes.

Some of those stories have been captured in the book Secretum, where, for the first time, Pagano speaks at length about many aspects of Vatican history.

For example, Bishop Pagano came to the conclusion that Benedict XV, the pope of World War I, poorly chose his collaborators which led to financial problems.

BP. SERGIO PAGANO Prefect, Vatican Apostolic Archives He had weaknesses in friendships. So when he died in 1922, his safe was empty. Money had to be borrowed from the United States to make the conclave possible.

Pope John Paul II asked Pagano to study in depth the material on the trial of Galileo. In the book, the archivist recalls how there was a cardinal who invited him to his home to tell him this:

If you find among Galileo's documents anything that could harm the Church, destroy it."

By studying Vatican documents, Pagano has even developed his own idea on why Pope Pius XII did not condemn the Holocaust during the war.

BP. SERGIO PAGANO Prefect, Vatican Apostolic Archives The further we proceeded in our research, we discovered more letters even from German Catholics denouncing the extermination camps to the Pope. But at the same time, they told the Pope: don't talk. Don't reveal your sources because we risk our lives. I believe that he did not want to say anything because of the terrible idea about Hitler's madness that he had when he was nuncio in Germany. It would have caused such a fire that would have devastated Europe even more and would have provoked an infinite massacre. This is what I believe, although whatever was the real reason for his silence, he took to his grave. He was well aware of what his silence implied.

Pagano acknowledges that the Vatican's history is troubled, but says he has seen more light than shadows in its archives.

"Now people want to make others believe that the Church is made up of pedophiles, of unbalanced, deluded people, but it is not true at all.

Pagano insists that when interpreting history, it is very important not to lose sight of the context that the events took place.

JRB TR: AT

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Guardian of Vatican secrets: Pius XII took his reason for Holocaust silence to the grave - ROME REPORTS TV News Agency


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