Monday, March 27, 2006
I think you can file this one under "irreconcilable differences," in other words, we just don't see the world the same way. While tens of thousands of people put their names to a petition to shame in the Academy Awards for honoring "Paradise Now" -- the film humanizing suicide bombers -- the Muslim Public Affairs Council will be throwing a "gala dinner" to honor the film and its "Palestinian" director.
Arab American News: 'Paradise Now' and Junoon to receive award
The gala awards dinner will be held on April 29, 2006 at the Marriott Downtown Hotel in Los Angeles.
The Academy Award-nominated "Paradise Now" follows two Palestinian childhood friends who have been recruited for a strike on Tel Aviv and focuses on their last days together as they grapple with the moral and political questions facing Palestinians resisting occupation. When they are intercepted at the Israeli border and separated from their handlers, a young woman who discovers their plan causes them to reconsider their actions [sort of -S]...
As offensive as this is, this pales in comparison to the report written by a staff reporter from the Canadian Jewish News, Sheldon Kirshner, about Omar "Jenin, Jenin" Bakri's appearance at the Voices Now film festival in Toronto earlier this month. The festival itself could have fairly been called the "Pallywood" film festival, but Kirshner managed to make my jaw drop by writing 8 paragraphs about Bakri and his more recent "documentary" about his problems getting Jenin, Jenin screened in Israel without mentioning the reason: it was found in court to be a tissue of lies presenting the IDF as having wantonly massacred hundreds of Palestinians when in fact only 50-odd Palestinians were killed and virtually every one of them an armed combatant, sacrificing the lives of nearly 30 IDF members in the house-to-house search for terrorists responsible for a recent outrage in Intifada II instead of bombing the place from the air.