German McCarthyism against pro-Palestinian filmmakers
The fight waged in Germany against anti-Semitism increasingly resembles that of US Senator John McCarthy against communism. No one who speaks of the suffering that Israel inflicts on the Palestinians without immediately relativizing that pain by citing the atrocities of Hamas is safe from being publicly accused of being anti-Semitic by the political inquisition.
The persecution has reached such a point that the Secretary of State for Culture, Claudia Roth, and the mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, have announced that they will open an investigation into what happened at the Berlinale awards ceremony, when several winners raised their voices. voice on behalf of the population in Gaza.
“It is unacceptable that international filmmakers do not address the brutal terrorist attack by Hamas against more than 1,000 people who were living in peace and that they did not say a word about the more than 130 hostages who are still being held,” says Roth, for whom he does not condemn “the Hamas' inhumane strategy” is anti-Semitism.
It is not true that Hamas was not talked about and, in fact, the director of the festival, Mariette Rissenbeek, did. But for Roth “it was not enough”. Rissenbeek and his colleague in the Berlinale management, Carlo Chatrian, have been called for consultations and Roth will meet with the future management to “draw conclusions from what happened” and clarify “how it can be guaranteed in the future that the Berlinale is a place free of hate speech, anti-Semitism, racism and all forms of misanthropy.”
It is not known if he will also meet with Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to Germany and with enormous influence in this country.. “Once again, the German cultural scene shows its bias by rolling out the red carpet exclusively to artists who promote the delegitimization of Israel,” maintains the diplomat-in-waiting, as the mayor of Berlin faithfully repeated after the legacy launched the first stone, that “such incidents” do not occur again.
The incidents to which he refers took place at the closing gala of the Berlinale. Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra, awarded for a documentary about the West Bank, asked when collecting the award that Germany stop sending weapons to Israel. “It is very difficult for me to celebrate when tens of thousands of my people are being massacred and murdered by Israel in Gaza,” said Adra, whose words were received with applause and cheers from the audience.. His filming partner, and ultimately Israeli, Yuval Abraham, addressed “the people who have power in this room, ministers, people whose voices are heard” to demand “a ceasefire, a political solution and the end of the Israeli occupation. The American Ben Russell went further and spoke of genocide. The International Court of Justice has not yet ruled on that matter, but to Roth, all those statements of support for the Palestinians seemed “shockingly one-sided and characterized by a deep hatred of Israel.”
The Berlinale is the least glamorous festival in the world. Its seal is political, but the fight against anti-Semitism is imposed in Germany and arbitrarily, since there is no universally accepted definition of the term, nor consensus on what is or is not anti-Semitic. Censorship, on the other hand, is well defined.