12 / Paradise Now
In the news lately we heard about allegations that Israelis, in their latest war in Gaza, had used civilians as human shields. One of the strongest argument by Israel against Palestine was that the civilian death-toll was so large because Hamas put its fighters in civilian areas to launch their rockets into Israel. This use of human shields was decried as cowardly and illegal. Propaganda indeed is a dirty business, and how about truth being the first casualty in war?!
On the subject of Israel/Palestine, I just remembered a Palestinian movie from a couple of years ago, Paradise Now. It was directed by Dutch/Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad and co-produced by Amir Harel, a Jewish Israeli. In an interview with Jewish American Tikkun magazine, Abu-Assad was asked "When you look ahead now, what gives you hope?", "The conscience of the Jewish people" he answered. "The Jews have been the conscience of humanity, always, wherever they go. Not all Jews, but part of them. Ethics. Morality. They invented it! I think Hitler wanted to kill the conscience of the Jews, the conscience of humanity. But this conscience is still alive ... maybe a bit weak ... but still alive. Thank God.”
The film humanizes the plight of Palestinians and puts a human face on a suicide bomber. Very controversial, of course, and leftish Stephen Holden, in his October 28, 2005 article in the New York Times, applauded the suspense and plot twists in the movie, and the risks involved humanizing suicide bombers, saying "it is easier to see a suicide bomber as a 21st-century Manchurian Candidate - a soulless, robotic shell of a person programmed to wreak destruction - than it is to picture a flesh-and-blood human being doing the damage.”
For the sake of balance, I enclose the backlash from the Right: Irit Linur, an Israeli novelist and screen-writer, wrote in a February 7, 2006 article in Ynet News that Paradise Now is "an exciting, quality Nazi film." She claims that the sophisticated techniques and symbolism are used to present caricatures, recycle antisemitic myths and even introduce christological associations in the film.
So there!
(with research from Wikipedia)