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| Scene from the HBO series 'Our Boys' (JTA) |
I mention it because of an HBO series called ‘Our Boys’ depicting that event. I admit that I haven’t seen it. Nor is it likely that I will any time soon. I do not subscribe to HBO. Everything that follows is based on a JTA article.
The series is being criticized for being very one-sided. Some of the story told in that series is fictional and some is fact. But fact remains un-separated from fiction in this series. What is true and what isn’t? Who knows! It also glosses over the tragedy that sparked this crime, the brutal murder of 3 Israeli teens just weeks before.
Not that this makes any difference. Khdeir’s murder was inexcusable under any circumstances. Taking the life of an innocent human being in revenge for a murder he had nothing to do with is something ISIS does. Not the Jewish people.
This series seems to be sending a very ominous message. Which in this case is that Jews can be just as bad as ISIS and that the rest of us don’t care about it that much when it happens. I don’t know of any HBO series that discusses the heinous crimes perpetrated against Israelis by Palestinian terrorists on what seems like a regular and endless basis. Just recently a young teenage girl was murdered that way. Where is the series about Palestinian terror? I don’t think you will find one.
This is the problem of the left leaning entertainment industry. Not that they are evil. Or even antisemitic. But that they see underdogs – which in this case are the Palestinians. And Israel - the occupying force responsible for their suffering. All without a shred of context. Palestinians are victims. Israelis are their victimizers.
I’ll bet that the message of a series like this is also to show how the ‘occupation’ has turned people into monsters. People whose parents and grandparents were victimized by Nazi monsters have now themselves become Nazi-like monsters themselves – doing the same kinds of things to Palestinians that Nazis did to the Jewish people over 70 years ago!
I’m sure the Israeli producers of this series believe they are just doing a fair analysis and depiction of reality. Perhaps their goal is to generate sympathy for Palestinian who live under the thumb of the Israeli military. Maybe they want the world to understand what they think they do. Which is how good people can be turned into terrorists. I don’t know. Here is what one of those producers said about their conscious choice to focus on the brutal Israeli murder:
“We were drawn to understanding the perpetrators of this murder more than we were interested in understanding the victimhood of our side,” Hagai Levi, one of the filmmakers, told Drama Quarterly.
Does this not say it all? Well… not ‘all’. Here is another perspective:
Some 120 Israeli families who lost members in terror attacks disagree. They wrote a letter to HBO criticizing the show’s viewpoint, saying it equates two events that differ in significant ways.
“Khdeir’s murder was met with shock and condemnation by the vast majority of the Israeli public,” the parents wrote, according to Israel Hayom. “Dozens of Jews are murdered as a result of the ongoing incitement by the Palestinian Authority every year. The Arab street does not condemn the murder of Jews and even supports and encourages it.”
The Palestinian Authority has a policy of paying stipends to the families of terrorists either in prison or killed in the attacks — a policy that Israel has dubbed “pay to slay.” Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, rarely speaks out against attacks against Israelis, though he did condemn the kidnapping of the teens.
Indeed! That kind of context is precisely what is missing to the liberal mind in our day.They believe that they believe that they have the proper frame of mind to overlook the obvious and find some sort of deeper truth.
There are other examples of this.
About a year ago I saw a movie about the 1976 hijacking of a plane full of Jews, diverting the flight to in Entebbe Airport in Uganda and holding the passengers hostage. What happened there was very clear. Israel’s heroic actions rescued the lives of every passenger but one (if I recall correctly) The hero of that event, Yonatan Netanyahu (the Prime Minister’s brother) was killed in action. And yet the producers of that movie in their infinite stupidly humanized the hijackers by sympathizing with their goal. They practically turned those hijackers into heroes fighting for a just cause. And made Israeli leaders look sinister!
That is how the left thinks sometimes.They believe they are digging deeper and finding truths that the rest of he world does not see..
And then there is this. I am a big fan of Steven Spielberg. He has probably done more for preserving the memory of the Holocaust than any other living human being. But he too was guilty of that kind of thinking. I recall him discussing a movie he was about to make about the aftermath of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 72 Munich Olympics.
The Munich massacre made the entire world have sympathy for the Jewish state. But Spielberg would have none of that. He said he was not about to make a movie that would a seen as cheer leading for Israel. He was going to get at the ‘truth’. He hired Tony Kushner - a leftist Jewish writer and fierce critic of Israel to write the script. Kushner made Israel look pretty bad.
Again, that is how the left thinks. They believe that they think deeper about all issues than most others and try to get at the deeper truth. But at the end of the day they tend to see only one side of any conflict. The underdog side. They are the ones that get hurt and they are the ones that deserve sympathy. I believe that is how the Israeli Jews that produced this HBO series think. They probably believe they have found a deeper truth. A truth that of course makes Israel look bad. And they will probably get away with it. But not here they won’t.