And What Have We Done?
We think we can orchestrate our growth with good jobs, relationships, and positive mindsets; in reality, true growth occurs during human catastrophes.
We need to talk about us. The people. Society. And what have we done? I tend to not talk about celebrities in the times of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time unfolding on our phones, but last week with the Oscars, the celebrity culture intertwined with The Military Industrial Complex, better yet - danced with it, so here we are.
Yesterday, Variety magazine published an Open Letter, signed by Over 450 Jewish creatives and professionals, denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’ Oscars Speech, in which he “refuted (his and his producing partners) Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people”.
Denouncing the refute? Is this real life? More on this below.
All human catastrophe, and especially the ones of this magnitude we are currently witnessing in Gaza - lifts the masks. From the government and the people in power, celebrities you admire, your friends, family, followers on social media. There’s nothing anyone can say anymore, confronted with what they have done during this time.
There’s hope here folks. For every individual who callously ignores or even endorses violence against a starving, defenseless population under siege, there comes another, seemingly out of thin air, who restores your faith in humanity.
I know what you’re thinking; it’s hard to imagine what could be hopeful amidst images and videos of children being blown to pieces, but it’s precisely in these moments that we find our collective clarity. We think we can orchestrate our growth with good jobs, relationships, opportunities, and positive mindsets; in reality - actual, real growth happens during human catastrophes.
There’s nothing poetic or meaningful about mass death; its significance lies solely in its reflection of society. Since October, faced with the greatest horror of our time, how have we fared? The society that often ponders, "If we had lived through the Holocaust, surely we would have taken action," we now confront our own response.
And how did people with huge platforms respond? Successful, famous people, followed by millions? Their apparent concern seems to vanish when faced with the “complexity” of the present crisis, revealing a superficiality that prioritizes image over genuine care. “Hollywood is more of a PEP squad: progressive except for Palestine” as Dave Zirin hauntingly called them out in his piece for The Nation.
“Palestine is a litmus test”, we heard early last October, but we had no idea the unraveling would be so painful to watch. People you loved to see on screen praying for Israel on their Instagrams alongside an image of a leveled Gaza Strip or deleting an image of children in Gaza looking at the skies in horror upon learning those aren’t Israeli kids but Palestinian ones. Heart-wrenching captions alongside a visually striking image of the wrong kids whose imminent fate don’t deserve your public sympathy, let alone action.
Dystopia struck abruptly, realizing people you admired are, at best, selective in their humanitarian efforts, while others are merely performative, catering to Instagram likes. Mind you, these are the very Hollywood liberals who once recoiled at MAGA in disbelief. Yet now, they find themselves entangled in the same “frenzy of bloodlust, dehumanizing rhetoric, and willful ignorance of facts that they vehemently denounced in the MAGA movement” - as Fredrick Joseph phrased it.
You may ask yourself why am I particularly hard on celebrities, while so many people aren’t speaking out? Because they have a DUTY, as human beings with large platforms and the adoration of many to USE that privilege in pressuring governments to stop mass death. Because they have been telling us for years they care about human life, suffering, human rights, climate issues - to expand their public profiles, and now have a RESPONSIBILITY to act on decades of their empty talk. Because they smirk at the far-right for supporting Trump, a leader who cares little about laws, empathy, and humanity; yet support the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, choosing to believe fairytales about the most sophisticated army on earth slaughtering 30,000 + civilians in “self-defense”.
Again, Fredrick Joseph wraps it up with a perfect bow:
“This introspection leads to an uncomfortable truth about these liberals: the liberalism they profess is a privilege, a garment worn with exclusivity, extended only to those deemed worthy of humanity. It is a selective liberalism, conditional and bounded, a travesty of the very ideals it purports to uphold.
In this light, the struggle for Palestinian liberation becomes not just a fight against an external oppressor but also a battle against an internal contradiction, a hypocrisy within the ranks of those who claim to stand for justice and equality. This is the dilemma at the heart of the matter — the reckoning with a liberalism that is, for some, only skin deep.”
Where is the hope I mentioned above, the hope I’m trying to sell you here? Well, hope is in the - freedom.
You are free.
We are free from these people.
I feel free. I’m no longer disappointed in famous and/or successful people who don’t use their large platform to speak out on mass murder, I’m free of holding myself to their standards of jobs, success, lifestyle. I no longer see their houses, projects, or large checks as something I’m striving for or longing for. I don’t see their vacation images on yachts in the middle of winter and sigh; instead, I pity their ambivalence. They are ridiculous to me. I pity the lack of their moral compass, I pity their panic about losing opportunities; these people aren’t free.
Me and you, we are free.
You still don’t see it?
Are you a person who doesn’t fall into the trap of tribalism where you instantly side with “your people” or the “people that look like you”?
Are you a person who is critical of your own (state, nation, religion), as that is the highest form of patriotism, intelligence, and consciousness?
Are you a person who is so disgusted by the horrors inflicted on other humans that you never even considered the repercussions your speaking out might have on your privilege?
Are you a person who, upon the first missile dropped on a civilian population, felt an instant collective clarity and responsibility for the less privileged?
Congratulations, you are FREE.
As we've witnessed over the past 6 months, anyone falling short of these standards poses a danger to society.
Yesterday, on that note, Variety Magazine published a letter signed by Over 450 Jewish Creatives and Professionals Denounce Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’ Oscars Speech in an Open Letter. Today, the number of Hollywood elite’s signatures is at 1000 signatures.
As a reminder, at last Sunday’s Oscars, Jonathan Glazer won best international film for “The Zone of Interest”. For his Oscar speech, Glazer said:
“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s 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 innocent people. Whether the victims of October — 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?”
This speech, calling for an end to all dehumanization and the occupation that has been causing mass death for 75 years is dubbed a “controversial acceptance speech.”
Calling for the ending of suffering is controversial unless it’s called for certain people. Not all people, ya’ll.
However, this Open Letter as a response to Jonathan Glazer is NOT called out as controversial:
“We are Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.
We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.
Every civilian death in Gaza is tragic. Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas. The moment Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders is the moment this heartbreaking war ends. This has been true since the Hamas attacks of October 7th.
The use of words like “occupation” to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history.
It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood. The current climate of growing antisemitism only underscores the need for the Jewish State of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s film.”
I have no strength to unpack this statement, past this one paragraph. My mind, as well as my soul, has been violated for 6 months; I’m at my end wits how anyone seemingly sane, intelligent, and successful can utter the words “Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination” at the time when that same nation’s government has indiscriminately killed 30,000 + civilians and is held plausible for a gencode by the highest court on earth. Or “Israel is not targeting civilians, it is targeting Hamas”, an exceptional example of tribalism I mentioned above; as if they are sitting in that war cabinet and know who Israeli officials are targeting, instead of their pool houses on Mulholland. Don’t even get me started on “blood libel”. Is this a game of Jumanji, or real life? Or the grand finale - “The use of words like “occupation” to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years”. I'm not one for the loss for words, but emotionally, I don't have any to describe people claiming to defend a biblical homeland while Israel is internationally recognized as the occupying power in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
So I will let Jonathan Cook break it down for you. In this stunning piece, he is commenting on Norman Finkelstein’s book “The Holocaust Industry” and says:
“A follow-up book called the Antisemitism Industry, an investigation into much the same group of people, is now overdue. These ghouls don’t care about antisemitism – in fact, they rub shoulders with the West’s most prominent antisemites, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orban.
Rather, they care about Israel – and the weaponization of antisemitism to protect their emotional and financial investment. They profit from Israel’s central place in US political, diplomatic and military life:
as a giant real-estate laundering exercise, based on the theft of native Palestinian land;
as a laboratory for the production of new weapons and surveillance systems tested on Palestinians;
as a heavily militarized colonial state, a spearpoint for the West, useful in destabilizing and disrupting any threat of a unifying Arab nationalism in the oil-rich Middle East;
and as the frontier state for eroding legal and ethical principles developed after the Second World War to stop a repeat of those atrocities.
Glazer’s crime at the Oscars was to threaten the Antisemitism Industry’s stranglehold on the West’s narrative about Israel.
In Britain, the Antisemitism Industry calls them the “wrong kind of Jews” – Jews who care about all human suffering, not just Jewish suffering. Jews who refuse to let Israel commit crimes against the Palestinian people in their name. Jews who rightly described as a witch-hunt the smearing of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, including his Jewish supporters, as antisemites.
Glazer seized the rare opportunity provided by the awards ceremony this week to grab the microphone from the Antisemitism Industry and represent a Jewish voice that westerners are not supposed to hear. He used the Oscars as a platform to highlight Palestinian suffering – and to suggest that it is normal to care about Palestinian suffering as much as it is Israeli and Jewish suffering.
In doing so, he threatened, like Finkelstein before him, to expose the fact that these antisemitism witchfinder generals are dangerous charlatans, conmen in the true sense.
Unlike the Antisemitism Industry, Glazer has profound, universal things to say about the Holocaust and the human condition. He makes his living from tapping deeply into his humanity, insight and creativity, not wielding his power like a bludgeon to terrorize everyone else into submission.”
You still don’t feel your freedom? You could be like Jonathan Glazer in this world, a man who used his one-in-a-lifetime professional success to shed light on the suffering of others, without concern for how many doors might close for him.
Or you could be a Hollywood creative who has internet access and yet signs the letter stating Israel isn’t committing genocide but is fighting against its own extermination - against stateless, defenseless people without an army.
Or you could be Sean Lennon, a man-boy who hasn’t had an original thought his entire life. He keeps winning the lottery after the lottery, first by merely being born to such a father; all there, laid out for him by his parents - yet can’t seem to seize any win.
At the Oscars, yet another such opportunity presented itself, and the timing was pure poetry. Sean was a co-writer and a co-producer on an animated short movie called War Is Over!, based on his parents’ famous anti-war song - WAR IS OVER, If You Want It (Happy Xmas). They won.
Take a walk with me.
Two weeks before the Oscars, Sean sat down for the episode of Making Of, featuring the animated short’s writer/director Dave Mullins, and producer Brad Booker. In it, Dave Mullins gave us an account of his conversation with director Peter Jackson whose company Wētā FX created the animation and visual effects for the animated short, in January of 2022: “The Ukraine war has just broken out 2 weeks earlier and he (Peter) felt the way we did, which was a very important moment. There was a moment in the film where we really go there, it’s dark, you see the cost the innocents pay in a war, not only soldiers, but an innocent, and he said: do you have to do that? And I said: Peter, this is a whole point of this, is that we show the gravity of what war is and the effect it has on people.”
Brad Booker, the producer added: “For this reason, the world needs this message more than ever, and at that point (the song) was at its 50th anniversary and Peter knew he could help bring this thing to a new audience and people that really needed to hear it at that moment in time”.
Then Sean comes on in the Making Of, linking it again so you can hear it for yourself, a phenomenon of what a 48-year-old man said on camera during an active genocide happening in this world: “I’ve always been a fan of the messenger pigeons in wars, you know, the idea that these pigeons are kind of war heroes and that they should be, like, lauded in the same way that the soldiers are, because they are risking their lives and, you know, ultimately, you know, possibly saving human lives, so I’ve always found that to be very romantic and interesting”.
Do you feel freedom yet? Do you feel the weight off your shoulders seeing these people, hearing these people?
This trio of losers won an Oscar for an animated short about a WAR, based on one of the most famous ANTI-WAR songs in history, made by the most famous ANTI-WAR activist and protestor on planet Earth, and they won it during an ACTIVE genocide. They went on stage to pick up an award for a movie about a WAR, honoring JOHN LENNON, a person who made not one, but three most famous anti-war songs in the history of mankind, and said nothing. Not a peep; even if they had said just the names of these songs, it would mean they honored John and his activism. These are the people, who, I repeat - stated the whole point of their movie “is that we show the gravity of what war is and the effect it has on people”.
Are we present on Earth currently? This was the moment to take the stage, to have the courage, to pressure those in power in front of the billions of people watching it.
Then Sean steps up to the mic, embodying the self-centered mass of nothingness he’s always been, and instead of honoring his father, who lost his life for his relentless campaigning for anti-war, anti-establishment, and whoever tells you it’s for other mundane reasons is just not that intelligent, and says nothing about the current ongoing slaughter of the purposely starved civilian population under siege. Instead, he initiates the audience to congratulate Mother’s Day to his mother, desperate to say his parent’s name, once again reminding us who he is, instead of using his privilege, his platform, and his fresh Oscar win to draw attention to the human catastrophe that would send his father to agony, if he were here to witness it.
John did for the Vietnam War what you have been doing for 6 months on the streets of New York, London, Washington, Dublin, Berlin, Amsterdam, and the whole world, for Gaza. John would be on the streets of Manhattan with you now, taking all the government officials to town on his Twitter. He would be relentless today, as he was then.
If you haven’t seen the documentary The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, now is the time. Since his own son won’t do the job of reminding people what his father did in the times of war, death, and suffering for the previous war the U.S. inflicted on a foreign nation, let’s pick up the slack here. It’s hugely important, for all of you who are appalled with what our government is doing now, to see the parallel between what they did then. For all of you who are stunned by the social media suppression, censorship, threats, and free speech violations about Palestine; watch the U.S. Government try to silence John and get him deported, for opposing the reelection of Richard Nixon as president in 1972, and his anti-war and anti-Nixon campaigns.
In light of the U.S. Government being in the process of banning TikTok to suppress pro-Palestinian Z Gen voices, it is eerie to see how, then, Nixon viewed John, a Beatle, an extremely influential celebrity - a potential nuisance in an election year. He was even caught on tape (this guy and tapes!) with, I believe it was his chief of staff, discussing how “we gotta get rid of this guy, this guy can sway an election”. Nixon eventually won the election year in 1972, the one John was protesting like we are protesting Genocide Joe today, but the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to drop its case.
Gore Vidal offered some answers: "Anybody who sings about love, harmony, and life, is dangerous to somebody who sings about death. Lennon was a born enemy of the U.S. He was everything they hated."
In the song that the animated short his son received an Oscar for last week was based on, John is repeatedly asking - “and what have you done?”
“So this is Christmas
And what have you done?
War is over
And what have you done?
War is over
If you want it
And what have you done?”
What have we done?
When history documents this genocide masquerading as a war, among all the people discussed in this article, what is the category we fall into? Are you content with where you stand?
And what have we done?
This man is saving grace for so many
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻