UN ROLLS OUT RED CARPET TO FETE NEW ANTI-ISRAEL MOVIE
AN E-PAL ASKS….What is the ‘last straw’ exactly, for our continued support and membership in this most corrupt, despicable body of bloody, non-democratic, freedom hating nations? nrg
United Nations Rolls Out the Red Carpet To Fete New Anti-Israel Movie
By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun | March 13, 2011
http://www.nysun.com/editorials/united-nations-rolls-out-the-red-carpet-to-fete/87261/
UNITED NATIONS – The General Assembly, for the first time, will attempt tomorrow evening to morph itself into Hollywood, conducting a red-carpet premiere event that will see diplomats mingling with film stars and cinema moguls – and, in the process, promote an anti-Israeli view of the bloody wars between Arab and Jews.
Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” a tale of the Middle East’s travails through the eyes of a young Palestinian Arab girl, has already received advanced notices as a film heavy on message but short on artistic merit. The event tomorrow is being held over the protest of Jewish organizations and Israeli officials, who had asked the General Assembly’s president, Joseph Deiss of Switzerland, to cancel it.
The film, which will open in American theaters after the Turtle Bay premiere, is based on a novel by Mr. Schnabel’s girlfriend, the Palestinian journalist-turned-celebrity Rula Jebreal. Offering one Arab tale of Israeli-committed horror after another, it ignores Arab violence against Jews, such as this weekend’s slaying of a Jewish couple and their three infant children. Israel has a manhunt underway to find the killers, who, they said, slew the family as the victims slept in their home at Jewish West Bank settlement at Itamar.
“Mr. Schnabel, Ms. Jebreal, actors, celebrities and personalities from the film industry will attend the screening,” Mr. Deiss’s spokesman, Jean Victor Nkolo, said in a press release. “For the first time the United Nations General Assembly Hall will be equipped with the latest technology to serve as the venue for a film premiere,” he added. The film will be screened on a 35 MM PRINT, in a large screen format using a Dolby 5.1 surround system, he said.
Mr. Deiss decided on his own, as president, to screen the movie at the General Assembly hall, according to Mr. Nkolo. “He saw the film and thought it was a good start for a discussion on peace in the Middle East,” Mr. Nkolo told The New York Sun.
As Mr. Deiss basked in stardust, Israeli diplomats were working the phones. The unprecedented use of the General Assembly hall to endorse and promote a commercial movie “is inappropriate and undermines the credibility of the U.N.,” Israel’s deputy ambassador here, Haim Waxman, wrote in a letter to Mr. Deiss. Noting that the Assembly “already deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict excessively and obsessively,” Mr. Waxman added he was “concerned” that the movie showing would serve to harm the image of the world body “in the eyes of many.”
Miral “has a clear political message, which portrays Israel in a highly negative light,” the president of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, added in a letter to Mr. Deiss. Using the General Assembly hall to screen it “will only serve to reinforce the already widespread view that Israel simply cannot expect fair treatment in the U.N.”
The film’s place “is in the theaters,” not the Turtle Bay, Mr. Waxman added in a press release, where he noted that the Israeli U.N. mission was not told in advance of the initiative to turn the hall into a movie theater.
The General Assembly is the institution that voted, on November 29, 1947, to partition mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Miral juxtaposes scenes from that historic vote with highly dramatized Arab suffering in its aftermath, but it skips the fact that the Arab members of the new world body unanimously opposed the plan, while the Jews danced for joy when the vote was announced, celebrating it in the streets of Tel Aviv. So the General Assembly will host on Monday the spectacle of a party that celebrates the opposition its own resolution. Since the 1970s it has annually marked that November 29 date as a day of “solidarity” with the Palestinian people.
A number of negative reviews of Miral have already been published, including in the London Daily Telegraph, which called the film “hamfisted.” Said the Telegraph: “Upfront only with a Vanessa Redgrave cameo, Schnabel wants an effort badge for partisan compassion, but effort — along with any sense of shape, urgency, or ideological engagement — is precisely what’s lacking.”
But Deborah Young, writing at the Hollywood Reporter, suggested Miral may have a chance of swaying some viewers. “Although too schematic and unfocused to garner much critical support, it has the kind of direct simplicity that could reach out to historically challenged audiences – a category that includes most people – and politically minded festival juries,” she wrote.
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