The Pink Floyd musician and outspoken BDS proponent was one high-profile attendee at the screening of the film that he narrated.
A group of pro-Israel students at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have condemned a recent film screening on campus hosted by a pro-Palestinian group, accusing the event of perpetuating antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The Students for Justice in Palestine movement held a screening on November 30 at UCLA of the film “The Occupation of the American Mind,” a cinematic creation that claims to expose “Israel’s public relations war with the world.”
The popular cross-campus pro-Palestinian student movement, often holds pro-BDS and pro-Palestine events, lectures and activities on campuses across the US in an attempt to raise awareness for its cause.
The screening of the film at UCLA was widely publicized and was also followed by a discussion with the film’s producer, Sut Jhally.
One high-profile attendee at the screening was the film’s narrator, Roger Waters, the renowned Pink Floyd musician and outspoken proponent of the BDS movement against Israel.
The documentary film has come under fire for its approach in purporting to show the different ways in which Jewish Americans as well as Israeli activists do everything in their capacity to lobby pro-Israel ideas, laws and actions in favor of Israel; thus developing an ever-growing operation that seeks to gain control of the American government and public opinion.
While some of the student body at UCLA attended the event and reportedly had a positive reaction, others were alarmed by the event and the discussion that followed it.
In an article submitted to UCLA’s newspaper, the Daily Bruin, a group of pro-Israel students expressed their concerns and even bewilderment at the university’s administration for enabling what they said was a blatantly antisemitic event on university grounds.
“The film is an intellectualization of the centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that a group of powerful, manipulative and domination-obsessed Jews have gained control of politics and media through a combination of wealth, power, influence and deceit,” read the letter penned by two students and endorsed the representatives of several campus groups. “The film asserts that through sheer mendacity and careful scheming, Jews concocted stories of suffering, when in reality, they were the true oppressors.”
“Rather than initiate a constructive dialogue about the role of the media in this conflict, ‘The Occupation of the American Mind’ devotes its energy to flirting with and perpetuating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” the students lamented. “Our interest in writing this piece is not to silence the viewpoints put forth by the film. Rather than silencing voices, our goal is to combat ‘bad speech’ with constructive speech.”
They explained that while they are both eager to promote their fellow students’ constitutional rights such as freedom of speech, they were disappointed in those from the student body who backed the event, charging that they provided a platform of “identity-based hatred” that violated the university’s code of conduct.
“Along with their right to screen this film comes our moral responsibility to call it what it is: inflammatory, anti-Semitic propaganda,” stated the letter criticizing the film screening.
The group of pro-Israel students said that they felt their peers had failed to discern between pro-Palestinian activities and antisemitic agendas.
The article, published December 1, garnered the response of many who echoed their hopes to put a stop to antisemitic activities in student campuses across the US.
Original article was published in The Jerusalem Post here.
The Radicalism of Roger Waters
Hatred and Discord at UCLA and a Campus Near You
Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters recently narrated a film entitled “The Occupation of the American Mind,” which purports to expose a vast conspiracy between the “Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby…to shape American media coverage of the [Israeli-Arab] conflict in Israel’s favor.”
Other participants in the film include: Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist who has expressed support for deadly rock-throwing attacks against Israelis as a “birthright and duty” of the Palestinians; Max Blumenthal, whose anti-Israel tirades are favorites of the arch anti-Semite and white supremacist David Duke; and Stephen Walt, best-known as the author of a controversial book alleging that a pro-Israel lobby controls American foreign policy in the Middle East.
In fact, nearly every supposed expert participating in this film is at best highly critical of Israel — and at worst entirely hostile to Israel and her very right to exist — immediately ruling out any chance that it is meant to be a serious and balanced critique of a lack of diverse perspectives in the American media.
Waters himself has previously compared Israel to Nazi Germany, saying that when it comes to Israel, “the parallels with what went on in the 30’s in Germany are so crushingly obvious,” blamed a mythical “Jewish lobby” for a lack of support for his views within Hollywood and the wider United States (disturbingly mirroring anti-Semitic canards of extreme Jewish power), and downplayed and almost tacitly supported the firing of rockets into Israel by the Hamas terrorist organization.
But perhaps the best evidence that this film was created as pure propaganda rather than a scholarly pursuit is its stamp of approval from the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). SJP is the leading anti-Israel organization on US campuses, well known for its radical views and tactics — which we at Creative Community For Peace (CCFP) would argue often infringe upon freedom of speech.
SJP makes a habit of disrupting and shutting down events which present narratives with which they disagree. Just this year, SJP chapters have disrupted events from Georgetown to UC Irvine, from the University of Maryland to the University of New Mexico — among many others — that were deemed to be too pro-Israel.
Earlier this year, for example, SJP at UC Irvine was chastised by university administrators for violating student conduct policies after disrupting the screening of an Israeli film. In 2014, the SJP chapter at Loyola University in Chicago was suspended for blocking Jewish students from attending an event. And that same year, SJP at UCLA was reprimanded by the president of the University of California system for violating the principles of “civility, respect, and inclusion.”
Today, Waters himself is set to participate in a screening of the film with SJP at UCLA. Isn’t it rather telling that this film — criticizing the media for only showing one narrative, highlighting only one side of a complex conflict, is being screened by an organization that makes a habit of silencing all narratives but their own?
That a cohort of those who have expressed their desire to eradicate Israel as the Jewish homeland has produced a film without balance is no surprise. But to those us us who wish to build bridges, it is quite disheartening.
This film may soon be coming to a campus near you, bringing a myopic narrative — which is counterproductive to the nuances a peace resolution requires — in the hope of isolating Israel in the form of boycotts, helping to deny Israelis and Palestinians the opportunity to achieve the diplomacy and dialogue so necessary needed to form the mutual respect, compromise, and cooperation on which the road to peace will ultimately be paved.
As always, we at CCFP — an organization comprised of prominent entertainment industry executives devoted to promoting the arts as a means to peace and to countering the cultural boycott of Israel — are disappointed that Roger Waters, who could do such good in the world by raising his voice for peace, has instead chosen to align himself with the voices of hatred and discord.