Israel Matzav

Motion Picture Academy gives Oscar to filmmaker who accused Israel

The Zionist Organization of America has condemned a decision by the Motion Picture Academy to grant an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement to French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard has what the ZOA calls an 'unremitting obsession with Jews.'

In 1968, said ZOA, Godard called Jewish producer Pierre Braunberger “sale juif” (“filthy Jew”); in a 1976 documentary he contrasted the lives of a French and Arab family and featured flickering images of Golda Meir and Adolf Hitler, proposing them as comparable tyrants.

According to the statement, Godard has also defended the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, described the State of Israel as “a cancer on the map of the Middle East,” and has justified acts of Arab terrorism by saying that “Israel is a paradoxical form of Nazism’s historical resurgence.”

A more recent anti-Israel comment made by Godard was in a 2009 article in Le Monde, in which he is quoted as making an off-camera comment during the filming of a 2006 documentary: “Palestinians’ suicide bombings in order to bring a Palestinian State into existence ultimately resemble what the Jews did by allowing themselves to be led like sheep to be slaughtered in gas chambers, sacrificing themselves to bring into existence the State of Israel … Basically, there were six million kamikazes …". The odious comparison was followed by his saying that "Hollywood was invented by Jewish gangsters.”

ZOA expresses its disappointment at the Academy’s response when presented by the Forward with some of Godard’s remarks, which read: “The Academy is aware that Jean-Luc Godard has made statements in the past that some have construed as anti-Semitic. We are also aware of detailed rebuttals to that charge. Anti-Semitism is of course deplorable, but the Academy has not found the accusations against M. Godard persuasive.”

Godard won't be there. Read the whole thing.

I guess it couldn't be an Oscar season without a controversy about Israel.

/Sigh

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:55 PM