Jews attack and destroy anyone that says something they don’t like. Octavia Nasr was fired from her job for tweeting she admired Sheik Fadlallah. Helen Thomas was fired for saying Israel should get out of Palestine. Pat Buchanan is the subject of a boycot for saying that Elena Kagan made three Jews on the Supreme Court of The United States of America. Mel Gibson has been the target of multiple jewish plots for making the move “The Passion of Christ”.
A film director received an honorary Oscar because he is old and going to die. His name is Jean Luc Goddard. Jews think Goddard says things that Jews don’t like, so they have gone on the attack to deprive him of his Oscar. You can read about it below.
It should have been a typical acting love-in of the type the beautiful and rich elite of Hollywood do so well. At a lavish dinner last night, the acclaimed French director Jean-Luc Godard was given an honorary Oscar alongside other established greats such as Francis Ford Coppola and the actor Eli Wallach.
There was the usual banquet, mutual backslapping and enough air-kissing to inflate a zeppelin – but that was where the parallels with orthodox movie award ceremonies ended. For not only did the recipient of the gong fail to show up, but he was, in absentia, the subject of fierce debate over whether or not his long commitment to highlighting the plight of Palestinians has crossed over into antisemitism. The question on many people’s lips was: is Godard anti-Zionist or is he anti-Jewish?
In Hollywood there is no greater sin. The debate dominated the build-up banquet, which is held earlier than the globally televised event due in February.
It was a battle fought across the newspapers of America in angry editorials, as well as in the salons and offices of Hollywood movers and shakers. Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, penned an outraged post on the Daily Beast website where he compared Godard’s accolade to the award of an Oscar in 1926 to the director DW Griffith, who was accused of being a racist.
“Just as no one in the film industry could look a black person in the eye after giving an award to Griffith, so it should be just as hard to honour Godard and look history in the eye,” Cohen said.
That followed on from a lengthy piece in the Jewish Journal which put the director on its cover under the headline: “Is Jean-Luc Godard an antisemite?”
The article delved deep into the French director’s body of work and scores of his interviews to examine the question. The reclusive 79-year-old certainly has a long history of supporting the Palestinians, including filming Until Victory, which told the story of the Palestinian struggle against Israel. He once admitted that his grandfather had “ferociously” disliked Jews. “He was anti-Jew; whereas I am anti-Zionist, he was antisemitic,” the director once said.
But some critics say Godard’s work and some of his statements have crossed the line from being critical of Israel and its policies and into antisemitism. In one of his films (Here and There), the director alternates images of Adolf Hitler with Israeli leader Golda Meir. He has criticised films about the Holocaust such as Schindler’s List and Shoah, though often on apparently artistic grounds.
But some other reported statements are less easy to defend, including once calling a friend a “dirty Jew” and, after being asked for back pay by a colleague, saying: “It is always the same, Jews call you when they hear a cash register opening.” In a 1985 interview Godard spoke of the “image of the central European Jew” as being part of Hollywood’s problem with being caught up in debt.
The Jewish Journal went so far as to send a list of these and others of Godard’s supposedly antisemitic statements to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation behind the Oscars. The academy replied that it was aware of the allegations. “Antisemitism is of course deplorable, but the academy has not found the accusations against Godard persuasive,” it said. Some Jewish groups, such as B’nai B’rith International, have condemned the decision to honour Godard.
But the biggest surprise of the controversy might just be the award itself. Godard sprang to fame at the head of the French new wave with ground-breaking works such as Breathless.
Along with other auteurs such as François Truffaut, he rebelled against conventional French cinema and later against Hollywood. They believed that a film was the director’s intellectual vision and should break out of the constraints of straightforward plots and conventional cinematography.
Such attitudes never went down well with mainstream Hollywood, which regarded new wave films as impenetrable, unmarketable and difficult for audiences. None of Godard’s 70 feature films has ever been nominated for an Oscar, despite his international acclaim. That attitude has largely been returned by Godard, whose decision not to attend the ceremony last night means the academy will have to ship the gold statuette to his home in Switzerland.
He once said: “I believe a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” In the highly commercial and brutally cynical world of Hollywood, that sort of sentiment might be more of a reason for shock than any criticism of Israel.