Judeosphere

The BDS movement is well on its way to becoming the most successful, imaginary sanctions movement in recent history.

In recent weeks, a letter (see below) was sent to film schools, urging them to boycott the Tel Aviv University Student Film Festival. The letter’s signatories included James Cameron and Jane Fonda.

James Cameron did not sign PACBI Letter to Film Schools

However, it turns out that Cameron and Fonda did not sign the letter. According to the Jerusalem Post: “The two activists whose names appear in an e-mail accompanying the letter and forwarded on to the Post – York University film professor John Greyson and Canada-based filmmaker Kathy Wazana – did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Post. But in an e-mail seen to come from Wazana and obtained by the Post, Wazana referred to Fonda and Cameron having been included as a ‘joke.’”

The blog Divest This!, devoted to debunking BDS hoaxes, had this to say:

Just to be clear, the person explaining the behavior of the “Team Boycott” is a fully grown adult. I need to mention this because I occasionally have to deal with similar excuses for inexcusable behavior, but usually from my children (both of whom are below the 11-year-old age threshold needed to attend Hogwarts).

It was a joke, it was a parody, it was a pun… That’s their response to why a letter sent to film schools, written in a deadly earnest tone, asking them shun their fellow film makers because of their Israeli nationality, concluded with fake signatures from not just Cameron, but Jane Fonda as well.

“Take me seriously!!!” cries out from every sentence of their original letter. “We care about the suffering masses more than you do! We are the moral lodestone you should follow! Do what we say because we are serious thinkers, serious activists, serious people!”

And then when their hand gets caught in the cookie jar, and this turns out to be just the latest in a long, long line of boycott-and-divestment related hoaxes, their only response is to say “just kidding” and pretend the whole thing never happened.

Meanwhile, one person who is definitely on record for supporting the boycott is anti-Zionist activist Tony Greenstein, who throws Godwin’s Law out the window to make this statement:

Thus the Israeli artistic establishment, with notable exceptions of course, are participants in the Occupation. They intend to lend a hand to repair Israel’s image. Indeed in some ways they are more complicit than the soldiers who beat and shoot because they are helping ensure that the beatings and shootings can continue by presenting an anaesthetised version of an ‘alternative’ Israel of trendy films.

Just as Hitler employed the talents of Leni Riefenstahl to sanitize his regime, so Israel’s film producers and international ones too, lend a hand to portray the breaking of bones and the use of fleschettes in a different light.