Moore: Jews most oppressed people on Earth
A lot of Muslims are glad of Michael Moore’s “exposé” of George W Bush’s government, Fahrenheit 9/11, even though everyone knows the film is full of half-truths, distortions and cheap shots, as even people who agree with his political views (like Nader-supporters, or ex-supporters) have attested to. A post on the “Bewleyupdates” Yahoo group pointed out this interview with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the former Rabbi of Oxford university, along with a remark from an intermediary, “Now we know why Israel wasn’t mentioned in F9/11”.
To cut a long story short, Boteach met Moore at the Republican convention, where Moore had gone to write a column on it for USA Today. Boteach asked him about his alleged comment to the New York Times that Israel was in Moore’s own axis of evil. Moore said that the quote was taken out of context and that he believed in Israel’s security and its right to defend itself.
Of course, we can’t really be surprised that a white American believes that there should be a state of Israel. What I take serious exception to is his staggering statement that he regards the Jews as the most oppressed nation on earth. The truth is that in this age they are one of the most priveleged groups on earth; they are enormously influential, both politically and financially, in three of the most powerful countries on earth. Even before World War II, the situation was complicated but it was not a story of unrelenting persecution. (For one thing, the countries where most Jews lived were invaded by the people who perpetrated the Holocaust – they didn’t carry it out.) And the Jews were certainly not the only persecuted nation in Europe – the treatment of the Roma was not much better, and that is still going on in some places.
Moore also said that after making Bowling for Columbine, he “discovered that Israel has one of the lowest levels of violence–I mean, beside the conflict with the Palestinians–even though there are so many guns around”. Boteach replied, “well, that’s because it’s a healthy society … a society that values life”. Can someone tell me if Andrea Dworkin was lying in her piece about the prevalence of pornography in Israel – that there is even porn about the Holocaust? Is this the mark of a healthy society? Certainly the Israelis’ record in the occupied territories make any attempt to describe it as “a society which values life” an insult to his readers’ intelligence.
As is his claim that the most offensive of Moore’s distortions in F9/11 was “his whitewashing of Saddam’s butchery, and the portrayal of life under Saddam as something akin to living in Disneyland”. Everyone knows that Saddam’s régime was brutal, as are numerous other governments around the world that Bush and his flunkies (I’m talking about the likes of Tony Blair here, not Cheney, Wolfowitz et al) have done nothing about removing. The fact is that for most people, life went on, which it didn’t during the war and the period of lawlessness which came after it, not to mention that nobody can guarantee what sort of system the exercise will lead to.
