Yaelle Kayam's Diploma is the kind of IDF propaganda film posing as legitimate art that makes me wish Dr. Norman Finkelstein was a film-critic. Alas, the Public Library of Drama bans access to Dr. Norman Finkelstein's private website. This is a nationwide ban, because all data traffic from Greek public libraries pass through the routers in Athens. If I cannot access his website at a public library in this little town, not a soul throughout the whole of Greece will be able to read his website from a public library computer. In a country where people can buy translations of his books but cannot access his websites, an IDF propaganda-film like Diploma quietly slips through the adjudication process. You know you are dealing with IDF propaganda when a mere graduation film makes it to, yes, Cannes 2009.
In fact, it makes me wish someone out there would write an Art Studies version of Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah, so that I don't have to expose all this IDF propaganda posing as art all by myself. Someone out there has to be as bothered by all this as I am. Someone who the Google Nazis don't dare censor. My own essays exposing another IDF propaganda front posing as performance art, the performance group Public Movement, are all censored by Google. Not a single Performance Studies scholar has bothered to research Public Movement as in-depth as I have. If they did, they could see for themselves, that everything in my exposes is true. Will the Norman Finkelstein of film-criticism please stand up?
There is no difference between what Yaelle Kayam and Public Movement are doing. Both are performing a propaganda function for the IDF. Google still refuses to link up to those essays; links to my essays disappeared a few days after ranking amongst the first hits for the query "Public Movement". This shows that the IDF controls Google. I am pretty sure they will be censoring this article as well. So powerful is the IDF that we can't even write freely about an Israeli performance or an Israeli film on the internet.
Diploma starts with the following bunch of lies on a white-on-black text-screen.
Hebron is the only Israeli city placed within a Palestinian municipality.That the room didn't burst out laughing scornfully at this bunch of lies shows you how politically ignorant contemporary film-makers are. Do not expect this ignorant generation of film-makers to make the next "4th of July", "Apocalypse Now", "Johnny Got His Gun", or "Dr Strangelove". They can't even tell apart, let alone tear apart, a political lie when it's right in front of them. They are anti-political to the point that they shamelessly applaud government propagandists. The majority of contemporary film-makers have no ethics and no regard for Human Rights, even as they are given funds upon subsidies upon grants to make Human Rights propaganda. It's up to film-critics to perform the criticism that these lemmings are incapable of, not to exonerate their political ignorance and anomie, but to condemn it as vehemently as I am about to condemn the above, treacherous statement. The Israeli Ministry of Sports, Education and Culture is backing this film. The America-Israel Foundation is behind this film. Need I go on?
Anyone who believes the lie that "Hebron is the *only* Israeli city within a Palestinian municipality" is warmly encouraged to get a copy of Ronit Chacham's book, Breaking Ranks, and have a look at the maps printed in the last pages of the book. In fact, you don't even have to buy the book, the generous Nazis over at Google have put it up on the internet for free. Now I ask you: Is Hebron the ONLY Israeli settlement within Palestinian territory?
Doubting Thomases are also welcome to download one of the many maps of Greater Israel available today on the Internet. This is what Israel truly has in mind for itself. This is Israel's long-term plan. The war between Israel and Palestine is not a defensive war, it is but a station in the unfolding a long term EXPANTIONIST agenda. Films like Diploma encourage the active forgetting of this fact, and the audience not only dully forgets, it was never aware in the first place, for any public discussion of the plan for a Greater Israel in the Western Media is now taboo and dismissed as conspiracy theories. Where is the film-maker making a film about THAT?
Here is the propaganda plot of the film:
Palestinian girl Ayat on her graduation night (Hebron is home to the Palestine Polytechnic University). P-girl can't get to the University to obtain her diploma and partake in the graduation ceremony because of a curfew.
--- At this point I have to reference Norman Finkelstein who in Beyond Chutzpah cited sources demonstrating that the IDF won't even allow Palestinians to even *go* to school, let alone long and frequently enough to graduate.P-girl and her younger brother Samer disregard the curfew and try to sneak through the maze of streets to get to the University. On their way there, they observe zealous Zionist settlers who have taken over the streets after the curfew to stage a loud protest. The protesters openly taunt, not the Palestinians, but, get this, the Israeli government that wants to remove them from the settlement.
-- It was at this point that fully I realized just how much propaganda was worked into this movie. Settler violence in Hebron has been against Palestinians, not against the IDF, which has been exposed having a pro-settler bias.
P-girl and her brother move on to the next scene: the now infamous Palestinian Rock-Throwing Teenagers (r) (tm) pelting the settlers' protest.
-- This scene was totally laughable. That a group of a handful of teenagers would take on a crowd of settlers large enough to lynch them is just plain ridiculous.Barely close to the University, P-girl and her brother are suddenly stopped by IDF thugs with big American guns. Miraculously, the IDF thugs do not kill them on the spot, as they usually do. Instead, they demand to see their IDs, search their bags, and after P-girl "emotionally" puts on her graduation gown and cap for them, the IDF thugs generously send the two of them home, despite the University being just around the corner.
-- After reading Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah, such an image of gracefulness on the part of the IDF is truly laughable. Had this film been a realistic depiction of the behaviour of the IDF in the West Bank, as detailed in Finkelstein's book where he cites countless of report's from human rights groups, P-girl and her brother would be blown full of holes and left to die at the front steps of the University as a "warning to those terrorists". That's how aggressive, inhumane, and monstrous the IDF is. Yaelle Kayam is living in a fantasy world, and I certainly hope this review bursts her bubble. Hell, she might even pick up a French translation of Finkelstein (this girl studied at THE Sorbonne in Paris, after all!) and really wake up. Let's hope.Like the members of Public Movement, and the Israeli spies posing as "art students" who were caught spying in and on the USA, Yaelle Kayam fits the profile of the contemporary IDF propagandist posing as a legitimate artist. Based on my research so far, I can give you the following information. The IDF will generally pick and choose young Jews who are trained "abroad", at European and American art schools, to perform propaganda functions for the IDF and the Israeli government. Yaelle Kayam fits this aspect of the profile, having studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris and Film in Melbourne, Australia.
Why doesn't the IDF use local Israelis to make propaganda films/performances/photography/whatever for them? Because Israeli youngsters who have the money to study abroad generally come from upper-class moneyed families with ties to the cultural/political Israeli establishment. Had they not come from moneyed families they would not have had the money to study abroad in the first place. In countries like Israel (but this is also true for Greece) having an arts degree from Europe or from America on one's resume is evidence, not of ones actual own worth as an artist, but of one's family capital. Rich/elite Jewish kids study in Europe/USA, poor Jewish kids study at local schools. Yaelle is a rich kid. The fact that she received a grant from the Israeli American foundation only goes to show how prestigious and elite her family is. Look up one "Juliette Kayam" on the internet; she is a terrorism expert at, yes, Harvard University. That tells you all you need to know about the level of penetration into upper echelons by the Kayam clan. Harvard is also the base of operations of the Zionist ideologue Alan M. Dershowitz, a supposed "professor" of law who is nothing but a total fraud and was mercilessly exposed by Norman Finkelstein in Beyond Chutzpah. Dershowitz retaliated by destroying Finkelstein's academic career at the DePaul University.
Yaelle has a film career not because she is a good film artist, or an ethical film artist, but because she and her family are members of the Jewish-Zionist global cultural/political elite. The Israeli government "helps" them with their art careers because it owes their families "favours". Cronyism thus runs rampant in Israel. But that isn't any different from the way elites function practically elsewhere.
I think there is another, more practical reason why the IDF prefers to use Jews who have studied abroad over local Jews. It think it is because Jews who live, work or study aboard are less likely to produce realistic images, and more likely to re-produce propaganda images handed down to them from the IDF. Jews who actually live their full lives in Israel do not need to be told what the IDF looks like; having spend 3 years in the army, and having lived under Zionist occupation themselves, they know it like the back of their hands. I am pretty sure they can look at this film and say: "This is bullshit". It is the elite Jews, who, having grown up at a relative and relatively safe distance from the actual atrocities on the ground in their home country, who are easier to brainwash by the IDF. Having missed out on all the fun, the bombings and the violence, these live-abroad elite Jews must suffer some kind of a survivor's guilt, and are eager to assert themselves as Israelis despite or rather because having spent years away from home. Rahmbo Emanuel's "compulsory service" comes in different forms.
And the cultural/political Israeli establishment always has a link to the military establishment, because Israel is a militaristic society where the military rules all aspects of life from the cradle to the grave. "Israel is not a state with an army, it is an army with a state" (Ben Kaspit quoted by Finkelstein).
The IDF understands that current and future generations of upper-class Europeans will consist mainly of atomized, isolated, lonely, rugged individualists with no group or community affiliations, socially inept because Xbox fried their brains, who are so desperate for a Best Friend (R) (TM), that he/she might as well be a Zionist Israeli Best Friend, like that friendly Jewish nerd with the horned glasses age-peer they met on their government sponsored tour of Israel. The IDF gives these lonely upper-class European youngsters an Israeli best friend for life, and in return hopes to win their loyalty and support for Zionist war-mongering. Once you have a Zionist best friend, it's no longer "Tel Aviv getting bombed by terrorists", or "The IDF getting bombed by terrorists". Now, it's "my best friend (who is a secret IDF agent) getting bombed by terrorists". The IDF has been studying Naomi Klein's "No Logo", where she wrote about personalized advertising. The IDF knows that no advertisement is more personal than your own personal Zionist best friend. Such whores are the IDF that they are willing to exploit personal relationships between children to win future support for Zionism and the plan for a Greater Israel. The IDF has created a situation where we can't even trust Israeli jews to allow our children to make friends with them; the supposed friendship might be just another means to infiltrate the minds of our children, impregnating them with Zionist support.
While you can't read Norman Finkelstein's webpage at a computer in a Greek Public Library, while Google.com tells you that my exposes of Public Movement do not even exist, well, at least you can go see Yaelle Kayam's IDF propaganda film at the local cinema. Isn't that what cultural, political and artistic freedom is all about?
Maria Technosux
Sources used:Oooh, look, an IDF propagandist with stereotypical nerdy horned glasses and German braids, how "intellectual"!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/talmon/2284342390/
