Bookburning

Bookburning is bad, right? So banning a film and removing its prints from the public domain, that would be just a step away from bookburning, don't you think? So how far away from this would it be if you decided to render a film illegible for awards, simply on the basis of it's political content? Certainly not an act in the spirit of free speech, is it?

Paradise Now is nominated for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Plainly told, and broadly acclaimed for avoiding melodrama, the film details the decisions and moral dilemmas of two potential suicide bombers from the Palestine. Unsurprisingly, there's a very vocal movement trying to get the film removed from the list of Oscar nominees, and this movement seems to have begun with an open letter from Yossi Zur, the grieving father of a suicide bombing victim. I will post that letter at the bottom of this entry.

Reportedly, an averaged-out Academy member would be a 70 year old Jewish man - which might make it a little surprising that Paradise Now was nominated at all. Whether the film is any good or not seems, in this case, to be somewhat beside the point (this being the Oscars where quality so seldom enters into the argument anyways). This is nothing more than a rather alarming case of hypocrisy, politically motivated, and even a little hateful.

How many films depicting acts of violence have been nominated for, and even won, Oscars? Even this year there is Munich, a film that is as dubious politically as any you are ever likely to see and in which the most deplorable acts are depicted. Should that film too be robbed of it's nominations? I suppose that Silence of the Lambs, that one time board-sweeper showed "nice violence" - faces being ripped off, skin being flayed, the imprisonment and torture of women - whereas Paradise Now shows "nasty violence" - that is to say, political violence.

I guess the "current climate" doesn't call for people to make a stance or take a side on cannibalism. For the record, I would transpose all of, say, Munich's nominations to Hostel in a heartbeat. I'm not afraid of, or appalled by, the existence of violent films. In fact, I think we need them. It's a world full of violence and we need to understand it.

Here is Yossi Zur's letter:

My son Asaf was almost 17 years old when he was murdered in a suicide bomb attack in Haifa, Israel on March 5, 2003. This year, on precisely the third anniversary of his death, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may grant an Oscar to the very dangerous movie "Paradise Now."

The film, nominated for best foreign language film of the year, follows the path of two young Palestinians from their decision to become suicide bombers to the moment one of them boards a crowded Tel Aviv bus.

"Paradise Now" is a very professional production, created with great care for detail. It is also an extremely harmful piece of work, not only for Israel and the Middle East, but the whole world.

My son Asaf was an eleventh-grader studying computer sciences, when one day after school he boarded a bus in Israel to return home. On the way, a suicide bomber from Hebron, 21 years old and himself a computer sciences student in the Hebron Polytechnic, also boarded the bus and blew himself up. Of the 17 people killed, nine were schoolchildren aged 18 or younger. Asaf was killed on the spot.

I went to see "Paradise Now" to try to understand what message it was trying to convey. Was it that the murderer is human and is as deserving of sympathy as his victims? He is not. Was it that he has doubts? He has none. After all, he is so sure of his mission that he is willing to kill himself along with his human targets.

Or maybe, I wondered, the film was trying to give the message that it is the Israelis who are to blame for this horrific act, for the phenomenon of suicide bombing. In that case, are the Israelis also to blame for the similar terrorist attacks on New York City's World Trade Center, the Bali nightclub, the Amman hotels, the shop in Turkey, the restaurant in Morocco, the underground stations in London, the trains in Spain and so many others?

What exactly makes "Paradise Now" worthy of such a prestigious nomination? At a time when Hamas, a terrorist organization devoted to the destruction of Israel, has won a landslide victory in the Palestinian legislative elections, and Iran's president has stated his desire to "wipe Israel off the map," what sort of message would an Academy Award triumph send to more than 1 billion viewers around the world?

Would the entertainment writers who chose to honor this movie have given the same accolades if the film had been about the young men from Saudi Arabia who moved to the U.S., took flying lessons and then underwent Islamic ritual preparations for their holy mission to crash airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? Would they have dared to nominate a version of "Paradise Now" for a similar award?

This movie attempts to deliver the message that suicide bombings are a legitimate tactic for those who feel they've exhausted all other means of resistance. But a suicide-murderer who boards a bus and snuffs out the lives of 15 or 20 innocent people, or who walks into a city carrying a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon and kills 10,000, or even 100,000 people, is that still a legitimate tactic? Where does one draw the line?

The world should draw the line at one person. My son was almost 17; he loved surfing, he loved pop music. He is now gone because a suicide bomber decided that blowing himself up on a crowded bus filled with children was somehow a legitimate act.

Awarding an Oscar to a movie such as "Paradise Now" would only implicate the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the evil chain of terror that attempts to justify these horrific acts, whether the number of victims is 17 or 17,000.