Mark Ruffalo may not have gotten exactly what he wanted when he accused Paramount’s board of aiding an ethnic cleansing, but he’s getting a long-overdue conversation for his efforts. Amid Israel’s war on Gaza, which has claimed more than 70,000 Palestinians since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, Zionists have used the charges of antisemitism as a catchall defense against anyone criticizing Israel’s “right to defend itself.” It’s the reasoning behind Melissa Barrera’s Scream dismissal, how some Democratic leaders are making Hasan Piker a pariah (when most of their voters don’t know who he is), and why Ruffalo received a stern letter from Paramount accusing him of leaning on “antisemitic tropes” when connecting the very few dots between the Ellison family and the Israeli military. Ruffalo has already received support from Hannah Einbinder, Jane Fonda, and Kenneth Lonergan. Today, an open letter signed by more than 170 Jewish artists, writers, creatives, faith leaders, and thinkers denounces the “outrageous smear campaign” against the actor.
Among the Jewish creatives who “stand proudly with Mark Ruffalo” are Abbi Jacobson, Alex Winter, Gina Gershon, Ilana Glazer, James Schamus, Joel Coen, Larry Charles, Kate Berlant, Naomi Klein, Sarah Sherman, Jane Schoenbrun, Todd Haynes, and approximately 150 more. They argue that pointing out the connections between the media we consume and the wars oligarchs wage have nothing to do with Jewish people or their right to practice their religion, and everything to do with the oligarchic control overtaking the world.
“Enough with the false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those who are brave enough to point out the obvious: that the assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected, and there is nothing antisemitic about recognizing that fact,” the letter reads. “We all saw this after their Trump-brokered takeover of TikTok — a takeover they openly proclaimed was in large part motivated by their desire to boost pro-Israel propaganda. Larry Ellison personally, with his astonishing purported $350 million in funding and pledges to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has been Blair’s major backer as Blair assumes an influential role in the Trump-concocted ‘Board of Peace’ takeover of Gaza, a territory which has become an open-air laboratory for AI-driven killing and control technologies like the ones celebrated by former Oracle CEO (and current Oracle and Paramount board member) Safra Catz.”
The antisemitism charges, they argue, obfuscate Ruffalo’s point, which is that tech oligarchies are consolidating media and aiding what the U.N. determined to be a genocide. The Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. is a “part of a larger project of tech-driven domination, a project Larry Ellison and his partners have never been shy about trumpeting — and one they themselves have explicitly linked to their support for the ongoing depredations being visited on the people of Palestine and their silencing of critics of those horrors.”
“Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism. It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty. According to a recent Washington Post poll, 61% of American Jews now agree that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza; and four in ten even agree that these crimes amount to genocide. Do those attacking Mark Ruffalo as an antisemite seriously believe that all these American Jews are antisemites too?”
Using antisemitism to stifle debate around Israel is not a new tactic. While it may have worked in the past, the continued debate shows how much harder it’s been to force-feed the public on Israel’s defense, especially three years into a war most Americans watched on their phones. The letter concludes: “Today, more and more people of conscience are joining together, to loudly and univocally proclaim: The time is over for spurious charges of antisemitism to be trotted out, this time in the defense of war, oligarchy, and AI domination. That tired playbook has run its course.”
Read the full letter at Variety.
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