On Tuesday night, Hollywood bully Harvey Weinstein received the Humanitarian Award at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s National Tribute Dinner at the Beverly Hilton. There, he spoke forcefully about the need to fight anti-Semitism.
“We’re gonna have to get as organized as the mafia,” he said, after being introduced by Jeffrey Katzenberg. “We better stand up and kick these guys in the ass… We just can’t take it anymore [from] these crazy bastards.” He continued:
I think it’s time that we, as Jews, get together with the Muslims who are honorable and peaceful – but we [also] have to go and protect ourselves… There’s gotta be a way to fight back. While we must be understanding of our Arab brothers and our Islamic brothers, we also have to understand that these crazy bastards [Arab and Islamic extremists] are also killing their own – they’re killing neighbors, they’re killing people from all sorts of different races.
Hearing Weinstein speak regarding the need to fight anti-Semitism is particularly galling, given that both he and Katzenberg heavily supported wildly anti-Israel President Obama in both 2008 and 2012.
Weinstein held multiple fundraisers for President Obama; Obama, in turn, praised Weinstein and his wife for their “friendship and support, and for the amazing movies that they’ve made.” At a $38,000-per-plate dinner for Obama, Weinstein laughably suggested that he had to raise big cash in order fight Mitt Romney. Weinstein said on The Rachel Maddow Show that Obama would be The King’s Speech if he were a movie, while Mitt Romney would be Our Idiot Brother.” He also said that President Obama was not embarrassing; the country was “embarrassing.”
Weinstein also planned to help Obama using his movie power. Before the election, he bought the rights to The Oath of Tobruk, a documentary touting Obama’s toppling of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya (which, of course, ended poorly). Weinstein said that the film “highlights the invaluable leadership from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
Weinstein himself is fine with purveying anti-Semitism in films he supports. He produced and distributed Miral, an anti-Semitic diatribe straight from the Palestinian playbook. American Jewish Committee executive director David Harris said the film was a “blatantly one-sided event… the film has a clear political message, which portrays Israel in a highly negative light.” Weinstein then used his Jewish birth to defend the film, which uses every anti-Israel trope in the book. The Forward described the film thusly:
[T]he Israelis depicted onscreen — soldiers bulldozing homes and countering rock-throwing with machine-gun fire, wardens whipping political prisoners and settlers building homes in Arab population centers because, as one character puts it, “what they really want is all of Palestine” — don’t necessarily come across as the peace-seeking sort.
Weinstein, however, said that the film was wonderful:
As a Jewish American, I can categorically state that I would not be releasing a film that was flagrantly biased towards Israel or Judaism.
The film was so bad that Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center—the same organization that gave Weinstein an award—said that when the United Nations screened the film, it marked “another sad day in the 63-year-old history of the UN’s bias against the state of Israel.” Weinstein admitted that his own mother would go on “strike” against the film. But Weinstein ran an ad congratulating himself for Miral on the same day that a Jewish family of five was murdered in Israel. He also called his critics “crazy and wrong”—unless they give him awards, apparently.
Anti-Semitism has surely been watered down as a term when Harvey Weinstein can call himself a warrior against it, even as he backs anti-Semitic propaganda and an anti-Semitic administration endangering the existence of the State of Israel and its 6 million Jews.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.