YOAV Shamir's documentary Defamation is a must-see for anyone wanting to understand how Zionist Jews manufacture fear, and teach Israeli schoolchildren to hate. In his review, Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli Jew who participated in the occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s, writes: “The film is an astonishing exposure of the morbid conditions that entangle contemporary Jewish secular identity. It explores and ridicules the current notion of anti-Semitism and the lobbies that are engaged in disseminating such a fear. It also exposes those Jewish ethnic campaigners who, for some reason, insist on shaping their identity around the phantasmic idea of being ‘racially' persecuted, defamed or hated.” One of the ethnic Jewish campaigners that Shamir exposes is Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League. Shamir, a young Israeli Jew, goes to New York to interview Foxman to get an answer to the following question: Could a Jew today lose his or her job just for being a Jew? If not, why is anti-Semitism still an important concern for the Anti-Defamation League. Foxman says anti-Semitism comes from even “self-hating Jews”, who are critical of the Israeli government's policies. All anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian Jews are targeted by ADL, including Dr Norman Finkelstein, whom Shamir also interviews. Finkelstein, you will remember, lost his job as a professor because of a concerted smear campaign and has been barred from entering Israel. Shamir even joined Foxman on his mission to the Ukraine, and filmed the ADL director lecturing that country's leaders on the lack of moral equivalence between Stalin's genocidal starvation of 11 million Ukrainians, and the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. The highlight of Defamation, though, comes when Israeli high school students are taken on a tightly scripted and closely supervised indoctrination tour of Auschwitz before joining the army. “I want to kill,” said one student afterwards. The lesson of the trip -the world is the enemy of the Jews - is accomplished. That lesson was put on display following young Israeli soldiers killed nine civilians on the Gaza flotilla on May 31. As described by Dr Ilan Pappé in Scotland's The Herald: “[There were] official parades celebrating the heroism of the commandos who stormed the ship and demonstrations by schoolchildren giving their unequivocal support for the government against the new wave of anti-Semitism.”
