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Monday, November 17, 2014

"Pallywood" !?

 Palestinian Extras Cutting Prop "Barbed Wire" 
During the Filming of Intifada: The Prequel


This sort of jumped out at me since I had just seen the film Interstellar and had my attention riveted by the fact that its depiction of the future had our elementary schools teaching Science wherein the Apollo moon landings were said to be staged film productions.


http://972mag.com/a-particularly-ugly-ethnic-slur-pallywood/98824/
By Larry Derfner
|Published November 15, 2014 


‘Pallywood’: A particularly ugly ethnic slur

And a very popular one among right-wing Israelis and Diaspora Jews.

I’ve been writing for years against the “Pallywood” theory – the right-wing notion that videos showing Palestinians getting killed by Israelis are really elaborate fakes meant to blacken Israel’s name. Yet it’s only this morning I realized that the term “Pallywood,” which was coined by Boston University Prof. Richard Landes (see below note A), is an ethnic slur, and a particularly ugly one.

It not only mangles the name of an entire people, it does so in the most contemptuous context – it links the name Palestinian with the telling of lies, and not just any lies, but lies about Palestinian deaths at the hands of their conquerors.

Pallywood. Compared to that, referring to New York as “Hymietown” is mild stuff.

What a bigoted term Landes invented, and what a popular one it is in the Israeli/right-wing Jewish political lexicon. A Google search for “Pallywood” this morning turned up 406,000 entries. There’s a Wikipedia page for it, too.

And I didn’t even notice how vicious an insult it was until now, which says a lot about how living in Israel makes you numb to abuses of Palestinian, or Arab, or Muslim dignity: In Israel, we Jews say things about them that they could never get away with saying about us.

Note A
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Landes
Richard Allen Landes (born June 26, 1949) is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He coined the racist term "Pallywood" for what he considers the practice of "staged filming" of "evidence" against Israel for the benefit of the Palestinians. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boston University. Landes was the director of the now quiescent Center for Millennial Studies.

[...]
Landes is notable for views on the use of film footage related to conflicts in Israel, in particular his use of the term Pallywood (Palestinian Hollywood), which is described by Ruthie Blum, writing in the Jerusalem Post, as a term coined by Landes to refer to "productions staged by the Palestinians, in front of (and often with cooperation from) Western camera crews, for the purpose of promoting anti-Israel propaganda by disguising it as news." Landes himself describes Pallywood as "a term I coined... to describe staged material disguised as news." Landes cites the film of the shooting of Muhammad al-Durrah, the Gaza beach blast and Hamas's alleged exploitation of electricity shortages during the 2007–2008 Israel-Gaza conflict, as incidents of Pallywood...

The algorithms of big lies.

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