Variety, the entertainment industry magazine with an online readership of close to 30 million people each month, is promoting anti-Israel propaganda.
In two articles, Variety promoted the anti-Israel propaganda film “From Ground Zero.” (“Michael Moore Boards Palestinian Oscar Entry ‘From Ground Zero’ as Executive Producer: ‘It’s an Honor to Stand in Solidarity,’” December 30, 2024, by Alex Ritman, and “‘From Ground Zero’ Review: Palestine’s Oscar Entry Compiles 22 Video Diaries From Gaza,” December 17, 2024, by Siddhant Adlakha.) Neither article gives a single word to the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel or to the hostages.
“From Ground Zero” is a compilation of short films made by people in Gaza since the war started, and chronicles some of the hardships that they face. But Variety does not mention that Hamas started this war with a barbaric attack on Israel in which 1,200 people were killed, including entire families, another 240 people were taken hostage, including very young children and the elderly, and many women were raped. Nor does Variety mention that Hamas actually could have ended the war and the concomitant suffering that the film purports to document at any time, and still can end it, if it surrenders and unconditionally releases the hostages.
Instead, both articles reserve blame for all of the suffering for Israel, the side that is defending itself and its people.
Even the New York Times has, in 2002, accused director Michael Moore of “generaliz[ing] in the absence of empirical evidence” and of “glib distortion of history.” But this does not stop Variety from publishing libelous quotes made by Moore without any countervailing point of view in its December 30 article. “The only weapons that Rashid and these 22 courageous Palestinian directors in Gaza have are their cameras and their creativity. No filmmaker, writer or artist should ever have to tell the story of their own extermination,” the article quotes Moore as saying. The claim that Israel is “exterminating” anyone other than terrorists is absolutely false – it’s a blood libel that should never have appeared in print.
Michael Moore
Of course Moore also repeats Amnesty’s unhinged claim that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Variety’s readers won’t learn that military expert John Spencer and international law expert Arsen Ostrovsky called the claim “utterly baseless, replete with malicious lies and gross distortions of fact, as well as wholesale fabrications of law,” or that the Israel chapter of Amnesty rejected Amnesty International’s report.
And in the earlier article, a December 17 review of the movie, Variety itself falsely calls Israel’s defensive war a “genocide.” It describes the featured filmmakers as “under siege,” but provides no explanation for how they came to be so. Although the review doesn’t mention the Hamas attack on Israel that started the war, ironically, it lauds the film for its “sense of history.”
Most abhorrently, the writer compares the situation in Gaza to the Holocaust, writing:
Their stories, and their essence, live within these pixels the way the Holocaust was captured on celluloid. The images of the latter that are the most familiar to the public were snapped either by perpetrators or liberators. “From Ground Zero” exists more in the tradition of photographers Henryk Ross and Mendel Grossman, inhabitants of Poland’s Jewish ghettos who not only documented daily life with their cameras, but imbued it with a familiar, beating humanity. In that vein, it’s hard to ignore just how much “From Ground Zero” feels like history unfolding, and tragedy being memorialized, right before our eyes.
Variety has failed to put this propaganda film in its proper context by informing its readers how this war started, as well as reminding readers that that Hamas is continuing to hold about a hundred hostages including a one-year old Israeli baby. In withholding this information, the entertainment industry publication is giving cover to the terrorists who are responsible for all of the suffering that the film exposes.