Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s recent interview on CNN is difficult to watch. Indeed, challenging is the best word to describe sitting through the thoroughly ill-informed Moore ramble on for 10 minutes while receiving little pushback.
Appearing on The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Moore was asked to comment on the anti-Israel campus protests that have swept across colleges in the United States following the Hamas massacre on October 7.
Moore suggests that such demonstrations are a hallmark of healthy “democracy and free speech,” and complains that protesters have been beaten and clubbed by police in response, even though no protesters are “committing any acts of violence.”
We must assume Moore was wearing a blindfold on the many occasions he claims he hung out on campus with the students because footage of threatening and violent behavior at different colleges has been widely shared on social media for weeks.
He goes on to suggest that most of the allegations of violence center around the signs some students are holding, which he says contain merely innocuous statements like “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea…”
Again, we must assume Moore is suffering from both hearing and vision problems to have not heard chants like “Go back to Poland” or seen signs held aloft by his Gen-Z heroes that imply the world must be “cleaned” of Jews.
Moore proposes a moral panic is being whipped up on the little evidence, claiming the “one Hamas flag” that was flown on campus is not representative of protesters in general and “this is all a made-up thing.”
Of course, there is a wealth of photographic and video proof that the problem extends far beyond one rogue antisemite flying a Hamas flag. We and millions of others around the world have seen the Hezbollah flags and the students in Hamas headbands, and we have heard their chants calling for “Zionists” to be wiped off the face of the earth.
The only mild pushback that occurs in the whole segment is Collins’ pointing out that many Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe.
Naturally, Moore trots out a lie that serves to dismiss this fact, which is that the majority of Jewish students support demonstrations.
Michael Moore on @CNN: “98% of them [protesters] are not saying anything that’s antisemitic because they don’t believe in antisemitism, in part, because Palestinian people are Semites.”
How to prove you know nothing about antisemitism while talking about antisemitism. 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/Ci8xOqmhxG
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) April 30, 2024
The parts of Moore’s interview that stand out most, however, are the ones in which he reveals his breathtaking ignorance—an ignorance so profound that it should render him blacklisted from any serious news program in the future.
The first is when he states that 98% of protesters are not antisemitic — something he suggests is impossible “because the Palestinian people are Semites.”
It is a shame that CNN anchor Collins also clearly knows little about the subject or she might have been able to challenge this disinformation. The word “antisemitism” is a late 19th-century coinage and was a way of giving a pseudo-intellectual front to anti-Jewish hatred. There is no such thing as Semitic people, just Semitic languages.
The second comes at the end of the interview when Moore starts ranting about the Holocaust, which he suggests Palestinians have borne the brunt of by virtue of the land being “taken” from them and not the Nazis as a response to the mass slaughter of six million Jews.
The implication of this is that Moore believes the creation of Israel was Western compensation to the Jews, ignoring historical and religious ties to the land dating back thousands of years.
Blithely unaware that a well-known ally of Hitler was none other than one of the “founding fathers” of Palestinian nationalism, the Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husseini, Moore even rewrites history to suggest that Arabs were somehow innocent of all Jew hate over the centuries. Of course, the massacres of Jews that long pre-date Israel’s creation in 1948 tell a different story.
Insultingly, Moore expresses how it’s right to “love the Jewish people but not this,” which he claims, in reference to the current war, is the false “mass extermination” and “carpet bombing of a civilian population.”
The most irritating aspect of the whole interview, however, is not Moore’s unbridled ignorance, but that he was not taken to task for some of his more outrageous remarks. Instead, Collins appeared starry-eyed and was practically mute as Moore was given the stage to reimagine facts and rewrite history.
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