The trend-setting accessory of the evening last night at the Oscars was a little pin that has been described in several different ways. I had trouble finding a closeup, but here’s the way it was described by those advocating its wearing:
Several stars including Grammy winner Billie Eilish and Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo wore red pins representing Artists4Ceasefire, five months into the Israel-Hamas war. More than 30,000 people have been killed since the war in Gaza began in October.
The pins feature an orange hand with a black heart inside, surrounded by a red circle.
“The pin symbolizes collective support for an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all of the hostages and for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza,” the group said in a press release.
In other words, they wish unicorns to come down from the sky and make everything bad go away – including Israel, actually, because that’s what a ceasefire would accomplish by facilitating the next massacre of Israelis. There was a ceasefire supposedly in place on October 7, something of which these celebrities may be unaware (or about which they may not care). In addition, Hamas has zero intention of returning the hostages unless Israel essentially surrenders.
So, why is the heart black? Why is the hand orange – or red, depending on the photo and the description? The group promoting this doesn’t seem to be saying, but you can get a better look at the symbol at their site here – where the hand looks like a slightly more orange shade of red than the background. I don’t know who designed the pin, or why those symbols were chosen. But the red hand held up in that way has a barbaric history:
Is the pin a deliberate reference to this horrific incident, and if so do the “stars” even know? Or is the symbolism merely a coincidence?
From an op-ed in the Times of Israel:
And I wonder if the designers knew about [the Ramallah lynching]. I wonder if they knew but didn’t care. I wonder, also, if it was done on purpose… I’d like to think it wasn’t, but I wonder… I wonder if the celebrities wearing the pins knew the history of the Second Intifada which nearly brought us to our knees in Israel, or about the lynching in Ramallah and those horrible hands out the window red with human blood and if they did know about any of this, I wonder if they made the connection and just didn’t care.
It’s the old “fool or knave?” question, and you really can hardly go wrong by answering “both.” And lest you think what these Oscar celebrities do doesn’t matter, it both reflects and adds to the current fashion of supporting a terrible cause – one that desires, among other things, the destruction of Western culture and liberty. No, these people don’t make policy (the Biden administration does, and they are in solidarity with it). But these people make the anti-Israel position even more fashionable.
And then there’s the “as a Jew” remarks by someone named Jonathan Glazer:
Unless you’re a film buff, you may not have heard of Jonathan Glazer before his viral moment at this year’s annual Academy Awards ceremony. After “The Zone of Interest”—a highly-praised film about the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp that is very loosely based on a Martin Amis novel with the same title—was named the winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, Glazer … read the following prepared statement:
“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness in a Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza—all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
“Resist” – as though they are being persecuted and have to go undercover to bravely fight against a Nazi occupation. What this guy is really saying is “don’t hurt me, I’m a good Jew; one who has refuted my Jewishness by making no moral distinctions whatsoever.” Glazer would no doubt have been against bombing Germany during World War II.
As Jonathan Tobin writes:
The tortured syntax of [Glazer’s] comments notwithstanding, what Glazer said wasn’t merely deeply offensive. It marked a new low in Hollywood’s descent into fashionable rationalizations of hatred for Jews. It also showed us how the new woke antisemitism works, especially when its standard-bearers are Jews with little or no connection to their heritage. As such, it was the quintessential “as a Jew” moment in which persons invoke their Jewish identity to denounce other Jews. …
Those, like Glazer, whose efforts are aimed at helping contemporary practitioners of Jewish genocide survive and win—and do so “as Jews”—are a disgrace and deserve to be remembered throughout history with opprobrium along with the worst examples of those who betrayed their own people. They also illustrate the moral depravity of artists and intellectuals who have been captured by an ideology that enables a virulent form of antisemitism that masquerades as advocacy for human rights.
Indeed – particularly the part about masquerading as advocacy for human rights.
I watch very few movies these days, and it’s been a long time since I cared one whit about who gets an Oscar – except that I used to be interested in the fashions at the ceremony. I don’t even care about that anymore, but here’s a link to Women’s Wear Daily‘s idea of the worst-dressed.
