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In Reply to: Protocols of Zion documentary posted by Perry on December 05, 2005 at 00:28:24:
Here's a further review by the same reviewer in the same publication. Not sure why he wrote two, but this one has some additional information. I will be particularly interested to see if any of TF's members or publications are included in "the cacophony of nutty voices" that appear in the documentary.
There was a time when TF's anti-Semitism was front and centre. Some of the first posters produced by TF were just blown-up ML covers. For example, in the early 70s, I was on the road in Japan, litnessing the Israel Invaded letter. We also had posters of the cover of that letter that we plastered all over the city we were in. One day while litnessing, I was arrested on the street by Immigration authorities on the basis of a citizen's complaint about that letter. I was threatened with deportation, although, in the end they let me go, perhaps because I was only 18 at the time, or maybe because I only had two months left on my visa. They had caught me red-handed asking for donations and so I had to sign a statement to the effect that I would no longer earn money while on a tourist visa. It was pretty scarey. One guy was yelling at me, and they had a Hari Krishna guy at the next table they told me was being deported. I was so ignorant that when yelling guy told me they were going to deport me, I asked if I would have a choice of which country they sent me to. I was thinking I could at least get a free trip to another field. It was a different guy (they played good cop/bad cop with me) who gave me the option of swearing to be on good, legal behaviour for the remainder of my stay. After that, leadership brought me into their home to keep a low profile, but after a few months and a "visa trip" to Korea, I was back in Japan engaged in activities prohibited to persons on tourist visas. Such is life in TF.
Anyway, at one time in TF's history there were hundreds if not thousands of people on the streets of cities all over the world spreading anti-Semitic hate literature. It will be interesting to see if any Family material makes it into the documentary.
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=14518
Movie Reviews
Protocols of Zion
By ken eisner
Publish Date: 1-Dec-2005
Directed by Marc Levin. Featuring Marc Levin and Al Levin. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, December 2, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas
Why do Jews always answer a question with another question? It’s a stall to figure out if you’re planning to kill them.
This may be pushing an old joke a little too far, but it connects with the premise of Protocols of Zion, filmmaker Marc Levin’s personal journey into the heart of darkness called anti-Semitism. Best known for his 1998 indie hit Slam, Levin here looks at the forms of hatred that have been in the air since 9/11.
Mostly, he finds, they are just slightly retailed versions of wholesale lies that have been hanging around for more than 500 years. More specifically, he’s interested in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet forged by the czar’s secret police sometime around 1897, for the purpose of channelling Russian rebelliousness into yet more anti-Jewish pogroms.
The small book, itself cribbed from a work trying to discredit anti–French imperial activists a generation earlier, laid out the rather unlikely paper trail of a people openly conspiring to mess with everybody else. You can almost hear Snidely Whiplash cackling between the lines, although the chapter headings Levin uses to divide his documentary are read, via old audiotape, by a Ku Klux Klan type with a flat Southern twang.
The people interviewed or seen here are generally less rustic: a white-shirted Nazi, Arab teenagers, über-hater Henry Ford, a black street preacher, and local crazies (one calls New York’s last mayor “Jew-liani”), and the former prime minister of Malaysia all quote liberally from the book’s blood libel, with varying amounts of self-awareness. In most cases, they are interviewed, harangued, or cajoled on-screen by Levin himself, who comes from a long line of Socratic (some might say Talmudic) lefties. This is borne out by the presence of the director’s elderly father, Al Levin, whose creative-writing work with prison inmates helped lead to Slam, and to an unusual connection with a tattooed Aryan Nations kid.
In the end, the filmmaker casts his net a little too wide. It’s impressive to witness the daring with which he enters each fray—some of his antagonists are genuinely disarmed by his willingness to listen—but the cacophony of nutty voices proves wearing. And his attempt to disprove the evil canard about Jews being warned about the World Trade Center attacks feels like stooping to a lower, and more sentimental, level. Still, the movie’s final shot, with Levin standing in a snowy cemetery by his dad’s side, is a melancholic and well-earned encapsulation of the human ability to endure.
