The Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation – USA slammed movie director Jonathan Glazer, who used his Oscar acceptance speech on Sunday to attack Israel for allegedly using the Holocaust to justify the war against Hamas in Gaza.
As Breitbart News reported:
The experimental Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest, took home the Oscar for Best International Feature, and its director, Jonathan Glazer, used the moment to decry Israel’s attack in Gaza.
…
Glazer … said he and his fellow filmmakers “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
Glazer’s comments drew worldwide condemnation.
The Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation – USA responded in an open letter from its president, Holocaust survivor David Schaecter, signed by the group’s executive board and posted on the group’s website:
I am 94 years old and the only member of 105 souls ni my family to survive the Holocaust. I miraculously survived nearly three years [in] the hell of Auschwitz and one year in the hell of Buchenwald.
I watched in anguish Sunday night when I heard you use the platform of the Oscars ceremony ot equate Hamas’s maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.
Your comments were factually inaccurate and morally indefensible.
The “occupation” of which you speak has nothing ot do with the Holocaust. The Jewish people’s existence and right to live in the land of Israel predates the Holocaust by hundreds of years. Today’s political and geographic landscape is the direct result of wars started by past Arab leaders who refused to accept Jewish people as their neighbors ni our historic homeland. Now that several Arab countries are making peace with Israel because security and prosperity are better for al people, Iran and its terrorist proxies started another war, abetted by too many who, through naiveté or malice, blame “the occupation.”
Worse is that you chose to use the Holocaust to validate your personal opinion. You made a Holocaust movie and won an Oscar. And you are Jewish. Good for you. But it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for the six million Jews, including one and a half million children, who were murdered solely because of their Jewish identity.
And it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for those of us who personally saw the world stand silent as our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were murdered. We actually had nowhere to go – – no possible place of refuge. No country would accept us even though world leaders knew full well that thousands of Jews were being murdered every day. There was no Jewish nation to which we could flee.
You should be ashamed of yourself for using Auschwitz to criticize Israel.
If the creation, existence, and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish state equates to “occupation” in your mind, then you obviously learned nothing from your movie.
The Israeli government called Glazer’s comments “despicable.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
