Protocols of Zion documentary

Given The Famiy's anti-Semitic beliefs it's fairly safe to assume that many members consider the so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to be an authentic document. Too bad, then, that they will unlikely see this new documentary on the subject. Here's an interesting review of it:

http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=14511

Doc takes on anti-Semitism

By ken eisner

Publish Date: 1-Dec-2005

Talk about chutzpah! Filmmaker Marc Levin doesn’t just stand up to anti-Semitism metaphorically; he actually puts his body in the path of the miscreants who practise it. In his new film, Protocols of Zion, he sets out to debunk ancient racial myths and confronts the people who perpetrate them, sometimes to surprising or even funny effect.

The documentary, which opens here Friday (December 2), centres on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a patently phony piece of hate literature cooked up by the Russian czar’s secret police in the late 1890s. The booklet laid out the supposed plans for world domination Jews had been plotting since long before Mel Gibson was born.

There was a time when Henry Ford gave away a copy of The Protocols with every car sold, and Adolf Hitler borrowed freely from it, of course. These days, you can obtain it from neo-Nazis and Jewish anti-defamation groups alike. And you can find its proponents—confused, willful, or angry—on the Internet, stalking the halls of power, and in the street, where the Socratic filmmaker most often confronts them.

“I think preemptive engagement is both valid and necessary in this day and age,” explains the Manhattan-based filmmaker, who last talked to the Georgia Straight about his indie hit Slam, back in 1998.

“There are people who are professionally, ideologically, and emotionally hard core, and are not going to be changed,” says Levin on the line from Toronto, where he has come to do Canadian press. “They are just going to use every opportunity to advance their own position of hatred. I accept that there are certain people who are beyond redemption. But this isn’t about conversion; it’s about conversation. I would submit that the majority of people who have pieces of these feelings or ideas about Jews or ‘Jewish power’ are misinformed or confused and haven’t really had the opportunity or the venues to discuss this.”

For example, he recently showed the movie to 500 Chicago high-school students, mostly black and Latino, and was fascinated by the resulting dialogue.

“Some people had heard of the Protocols, and among those it was totally accepted that it was a real book. They didn’t even know there was a controversy about it. Others related their own experiences of bigotry or prejudice. What I’m saying is that most people do want to be engaged and are looking for a way to do that.”

Just prior to that, HBO (which helped produce the doc) hosted a screening of Protocols at its New York headquarters for Nation of Islam and other black-separatist groups who have endorsed the bizarre fantasy that Israel was somehow behind the attacks on the World Trade Center four years ago.

“This upset some members of the local Jewish community, who said, ‘Why would you even let these people see your movie?’ And I got hate mail from some of the more militant members—you know, ‘You self-hating Jew’ and all that crap.

“In any case, the screening was one of the best we ever had. It was tense at times, but at the end, Malik Zulu Shabazz, the head of the Black Panther Party, who was on the record as saying no Jews died on September 11, admitted to journalists that he wasn’t so sure about that anymore. Then I went on Michael Medved’s radio show with Shabazz and asked him directly about it. He said, ‘You’re right, and people should see this movie.’ I’m not saying that he has changed his fundamental political views, but he has taken some of the poison out of the process.”

The filmmaker insists that these small steps are significant in a dangerous yet fast-changing climate. In the past, Arab TV has been filled with quotes from and dramatizations of the forged work (as excerpted in Levin’s effort). But now the Palestinian Authority has announced that all references to The Protocols will be expunged from textbooks and other public documents.

“This is an evolution. No one can change this kind of entrenched hatred overnight, but if it can stimulate openness, isn’t it worthwhile? I also showed it to some Palestinian-American students in Detroit and they were comin’ at me pretty hard for ‘only showing the Jewish side’. But they eventually started arguing with each other pretty vociferously about whether or not it advanced their cause to be associated with some czarist-Nazi bullshit. These are all dialogues that are going to be taking place for the next decade or so, and I think that’s healthy.”

In the past, Levin has concentrated on prison life, street poetry, and other survivalist aspects of African-American experience. (He directed Godfathers and Sons, the hip-hop installment of Martin Scorsese’s PBS series The Blues.) And he figures that his latest documentary is another exploration of human behaviour under extreme conditions.

“I think that all zealots have some things in common. I’ve even identified some of those qualities in myself, in my own crazy way, through my work. But the main thing is that you share something, even if you’re on opposite sides of an argument. There’s some kind of idealism happening there, and it’s our job to scratch the surface and find that.”