25 MINUTES OF STANDING OVATION FOR JEW-HATRED

Venice’s cultural elite did not merely applaud a documentary. They celebrated a one-sided indictment that erased Hamas, dismissed Israel’s right to defend itself and transformed anonymous allegations into a verdict against the Jewish state.

By: Ron East | TheJ.ca | Sept 15, 2026

For approximately 25 minutes, they stood.

They cheered.

They waved Palestinian flags.

They applauded an 80-minute documentary accusing Israel of the calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

Twenty-five minutes.

That is longer than many audiences have ever stood to honor a Holocaust survivor, a liberated hostage, a soldier who sacrificed his life protecting civilians, or a rescuer who ran into the killing fields of October 7.

But in Venice, the cultural elite found the strength to remain on their feet for nearly half an hour because the target was Israel.

The documentary is called NAZA. Directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, produced by The Guardian and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, it premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 10.

The film relies on interviews with 24 Israeli military and intelligence sources whose identities are concealed. Their faces and voices were digitally altered, shielding them from identification, public examination, and meaningful scrutiny.

Yet the film presents their allegations with the cinematic authority of a verdict.

The film’s official promotional language does not describe an investigation seeking answers. It declares that NAZA exposes what its producers call Israel’s “calculated mass killing” of Palestinian civilians.

The conclusion was written before most of the world could even see the evidence.

That did not trouble the audience in Venice.

Neither did the absence of cross-examination.

Neither did the anonymity of the accusers.

Neither did the IDF’s rejection of the film’s central claims.

Neither did the reality that Israel was fighting a terrorist organization that deliberately embedded its fighters, weapons, command centers, and tunnel infrastructure inside one of the most densely populated places on Earth.

None of that could interrupt the applause.

The IDF says human personnel, not artificial intelligence, make targeting decisions. It says every proposed target must be assessed for military necessity, anticipated civilian harm and proportionality under the laws of war. It categorically rejects the allegation that deliberately killing civilians was Israeli policy.

Those are not trivial rebuttals. They go directly to the accusation at the center of the film.

But Venice was not interested in deliberation. Venice wanted condemnation.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about investigating the conduct of the IDF. Israel is a democracy. Its military must be accountable, credible allegations must be examined, and any individual found to have committed a crime must face justice.

But investigation is not what unfolded in that theatre.

This was a prosecution followed by a celebration.

The ovation revealed something uglier than enthusiasm for a film. It exposed the grotesque moral double standard that governs the world’s treatment of Israel.

Where is the 25-minute ovation for a documentary exposing Hamas’s rape, torture, and slaughter on October 7?

Where is the festival prize for examining the Palestinian civilians who invaded Israel alongside Hamas terrorists to murder, kidnap and loot?

Where are the red carpets for films investigating the hostages held in Gaza, the families torn apart, or the Israeli communities burned to the ground?

Where is the cinematic outrage over Hamas building tunnels beneath civilian neighborhoods while leaving Palestinian families without bomb shelters?

Where is the standing ovation for the Israeli soldiers sent into booby-trapped buildings and terror tunnels precisely because Israel did not simply flatten Gaza from the air?

There is none.

The Jews are permitted to be victims, preferably dead ones. The moment Jews fight back, survive and defeat those attempting to murder them, the applause stops.

Then come the accusations.

Then come the tribunals.

Then come the films comparing Jewish soldiers to the Nazis who industrialized the extermination of the Jewish people.

NAZA reportedly includes interviewees drawing parallels between Israel’s conduct and the Holocaust. That comparison alone should have forced every serious viewer to pause.

Instead, they rose to their feet.

This is how modern Jew-hatred operates.

It rarely introduces itself with crude racial language. It speaks instead about “human rights,” “accountability,” and “international law,” while applying standards to the Jewish state that no other democracy confronting genocidal terrorism could possibly meet.

It removes Hamas from the battlefield.

It removes October 7 from the moral equation.

It removes the impossible decisions created when terrorists fight from homes, schools, hospitals, and mosques.

It then points to the consequences of that terrorist strategy as proof of Jewish criminality.

The Palestinian suffering in Gaza is real. Every innocent death is tragic. But compassion for Palestinian civilians does not require accepting Hamas’s propaganda, erasing its responsibility, or declaring Israel guilty based on selectively presented testimony from concealed witnesses.

Nor does the Israeli identity of the filmmakers make the documentary immune from criticism.

Jew-hatred does not become harmless when Jews participate in spreading it. An accusation does not become true simply because an Israeli delivers it to an audience already eager to believe the worst about Israel.

In fact, the participation of Israelis gives the international anti-Israel movement precisely what it desires: Jewish voices that can be displayed as moral permission to condemn the Jewish state.

“Even Israelis admit it,” the activists will proclaim.

The filmmakers will receive applause, awards and international prestige. Israel will receive another blood libel packaged as sophisticated cinema.

The Guardian, which produced the documentary, celebrated NAZA’s Special Jury Prize as recognition of “fearless, independent journalism.” But journalism tests allegations. It challenges sources. It presents material responses. It distinguishes evidence from interpretation.

Propaganda begins with a predetermined villain and constructs the story around the desired conviction.

The reaction in Venice suggests that the conviction was never in doubt.

The audience did not need to hear Israel’s defence. It did not need to consider Hamas’s methods. It did not need to remember the massacre that began the war.

Israel was accused.

For that audience, accusation was enough.

Twenty-five minutes of applause was not an act of compassion.

It was not a demand for peace.

It was not a defense of innocent Palestinians.

It was a public ritual in which the world’s only Jewish state was stripped of context, denied the presumption of innocence, and condemned for defending its people against a genocidal terrorist enemy.

Venice did not simply honor a film.

For 25 disgraceful minutes, it stood and applauded the demonization of Israel.

For 25 disgraceful minutes, it applauded the erasure of Jewish victims.

For 25 disgraceful minutes, it applauded the transformation of Jewish self-defense into a crime.

It applauded Jew-hatred and called it art.

September 15, 2026 | 2 Comments »

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  1. Avi Abelow on FB

    The NAZA Scandal

    Too many Jews still believe that if we perform the moral standards of the Western progressive world, the world will like us and respect us. Ignore the evil of the enemy. Beware of human shields. Be very careful with how you target terrorists. Speak the language of Geneva while they speak the language of slaughter. Then, we are told, Europe will clap, campuses will calm down, and the Jewish state will be allowed to defend itself and live.

    October 7 was the exam. Armed jihadi terrorists came in with mobs of unarmed civilians. Our IDF soldiers, trained and constrained by rules written to impress The Hague and CNN, did not treat that wave as what it was: an invasion. A normal army protects the border and shoots at invaders. Our soldiers on the border and in their tanks instead implemented the lessons they were taught about army ethics and rules of engagement, and held their fire, and instead were attacked and killed by the invading mob.

    That trained inaction led to over a thousand Israelis being butchered, burned, raped, and kidnapped. That is what progressive “morality” delivered on the ground.

    Those rules of engagement were not overturned. They stayed tight, stacked human approvals, courses for senior officers on how not to hit non-combatants when the enemy uses human shields.

    Anyone who has actually fought in the IDF, who has waited for permission on a target while terrorists hide behind children, knows how insane NAZA is. Either the anonymous “soldiers” are not soldiers, or they are self-hating Israeli Jews as the directors, lying in a movie to feed more blood libels that the Western progressive world will use in its ongoing campaign against the Jewish people and Israel.

    IDF soldiers who actually sat in the rooms are saying the opposite of NAZA’s cartoon. They were part of the decision chain in this war. Again and again the call was not to drop the munition, even when the target was real, because the enemy had stacked non-combatants around him as a shield and a camera trap. That choice was not a festival talking point. It was paid for in Israeli blood: extra hours under fire, extra raids, extra funerals, because commanders would rather lose our soldiers than hand the world’s newsrooms a pile of dead human shields.

    That is the Western progressive “morality” the IDF practiced under those stacked approvals. The movie pretends the machine was built to manufacture civilian corpses for sport. The men who held the trigger say the machine often refused the shot so Hamas could not turn a child into a headline. If that is “calculated mass killing,” then words have no meaning left.

    Venice handed a prize to that lie. NAZA, “collateral damage”, is two Israelis, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, putting scrambled voices and hidden faces on Tel Aviv rooftops and telling the world Israel built a machine to kill civilians on purpose. Record ovation. Special jury prize at the festival.

    The sickness is not the audience in Venice who reportedly gave a 25 minute ovation at hearing a blood libel against Israel and the IDF. It is here too.

    Culture Minister Miki Zohar said the film was self-hatred sold for applause from people who hate Jews, and that he wanted the directors’ citizenship pulled for betrayal. Then Yair Golan’s Democrats, the Labor and Meretz parties in a new costume, found their voice. Not against a movie that accuses the army of industrial murder. Against the suggestion that people who smear their own soldiers on a European stage should pay a civic price.

    Lazimi called citizenship-stripping derangement. Moatti said no minister decides which films are allowed. Lasky said “violent discourse against the creators must stop,” that these works raise “value questions that must be asked out of pain,” that wartime is exactly when you police Israel’s rights, “the essence of democracy.” Radman said he hadn’t seen the film and would not defend or attack it, only that hypocrites panic at criticism. Raz congratulated the filmmakers: after October 7 we “closed our ears,” now we must hear more than one side.

    Outrage at punishing the producers. Silence, or applause, for the libel. Their blindness to reality is beyond comprehension, as people around the world do not differentiate them from the IDF soldiers they are being taught to hate.

    Israeli journalist Amit Segal has just reported that the Democrats’ campaign leaned on Lasky to delete the post that legitimized those “moral questions.” Even they can smell the Israeli public. The public is disgusted. It knows a blood libel when it is packaged as cinema.

    But, this is not the real story of this movie.

    The jihadi enemy we face is immoral, and the world is silent.

    Jihad is not a metaphor and not a “resistance narrative.” It is preached in mosques and taught in schools: kill the non-Muslim, humiliate the non-Muslim, rape the non-Muslim when the doctrine permits it as spoils and terror. That is evil. Not “context.” Not “root causes.” Evil. October 7 was that 1,400+ year curriculum graduating in real time – murder, rape, film it, celebrate it.

    Israel’s job is not to win a Western debate on morality. Israel’s job is to stand up, name that jihadi evil without apology, and act to stop it, for Jews first, and for humanity, because this jihadi evil does not stop at our border.

    Western leaders, instead, throw Israel under the bus. They appease the jihad-supporting blocs in their streets, their campuses, their voting blocs, their aid budgets and their film festivals. And instead, they punish the Jewish state for fighting it and flatter the people who chant for our death. That is not diplomacy. That is surrender dressed as Western sophistication.

    The world is not starving for another lecture on proportionality. The world is starving for the morality God gave us in the Torah: rise up and kill those who rise up to kill you.

    That is not a slogan. That is law. That is how you stop a jihadi death cult.

    Progressive “morality” tells the jihadi: put a baby in the window i front of you and you are immune. So he puts a baby in the window. Every time. The only winners of that ethic are the jihadi murderers and their Western allies who smell weakness.

    True morality is ending the threat so human shields stop working, so our citizens can live.

    When jihadis know the human shield will not save them, they will stop using it. Israel must rewrite IDF rules of engagement and the code of ethics to match that older, harder, truer morality, and throw out the progressive counterfeit rules of engagement that got us October 7 and a war that still does not end the evil.

    When we copy the progressive West’s “morality,” we fail to destroy the enemy, fail to end the war, and fail to win public opinion anyway, because the same progressive West will still call us monsters while it courts the mob that funds and excuses jihad. When we act according to God’s morality, name evil as evil, and get rid of it, we win the war and model for the world how to deal with it.

    The Israeli progressive left is not a critic of that sickness. It is the sickness.

    Yair Golan and his Democrats party are the institutional form of it.

    A former second-in-command of the IDF who could look at his own army, the army that continously warned civilians to leave, that requested permission to attack as soldiers died waiting, and speak as if Israel “kills babies for fun.” That is not toughness. That is a man who left his Jewish identity at the door of Western progressive fashion and put on their costume.

    They think Judaism is Western progressive morality. Human rights seminars. Festival prizes. Moral questions “asked out of pain” while Jews are still in tunnels and Hamas still uses children as shields.

    They will police a Jewish minister’s tongue before they will police an Imam of a mosque that preaches our murder. They have disconnected from the covenant that says you do not stand by your brother’s blood, and from the law that says you do not leave life-saving work half-done so Brussels will like your tone.

    They are the sickness. NAZA is the symptom. Golan’s list rushing to protect the filmmakers and scold the minister, is the diagnosis.

    The West’s leaders feeding Israel to the jihad lobby is the same disease in a nicer suit. The cure is not another statement about democracy. The cure is to stop worshipping a foreign morality that gets Jews killed, to call jihad what it is, and to become, again, a people that removes evil because God said so, and because that is the only morality that has ever kept this nation, or any nation, alive.

    The world is waiting for us to show them what true morality is, and ditch the immorality of the progressive Western world….

    Am Yisrael Chai!!!

    https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0z6DMwfHuiBLnD4MXK55tkEmEoUqb6FcqFT9Vc6g4fyjFNGyYycxvuGvBJpadLw3jl&id=545522241

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      Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally were nicknames given to female radio broadcasters who shared English-language propaganda for the Axis powers during World War II. [1]

      Axis SallyWho she was: The main voice was Mildred Gillars, an American woman who worked for Nazi Germany. Another person, Rita Zucca, broadcast for Fascist Italy. [1]

      What she did: She broadcast from Berlin, playing popular American swing music mixed with messages meant to make U.S. troops feel homesick and lonely.

      After the war: Gillars was arrested, tried, and became the first woman convicted of treason in U.S. history. She served 12 years in prison before her release in 1961.

      Tokyo RoseWho she was: This was not a real single person, but a collective nickname used by Allied troops for about a dozen English-speaking women broadcasting from Japan. The most famous individual blamed as Tokyo Rose was Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a Japanese American trapped in Japan during the war.

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