Sunday, December 19, 2010

Hollywood dramatized ethnic cleansing in India and Pakistan, why not the other I/P?

Philip Weiss

Proof if any more is needed of the existence of a powerful Israel lobby in our country:

Tonight over dinner I watched the last 30 minutes of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) on Turner Classics. I was staggered to see the 1947 transfer of Muslim and Hindu refugees at the new border between India and Pakistan portrayed on the big screen. Pitiful streams of refugees. Then the anti-Muslim riots in Calcutta. And Gandhi's fast as he tries to will the new nations to peaceful coexistence. "For god's sake let us embrace like brothers," Nehru says. Gandhi tells a repentant Hindu who has killed a Muslim boy to adopt an orphaned Muslim and raise him as a Muslim. Etc.

The Nakba took place a year after the ethnic cleansing at the border regions of India and Pakistan, and you have never seen the Nakba depicted on the big screen. You have not seen the exodus of refugees from Israel and Palestine portrayed with sympathy-- no, only caricatured, as they were in Borat.

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