Propounding one particular pro-Israel, American Jewish point-of-view, the independently financed social-issue documentary “October 8” charts and laments the alarming enhance in antisemitism — significantly on college campuses and in social media — following the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion into Israel that resulted in over 1,200 deaths and the taking of 251 hostages. To make her passionate, if not significantly nuanced argument, director Wendy Sachs assembles a big solid of speaking heads, together with well-known figures, teachers, journalists, leaders of Jewish organizations and those that monitor extremism. More emotional and private testimony comes from a survivor of the assault, in addition to from U.S. school college students whose public assist for Israel earned them a deluge of on-line hate.
The informative movie calls consideration to an necessary concern, however viewers ought to acknowledge that the angle is one-sided. Israel’s response to the assaults is talked about solely in passing and the interviewees don’t appear to wish to settle for that one man’s terrorist could be one other man’s freedom fighter. Yet the movie is value seeing, if solely to know what antisemitism is, the privileges and limits of free speech, why the rhetoric towards Jews grew to become so full of hate, why so many presidents of elite universities resigned or have been fired from their positions within the aftermath of the pro-Palestine protests and the Trump administration’s present politicization of these protests and protesters.
More Jews have been killed within the Hamas bloodbath in a single day than at any time because the Holocaust. As the killers live-streamed their atrocities on social media, their actions have been celebrated in some quarters, together with in a pro-Palestine gathering in New York’s Times Square and on school campuses. A Cornell professor even spoke of feeling “exhilarated and energized” by the murders. Moreover, 31 pupil teams at Harvard signed a letter saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the assault.
Why did progressive universities fail to sentence the assaults and permit demonstrations that made Jewish college students and college really feel unsafe? Sachs and her interviewees recommend that the younger era will get their info principally on-line and is influenced by misinformation in addition to information sources managed by adversarial nations. Representative Richie Torres, a Democrat from New York, notes that social media platforms encourage indoctrination and sure ones create house for anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish sentiment, which could be expressed anonymously. Meanwhile, branches of Social Justice for Palestine (SJP) sprang into motion on campuses with speaking factors and directions for days of resistance that inspired violence and questioned Israel’s proper to exist.
The movie alleges that the SJP is funded by charities affiliated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. It discusses a gathering of Hamas officers in Philadelphia in 1993, which was monitored by the FBI, the place the group made a movement to border what they have been doing when it comes to apartheid and racial oppression. They knew that these phrases, already understood in American discourse, would draw optimistic press consideration and public response.
The energy and significance of the media echoes all through the movie. The choice of the Israelis to ask in journalists from all over the world to witness the demise and destruction wrought by Hamas is in comparison with Gen. Eisenhower bringing the press to see the German focus camps. An Oct. 17 article by the New York Times that relied solely on Hamas-supplied info to declare that Israel had bombed a hospital, an allegation later corrected, is decried.
Actor Debra Messing, an government producer, expresses shock that extra individuals in Hollywood didn’t straight condemn the violence and converse out in assist of the hostages. Her emotions of disappointment are echoed by actor Michael Rapoport, who finds it unusual that he must be one of many top-billed superstar audio system at a rally urging the discharge of the hostages.
Dense with typically repetitive info, the movie’s briskly edited visuals combine the speaking heads with information footage, web movies and chat graphics. The propulsive typically ominous orchestral music rating from Sharon Farber stresses the factors being made.