"You Have Been Betrayed." - The first in a series of mini documentaries being produced by our team. Share this with someone that needs to wake up.

Subscribe to KairosTime Now

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

https://x.com/i/status/2048467623407419460

Share

The film follows the Abu el‑Adel family across several decades, beginning with their displacement in 1948 and continuing through 1984. It shows routine family life alongside major events, including the birth of a child and the death of a grandmother. These scenes are presented within the broader context of curfews, restricted movement, and other conditions affecting residents of the camp.

The documentary also includes footage of the family visiting the site of their former village, now inside Israel. During this visit, an Israeli resident tells them they cannot remain there without a permit. The sequence documents the contrast between the family’s memories of the land and the current restrictions placed on them.

Gaza Ghetto is frequently cited in film archives and historical discussions because it provides early visual documentation of life in Gaza during this period. It remains part of contemporary Palestinian film collections and is referenced in archival resources such as the Palestine Film Institute.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

(10:13) Iran’s Growing Power Since the War Began

(14:37) Where Does the Hatred Towards Iran Come From?

(24:37) The Nuclear Weapon Lie Surrounding Iran

(32:51) The Greater Israel Project

(37:36) Trump’s Beholdenness to the Oil and Zionist Lobby

(41:12) Iran’s Drought, Israel’s Use of the U.S., and Accepting a Stronger Iran

(54:54) Sachs’s Exchange with Danny Danon

(1:01:37) David Ben-Gurion and the Displacement of Millions of Jews

(1:07:28) Zionism’s Origin

(1:17:06) What Will Israel Do If the U.S. Withdraws Support?

(1:24:38) The Untenability of the Greater Israel Project

(1:32:35) What Are the Economic Effects if This War Accelerates?

(1:47:17) Is This Preordained?

(1:57:07) Have Any Legislatures Grown More Powerful in the Past Decade?

(1:58:23) Will Our Current System Survive This?

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

After Arna’s death, Juliano returned to Jenin in 2002 following a major Israeli military invasion that destroyed large parts of the camp, including the theatre. The children he once filmed had become young men shaped by years of siege, displacement and violence. Several joined armed resistance. Ashraf and Ala became leaders in the Battle of Jenin. Yussef and Nidal carried out an attack in Hadera in 2001. Others were killed in confrontations with Israeli forces.

The film presents these developments directly and without commentary. It shows how the boys who once used theatre to process their trauma later faced a reality where many felt there were no peaceful paths left. The structure of the documentary has sparked discussion in solidarity circles. Some viewers feel the shift from childhood scenes to funerals and posters of the dead creates a mournful tone. Others say it risks overshadowing the everyday forms of steadfastness that Palestinians practice beyond armed struggle. Many also view the film as essential testimony that documents how occupation shaped the lives of these children and the choices they made as adults.

Arna’s Children is considered an important work in Palestinian documentary cinema. It records a community, a theatre and a generation living under military pressure. It follows the paths those children took as the conditions around them hardened. The film stands as a record of Jenin’s history and of Arna’s attempt to create dignity and expression in a place defined by restriction and loss.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

GHF, a Christian organization, laundered taxpayer money under the pretense of being a humanitarian aid company. In reality, it was a mass slaughter campaign.

In this Age of Absurdity, nothing is surprising anymore.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to KairosTime Now

Source: https://youtu.be/80Qrcgu_Kq8?si=l6PlRezwG71JmWIE

Residents describe tanks forcing their way through tight alleys, bulldozers knocking down homes with people still inside, and snipers firing across open areas. They talk about searching through broken concrete for missing relatives. An elderly man walks through the ruins asking, “Where is God?” A young girl speaks calmly about loss no child should face. A deaf man signs his account, pointing to the exact places where neighbors were killed.

There is no voiceover. No outside framing. Only the words of survivors who feel the world ignored what happened to them. Many call it a second Nakba, not only because hundreds of homes were destroyed, but because a community already shaped by exile was torn apart again.

The documentary stands as a record of their experience. It shows grief, anger, and the will to endure. For many Palestinians, it remains an essential account told by the people who survived it.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

For decades, Israel and its defenders have tried to describe the West Bank as “disputed territory,” as if its legal status is open to interpretation or dependent on political preference. That framing collapses the moment one looks at the law. Under the UN Charter, the Hague Regulations, the Fourth Geneva Convention, customary international law, and repeated rulings from the International Court of Justice, Israel’s rule over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is not a legitimate sovereignty claim. It is a military occupation, and one that has become unlawful through annexation, settlement expansion, and the denial of Palestinian self-determination.¹

The debate that continues in media and politics is not a legal debate. It is a political effort to obscure what the legal system has already made plain.²

The West Bank Is Occupied Territory Under International Law

Occupation has a specific legal meaning. Under the 1907 Hague Regulations and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, a territory is occupied when it is placed under the effective control of a foreign military power without lawful transfer of sovereignty. That definition fits the West Bank exactly. Israel controls borders, movement, land registration, natural resources, airspace, security, and the lives of millions of Palestinians who did not consent to its rule.

No recognized legal body has accepted Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. Israel captured the territory in 1967, but conquest does not create lawful title under modern international law. Military control does not become ownership simply because it lasts a long time.

The United Nations Human Rights Council concluded in its 2023 legal study that Israel remains the occupying power and that its continued presence violates the legal limits governing occupation. The International Court of Justice reaffirmed in 2024 that the West Bank is part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and that Israel’s authority there is one of occupation, not sovereignty.¹

Occupation Is Temporary by Law, but Israel Made It Permanent by Design

International law allows occupation only as a temporary wartime condition. The occupying power may administer territory for security reasons while awaiting a lawful political resolution. It may not exploit the territory, transfer its own population into it, permanently alter its character, or annex it.

Israel’s occupation has lasted nearly six decades. During that time, it has embedded control of the West Bank into state institutions, infrastructure systems, military planning, and domestic politics. Roads are built to connect settlements to Israel proper. Water systems are controlled unequally. Land is fragmented into isolated Palestinian enclaves while Israeli settlers move freely under civilian law.

When an occupation ceases to be temporary and becomes a system of permanent domination, it loses the legal protections occupation law was meant to provide. Scholars and legal analysts increasingly describe Israel’s rule as an unlawfully prolonged occupation because it has transformed temporary military control into a durable political order.²

Israel’s Settlements Are Illegal and Constitute a War Crime

The clearest legal issue of all may be the settlements. Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

This provision was created precisely to stop colonization under military occupation. Israel has nevertheless built and expanded settlements across the West Bank for decades, moving hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians into occupied land while displacing Palestinians through confiscation, demolitions, permit denials, and violence.

The United Nations Security Council, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Court of Justice have all affirmed that the settlements violate international law. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, transferring civilian population into occupied territory is a war crime.³

This is not controversial among serious legal institutions. It is only controversial among governments determined to shield Israel from consequences.

Subscribe to CC

De Facto Annexation Is Still Annexation

Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem after 1967, a move rejected internationally as null and void. But formal declarations are not required for annexation. States can annex land through facts on the ground.

That is what Israel has done throughout the West Bank through settlement blocs, segregated road systems, land seizures, military zones, legal dualism, and permanent administrative control. Israeli settlers live under Israeli civil law. Palestinians living nearby remain under military rule. One population enjoys rights, infrastructure, and political representation. The other is denied all three.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has described these policies as creeping annexation. In 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s policies and practices amount to unlawful annexation.⁴

Annexation does not become lawful because it is gradual.

The Separation Wall Was Ruled Illegal

In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s separation wall in the West Bank violated international law. Much of the route does not follow the Green Line but cuts deep into occupied territory, enclosing settlements and isolating Palestinian communities from farmland, schools, jobs, and medical care.

The Court found that the wall violated freedom of movement, property rights, and the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. It ordered that sections built inside occupied territory should be dismantled and that harmed persons should receive reparations.⁵

Israel ignored the ruling. Ignoring a judgment does not erase it.

Share

Human Rights Law Applies in Occupied Territory

Israel has often argued that human rights treaties do not apply in occupied territory. That position has been repeatedly rejected. The consensus of international legal bodies is that both humanitarian law and human rights law apply simultaneously during occupation.

That means Israel remains bound by treaties protecting civil liberties, children, freedom from torture, housing rights, due process, and equality before the law. Yet the documented reality in the West Bank includes arbitrary detention, child imprisonment, home demolitions, land confiscation, movement restrictions, settler violence often carried out with military protection, and systematic discrimination in planning and resource access.⁶

These are not isolated abuses. They are structural features of the system.

The 2024 ICJ Opinion Removed All Remaining Doubt

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued one of the most significant rulings in the history of the conflict. It held that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal and must end as rapidly as possible. It further stated that all states are obligated not to recognize the illegal situation, not to aid or assist in maintaining it, and to cooperate to bring it to an end.⁷

That is not activist rhetoric. It is the highest court in the international system stating that the occupation itself has crossed the line from temporary military control into unlawful domination.

The Real Question Is Not Legal but Political

The legal record is overwhelming. The West Bank is occupied territory. The settlements are illegal. Annexation is illegal. The wall was ruled illegal. Prolonged occupation aimed at territorial acquisition is illegal. The denial of Palestinian self-determination is illegal.

So the real question is no longer whether the occupation violates international law. It does.

The real question is why powerful states continue to fund, arm, excuse, and normalize an unlawful system after every major legal institution has already spoken.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to CC

References:

1. International Court of Justice. Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from Israel’s Policies and Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 2024. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176

2. European Council on Foreign Relations. Israel’s Unlawfully Prolonged Occupation. 2023. https://ecfr.eu/publication/israelsunlawfullyprolongedoccupation7294/ (ecfr.eu in Bing)

3. Fourth Geneva Convention, art. 49(6); Rome Statute, art. 8(2)(b)(viii).

4. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, reports on settlements and annexation; International Court of Justice. Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from Israel’s Policies and Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 2024. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176

5. International Court of Justice. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 2004. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/131

6. International Court of Justice. Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from Israel’s Policies and Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 2024. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176

🔔 If this video opened your eyes — SHARE IT. The algorithm buries what the powerful fear. Your share is more powerful than any media machine.

"Pain does not have a passport. And the ones who cause it… never feel it." — We Love Americans, But Not Their Leaders....

Credit: Sophmara

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to Jemby

Subscribe now

🎥 https://odysee.com/$/embed/@Truth-Fears-No-Investigation:7/Jewish-Terrorism:68

2:20 Why Did Buckley Support Trump So Early On?

13:14 John McCain Leading the Charge Against Big Tobacco

23:55 Obama’s Presidency and Buckley’s Speeches for Trump

41:17 Reminiscing About the Trump We Had in 2020

48:16 Trump’s Hatred of WASPs and His 2016 Victory Party

1:02:44 Homosexuality in Politics, Caretaking, and Ben Shapiro

1:10:20 The Failures of Trump

1:26:01 When Support for Trump Became Dissent

1:32:37 Trump’s Failure to Stand Up for Americans

1:41:22 Trump’s Failure to Investigate Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

1:48:13 The Epstein Files, 9/11 Files, and JFK Files

1:50:52 Trump’s Betrayal of Marjorie Taylor Greene

2:00:09 Has This Been the Plan? Where Does This Go?

2:13:24 Does Buckley Feel Personally Threatened?

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to KairosTime Now

These accounts are not shared by Western mainstream media, but their stories must be told nevertheless.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

The days of tiptoeing around any mention of Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Nazi genocide in the same breath as Netanyahu, Israel, and the European colonial implant on Arab Palestinian soil — which many simply call “the Zionist entity” — are over.

The once‑horrifying stigma of “anti‑Semite” or “anti‑Semitism,” weaponized to oust the anti‑racist, anti‑imperialist Jeremy Corbyn, has been emptied of meaning and bite.

Today many activists wear that pernicious label as if it were a badge of honour, because it has become a symbol of standing on the right side of history, calling out the most comprehensive genocide — the intentional destruction of a targeted, unwanted, identity‑based population, in whole or in significant part.

Having said that, all of us who oppose Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its de facto colonization or annexation of UN‑recognized pre‑1967 Palestine must categorically distinguish the Hitlerite racial hatred of Jews as an identity‑based population from our collective and heartfelt loathing of Israel for its Naziesque policies.

Subscribe now

These include brazen lies, institutionalized pro‑Zionist propaganda, ever‑expansive land grabs, pervasive Jewish‑supremacist ethno‑militarism, unconcealed hostility toward the world at large, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Old Europe’s fear and loathing of its unwanted Jews — something even Hitler called “anti‑Semitism” — was a quintessential cancer among anti‑Jewish Christians and European gentiles.

It is crucial that we understand the significant difference between racial hatred toward Jews as a demographic category or a people (scattered across the world, with multiple national backgrounds) and our vehement opposition to the deeds, words, and policies of Israel and its supporters, both Jews and non‑Jews.

It is imperative that we read Hitler’s words, holding our noses, knowing how vile, essentialist, and dehumanizingly genocidal they were.

The fear and loathing of Jews across Europe found expression in documents as diverse as the Magna Carta (1215), which spelled out when not to repay debts to “Jews,” to a 14th‑century German weavers’ guild resolution prohibiting the purchase of wool from “Jews,” and in distinct vocabularies such as “ghetto” and “pogrom,” rooted in old Latin/Roman and Russian.

Subscribe to Maung Zarni

But it was the two Germans, with drastically different origins, namely Kaiser Wilhelm II, the eldest son of Frederick III, the German Emperior, and Britain’s Queen Victoria - and Adolf Hitler, a fringe political figure, a lowly veteran of WWI, and a failed painter from the upper Austrian region of Linz, who promoted the most comprehensively vile racist tropes about “Jews.”

After his abdication in 1918, the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II corresponded with some of his old Prussian generals in Germany, describing Germany’s Jewish population as “the mushroom that grows on the German oak tree.”

In the following decade, the racial hatred of German Jews intensified, and Hitler published his Mein Kampf in 1925 (over 600 pages in the 1971 English edition), where he explicitly took readers through his transformation from someone who felt uncomfortable with anti‑Semitic expressions to someone who felt racial hatred toward the Jewish people, whom he called “a maggot(s) in the rotting body” (under the subheading Transformation into an Anti‑Semite, Mein Kampf, 1971, p. 57).

Here I am going to include several photographed pages for anyone interested in hearing straight from the horse’s mouth, so that we, the anti‑Zionist and anti‑genocidal, do not succumb to the old Fascist disease ourselves: Hitlerite racial hatred, which eventually resulted in industrialized mass extermination aided by the scientific and technological advances for which Germany was the center at the time, and rendered most effective by the German bureaucracy.

Share

Hitler’s beef against the German Jews was multifold: he blamed them for many things — Marxism, democracy, anti‑dictatorship sentiment, propaganda, cultural “contamination,” designs for racial domination, and so on — and assigned essentialist racist traits, most of them profoundly negative (for instance, deceitful, cunning, greedy, etc.).

Many of us non‑Europeans, including largely Muslim Arabs and Persians throughout West Asia, are not originally infested with the Hitlerite disease of fear and loathing of Jewish people.

Our opposition is against the behavior, policies, declarations, and, in short, the evident lack of humanity in both the state and society called Israel. We must stay within this principled, human‑centered opposition to Israel — and, by extension, its Zionist supporters worldwide.

Watch rabbinical scholar Professor Yakov Rabkin explain here the exclusively European roots of Zionism and the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine, and how Ashkenazi Jews of Zionist persuasion hijacked Jewish identity, history, and culture while projecting their deep‑seated paranoia onto worldwide Jewry.

Even before I made my first-ever visit to Gaza in the summer of 2024, that is, the nearest reachable point (Karem Shalom Crossing near the Egyptian-Israeli borders) to Gaza, I was drawing a Nazi comparison.

All forms of available empirical evidence persuaded me that Israel was turning Gaza, with its 2.4 million Palestinians, into its killing fields — the Zionists’ Auschwitz.

On 29 August 2024, our largely American peace delegation of Rabbis for Ceasefire and Christians for Ceasfire on 29 August 2024 heard bomb and drone explosions and saw the Israeli Defence Force, or Israel’s SS-executioners, coming back from their morning rounds of genocidal slaughter and assault in the sieged population in Rafah City a kilometer or so away, inside the walls, from where we were holding a peace vigil. Twenty nine of us, including our host Omar Haramy, Director of Sabeel, the Jerusalem-based Liberation Theology Center, and Lareen Abu Akleh, the younger niece of the IDF-murdered AJ correspondent Shireen, stood at the UN parking lot just outside the walls.

Subscribe to Maung Zarni

I made a second visit to the occupied West Bank and 1948 Israel — specifically Tel Aviv, the cosmopolitan European city “free of Muslims,” as Ilan Pappé put it wryly — in January 2025.

Through my trained eyes as a student of genocide, Fascism, and the history of authoritarianism, I came home from my two visits deeply troubled by what I observed: a state armed to the teeth, unconditionally joined at the hip with the richest and most imperialist country, the United States, supported by its fanatical Zionist bases in the diaspora, pursuing multiple processes of genocide across all pockets of the Palestinian people, while a genocidally primed society or civil society cheers on, supports, or partakes in the state’s crimes.

To get a sense of how deeply genocidal and how pervasively Nazi‑like Israel is — both the Jewish‑supremacist apartheid state and the Jewish Israeli society, including the 700,000 American Zionist Jews in illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — all you need to do is watch this nearly two‑hour in‑depth interview Tucker Carlson conducted with a liberal American Jew who had lived in Israel for more than seven years before returning to North America. Despite his opposition to the individual behaviors, public (genocidal) sentiments, and policies and practices.

Share

After my eyes witnessed how Israel is today’s replica of Nazi Germany, I could not generate an ounce of desire to visit any Holocaust memorial sites anywhere in Europe. Several months ago, I was traveling by train in Poland. When it stopped at Lublin station, for a fraction of a second I asked myself whether I wanted to get off and visit Majdanek, a major concentration camp.

Instead, I skipped the dark site of “genocide tourism,” traveled on to Warsaw, sat at a café in a park, and spent my time listening to an older Polish woman playing her violin for passers‑by.

For me, as someone who is passionately interested in and concerned about genocides, including the Shoah or the Nazi genocide of European Jews, Zionist Israel and its vile, sadistic public have all but destroyed my heartfelt curiosity and “human connection” to the memories of the murdered Jews of Nazi‑occupied Europe.

Not anymore. I now live the renowned Israeli genocide historian Omar Bartov’s nightmare: I no longer give a damn about any Holocaust memorial sites or annual memorial rituals insofar as the murdered Jews of Europe.

Between 2007 and 2023, I paid at least 12 visits — four visits to Auschwitz alone — to Nazi death and concentration camps and memorial sites across formerly Nazi‑occupied countries, including Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Austria. During the Covid‑19 lockdown, I co‑produced, with a dear friend and Uzbek war journalist Shahida, an educational film for Myanmar human rights activists, called Auschwitz: Lessons Never Learned.

A brief professional background of mine may be in order.

One of my 3 PhD thesis advisers was the late Robert L. Koehl, a pioneering scholar of Heinrich Himmler and SS who in his capacity as a German-speaking American military intelligence officer interrogated scores of surrendered SS officers in the US Section of the Allied Occupied Germany in 1945.

Though trained as a scholar of curriculum and knowledge, in my academic and activist careers I was compelled to turn to the study of genocidal destruction in my native country of Myanmar 15 years ago, my fellow Burmese, largely Buddhists, were pursuing a genocidal policy toward the country’s unwanted, predominantly Muslim Rohingya population (over 2 million in total, excluding those who had already been forced out in earlier waves of violent persecution since 1978).

Here I wish to leave readers with some educational items that have captured the most troubling, vile, and criminal aspects of the deeds Israel has been engaged in, with the help of Germany and Ukraine, of all states.

There’s Nothing Offensive About Invoking the Holocaust to Defend Human Rights

What Tim Walz and “Boogie” Yaalon understand but the US Holocaust Museum does not

In passing, Zionism is the deadliest parasite in recorded human history: among its three hosts have been antisemitic gentile Anglo‑American imperialist powers; the Jewish community at large (and Judaism), with its identity and history; and, last but not least, the indigenous peoples of historic — as opposed to biblical — Palestine. The late Golda Meir, the Tsarist Russia‑born Ashkenazi Jew who migrated to Wisconsin, USA, as a very young girl and settled in Mandate Palestine in the 1920s, made it very clear that Zionism was both an ideology and a strategy: early Zionists sought Western imperialist patronage from their earliest inception, both conceptually and strategically, for their settler‑colonial project of taking other people’s land by means of ethnic cleansing (e.g., the Nakba of 1947/48) and by weaving biblical fairytales as if they were empirical histories, with paradigmatic outright lies such as “A land without people for a people without land.”

Against their own interests, and driven by unfettered greed and turbo‑charged delusions of Jewish‑supremacist grandeur, Zionists of all stripes and colours have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination: they have captured the state in the USA, secured Security Council veto protection, extracted nearly $400 billlion American taxpayers money over half-a-century (and counting), and made Americans fight Zionist wars of aggression and choice.

All to expand Israel’s land mass, establish domination over hundreds of millions of Muslims in West Asia by destroying and/or destabilizing virtually all Muslim neighbours, and control sea and land routes to lucrative energy sources through cooptation with Arab Zionists in artificial Gulf states such as the UAE and the family dictatorship of Saudi Arabia.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to Maung Zarni

The announcement of a 10‑day ceasefire in Lebanon by U.S. President Donald Trump has raised more questions than it answers. Far from being a straightforward diplomatic breakthrough, the move appears to have caught Israel’s own security cabinet off guard—suggesting that the ceasefire was less a product of Israeli initiative and more a condition imposed by Washington. This dynamic alone invites suspicion: Is the U.S. using Lebanon as a bargaining chip in its broader negotiations with Iran?

Pressure from Tehran, Mediation via Islamabad

Analysts point to Iran’s role in shaping the ceasefire, reportedly making it a prerequisite for any further talks with the United States. Pakistan’s involvement as an intermediary underscores how regional actors are manoeuvring to limit Washington’s unilateral leverage. If Iran can dictate terms through indirect channels, the ceasefire may reflect not U.S. benevolence but strategic necessity.

The Battlefield Reality

Despite weeks of fighting, Israel failed to occupy key border villages, most notably Bint Jbeil—a city with symbolic weight in the resistance narrative. This military stalemate undermines the image of Israeli dominance and suggests that the ceasefire may be less about humanitarian reprieve and more about buying time to recalibrate strategy. That suspicion was reinforced when reports emerged that Israeli forces attacked villages in Lebanon just two hours after the ceasefire was announced. Such actions cast doubt on whether Israel ever intended to honour the truce, and they expose the ceasefire as little more than a diplomatic fig leaf.

Subscribe now

U.S. Military Buildup: A Pause Before Escalation?

The massive U.S. military presence in the region—tens of thousands of troops and a fleet of naval ships—casts doubt on the sincerity of the ceasefire. Rather than signalling de‑escalation, the buildup hints at preparations for a wider conflict. Some analysts frame the ceasefire as a public relations manoeuvre, designed to project restraint while laying the groundwork for future escalation.

Economic Leverage and the Hormuz Factor

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has already sent energy prices soaring in Europe and threatens agricultural supply chains in North America. Yet Iran, having spent decades cultivating alternative trade routes, appears resilient. This resilience undermines Washington’s ability to weaponise economic pressure, raising the possibility that the U.S. is using Lebanon as a diversionary theatre while its economic strategy falters.

Share

Attrition, Not Deterrence

The conflict increasingly resembles a war of attrition, where the goal is not merely to deter attacks but to inflict lasting strategic losses. In this context, the ceasefire looks less like a step toward peace and more like a tactical pause in a longer campaign of exhaustion.

Conclusion

The ceasefire in Lebanon may offer temporary relief, but its foundations are shaky. With Washington imposing conditions, Israel facing battlefield setbacks—and even violating the truce within hours, Iran manoeuvring, and U.S. forces massing—the truce seems less a genuine peace effort than a manoeuvre in a larger geopolitical chess game. For observers wary of U.S. and Israeli intentions, the ceasefire is not an end to conflict—it is a prelude to the next phase.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Hollywood is not just entertainment. It is a global propaganda engine that manufactures emotions, shapes who we fear, who we mourn, who we see as fully human, and who is treated as disposable. For Arabs and Muslims, Hollywood has functioned as a hundred-year smear campaign. The Arab or Muslim on screen is overwhelmingly a terrorist, fanatic, oil-hoarding sheikh, oppressed woman, refugee burden, or background extra whose main purpose is to die so that white, usually American or Israeli, protagonists can complete their moral journey.¹

This did not emerge out of nowhere. It sits at the intersection of Europe’s long history of Orientalism and anti-Arab racism, U.S. empire and the Pentagon’s public relations needs, Zionist efforts to normalize Israel and demonize Palestinians, and a profit-driven studio system that sells fear very well.² The result is a pipeline: Israel and the United States manufacture enemies, Hollywood supplies the imagery, and the public absorbs it as common sense.³

Jack Shaheen spent decades cataloguing this system. In Reel Bad Arabs, he analyzed more than one thousand films and found that the vast majority depicted Arabs as villains, buffoons, or threats, with almost no fully human, ordinary Arab lives represented at all.⁴ Edward Said provided the theoretical framework for understanding why. The Orient had to be perceived as inferior, backward, and menacing so that Western domination could be narrated as benevolent and necessary.⁵

Zionism fits neatly into this older Western script. If Palestinians and Arabs are already coded as barbaric, then the Zionist project can present itself as the enlightened West’s outpost, what Israeli leaders have called a “villa in the jungle.” Hollywood then becomes the cartographer of that jungle.⁶

How the West Learned to Hate Arabs: Orientalism Before Zionism

Europe was producing Islamophobic and anti-Arab fantasies long before Herzl dreamed of a Jewish state in Palestine. Orientalist paintings, travelogues, novels, and early colonial photography portrayed Arabs and Muslims as irrational, hypersexual, cruel, and incapable of self-rule.⁷ Said showed that these portrayals were not random prejudice. They were embedded in imperial policy. The Orient was constructed as everything Europe was not: lazy versus industrious, despotic versus democratic, fanatical versus rational. Colonization could then be cast as charity rather than theft.⁸

Early cinema inherited this visual language. Silent films such as The Sheik (1921) leaned into Orientalist fantasy by portraying Arab men as dangerous seducers, Arab lands as exotic playgrounds for Western adventure, and Arab women as either passive victims or erotic objects.⁹ The Arab was already marked as other before Zionism appeared on screen.

Zionism then weaponized this preexisting racism. If Arabs are uncivilized and naturally prone to violence, then Palestinian resistance to colonization can be framed as irrational hatred rather than a predictable response to dispossession.¹⁰ Hollywood did not invent that logic. It amplified it and wrapped it in Technicolor.

Zionism Arrives in Hollywood: Writing Israel into the American Myth

Once Israel was founded on the ruins of Palestine in 1948, Zionist organizations quickly recognized Hollywood’s value. Americans needed to see Israel not as a colonial project but as a plucky little democracy surrounded by irrational Arab hordes. The easiest way to do that was to merge Israel’s story with America’s own myths of pioneers, frontier, and “making the desert bloom.” Settler recognizes settler.¹¹

Historical work on Hollywood-Israel relations shows that by the mid-twentieth century, Zionist activists and communal organizations were cultivating relationships with studio heads, writers, and stars. Israeli officials were directly involved in shaping certain film projects. Palestinian presence, whether historical or contemporary, was almost completely erased from mainstream cinematic narratives about Israel.¹²

The film that crystallizes this process is Exodus (1960). Based on Leon Uris’s novel, it presents Zionist militias as noble freedom fighters and Palestinians as either invisible or reduced to a faceless Arab menace. Research into “Operation Exodus” shows direct Israeli government involvement in the film’s production, including cooperation with the Israeli military and coordination over messaging.¹³ As Hazem Fahmy argues, Exodus did not merely tell a story. It rewrote the story of Israel for American audiences, aligning Israeli state mythology with U.S. frontier myths about civilizing a land portrayed as if it were magically uninhabited.¹⁴

From there, a pattern emerges. Israeli Jews are shown as brave, conflicted, and morally serious. Arabs, including Palestinians, appear as angry mobs, saboteurs, or background noise. The Nakba is never mentioned. Israeli violence is framed as self-defense, while Palestinian resistance is framed as terror. That is how Zionism was written into Hollywood’s DNA.

Subscribe to CC

The Hasbara Machine: Direct Israeli Influence on Hollywood

Israel does not even pretend that this is a neutral cultural exchange. It openly treats pop culture as a front in its information war.¹⁵ Reports document a long pattern in which Israeli ministries coordinate with studios and producers to ensure “balanced,” meaning pro-Israel, content. U.S.-based Zionist groups such as AIPAC and allied organizations sponsor educational trips to Israel for actors, writers, and influencers. Oscar swag bags have even included luxury trips to Israel, marketed as rewards for A-list stars.¹⁶

These trips are not tourism. They are curated propaganda tours. Participants are taken to Yad Vashem and high-tech companies, given carefully controlled encounters with handpicked Palestinian citizens of Israel, and shielded from checkpoints, refugee camps, and bombed-out neighborhoods in Gaza.¹⁷

The same network that sells Israel’s image also polices dissent. Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a new blacklist has formed in real time. Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream after posting basic pro-Palestine statements. Other actors and writers were dropped by agents or quietly disinvited from projects for condemning Israeli atrocities. Studio executives and producers made it clear that “controversial politics” means anything that challenges Israel, not anything that advocates genocidal violence against Palestinians.¹⁸ Middle East Eye, Left Voice, and others have described this as a new Hollywood McCarthyism. Careers are being threatened not for communism this time but for refusing to cheerlead for apartheid and ethnic cleansing.¹⁹

When an industry punishes people for opposing the mass killing of Palestinian children while rewarding those who fundraise for the Israeli military, that is not complexity. It is political discipline.

Share

Jack Shaheen and the Archive of Hate

Jack Shaheen did what Hollywood refused to do. He counted. In Reel Bad Arabs, he examined more than one thousand films, from silent pictures to late twentieth-century blockbusters, and showed that Arabs were almost always portrayed negatively as terrorists, lecherous sheikhs, primitive tribesmen, misogynists, or buffoons.²⁰ In a later article on Arab women, he showed how Arab and Muslim women are reduced to veiled victims, exotic dancers, or invisible wives, rarely portrayed as actual complex people with jobs, opinions, or interior lives.²¹

After 9/11, Shaheen published Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11, documenting how Islamophobic tropes did not merely persist but intensified.²² The Arab terrorist became Hollywood’s default villain. Entire shows and movie franchises were built on the assumption that Muslim life is a legitimate target.

Among the stereotypes Shaheen catalogued were the terrorist who screams “Allahu Akbar” while trying to kill Americans or Israelis, the greedy oil sheikh, the oppressed woman who exists to be rescued by Western men or secular elites, and the “good Arab” who assists Americans or Israelis in killing other Arabs or denounces his own people.²³ Shaheen’s work proves that Arabs are not just occasionally maligned. They are Hollywood’s default villain.²⁴

The Pentagon-Hollywood Axis and the War on Terror

Hollywood’s Islamophobia does not simply reflect Zionist narratives. It dovetails perfectly with U.S. military propaganda. The U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies have long provided production support to films and television series, including access to bases, ships, helicopters, equipment, and technical advice, on the condition that scripts reinforce certain narratives. Researchers and journalists have shown that the Pentagon frequently requests script changes in exchange for support, particularly in films about war, terrorism, and covert operations.²⁵

So when Hollywood makes films about Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamic terror, or counterterrorism operations, there is often an invisible co-writer: the Pentagon.²⁶ This matters because films that question U.S. foreign policy or depict Muslims sympathetically often struggle to secure military support and backing from major studios, while films that portray Arab and Muslim bodies as legitimate targets for American violence are showered with resources.²⁷

This aligns seamlessly with Israeli interests. If Hollywood trains audiences to accept the War on Terror as a noble fight against savage and irrational enemies, then Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinians can be folded into the same civilization versus barbarism narrative.²⁸ Shows such as Homeland and films such as Zero Dark Thirty normalize a world in which Muslim lives are expendable, surveillance and torture are treated as minor ethical issues, and the United States and Israel are righteous victims defending themselves.²⁹

Post-9/11: Zionism and U.S. Militarism Merge into One Story

The attacks of September 11, 2001 became the excuse for everything Washington and Tel Aviv already wanted to do. Israeli officials immediately began framing Israel as the front line in the same war America was now fighting, and U.S. politicians eagerly repeated that line.³⁰ Hollywood responded with a wave of post-9/11 films and television shows that dramatized the War on Terror as a necessary and endless global campaign, centered American and sometimes Israeli suffering while rendering Muslim pain invisible, and turned Arab cities into anonymous backdrops for raids, drone strikes, and heroic special-operations missions.

Ayesha Qamar and colleagues’ 2024 study on Islamophobia in Hollywood movies found that explicitly Islamophobic portrayals increased in both frequency and intensity after 9/11. Muslim characters were more likely to be linked to violence, fanaticism, or suspicion after 9/11 than before.³¹ At the same time, Maytha Alhassen’s Haqq and Hollywood traced a century-long evolution of Muslim portrayals on screen, showing how older Orientalist tropes were simply recycled into post-9/11 security narratives.³²

USC Annenberg’s 2021 Missing and Maligned study found that Muslims made up only 1.6 percent of 8,965 speaking characters in two hundred top-grossing films from 2017 to 2019, and many of those roles were tied to violence or extremism.³³ A later report on television found similarly low representation and heavy reliance on stereotypes.³⁴ Muslims are barely present, and when they are present, they are framed as the problem. That is not an accident. It is narrative engineering.

Subscribe to CC

Case Study: American Sniper and the Industrial Production of Muslim Targets

If one wanted a distilled example of Hollywood’s Islamophobia, American Sniper would be a strong candidate. Based on the memoir of U.S. sniper Chris Kyle, the film portrays Iraqis almost entirely as savages trying to kill Americans for no reason, cowards hiding behind women and children, or legitimate targets to be gunned down from a distance.

Coverage by Al Jazeera pointed out how the movie revives age-old racist roles for Arabs, portraying them as dehumanized and voiceless people existing purely as threats to be eliminated.³⁵ The invasion of Iraq, which was based on lies, goes almost unquestioned. The destruction of Iraqi society is reduced to background noise. Viewers are invited to identify emotionally with Kyle’s trauma, while the Iraqi dead often do not even receive names.

This is exactly how Zionism wants audiences to see Palestinians: as an anonymous crowd, inherently violent, whose resistance is pure hatred, and whose killing is merely protection. When audiences internalize the idea that Arab life is cheap and that Western or Israeli snipers are heroic defenders, it becomes much easier to sell the bombing of Gaza or the siege of Jenin as regrettable but necessary.³⁶

Zionist Cancel Culture: Punishing Hollywood’s Dissenters

Hollywood likes to present itself as liberal and edgy until Israel is mentioned. Then the industry moves quickly to crush dissent. Since October 2023, this has happened in plain view. Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream VII after posting ordinary human rights language about Palestinians on Instagram. TIME and other outlets documented how quickly she was dropped despite no history of hateful speech.³⁷ Some actors and writers who signed ceasefire letters reported being quietly uninvited from projects, removed from consideration, or warned by agents to stay silent.³⁸ Meanwhile, those who cheer for the Israeli army, donate to organizations supporting its operations, or repeat genocidal talking points face no comparable professional consequences.³⁹

As Al Jazeera put it, the truth about Palestine is not coming to a theater near you, in part because those who try to tell it risk their livelihoods.⁴⁰ This is not a level playing field. It is a system where pro-Israel messaging is rewarded and anti-Zionist or even basic pro-Palestinian humanitarian concern is punished.⁴¹

Celebrity Propaganda: Israel’s Star-Studded PR Regime

Zionist organizations and the Israeli state have systematically used celebrity culture as a weapon. This includes fundraisers in Hollywood and New York that raise millions for Israeli soldiers, curated celebrity trips to Israel often co-sponsored by AIPAC or allied groups, and Brand Israel campaigns that associate the country with technology, LGBTQ rights, or wellness culture while washing away the reality of occupation and settler violence.⁴²

Israel’s cultural propagandists understand something very well. It does not matter how many United Nations resolutions condemn them if they can still get a favorite actor to smile for photographs in Tel Aviv and praise the food. Hollywood is not neutral terrain where this merely happens. It is actively recruited into the campaign.⁴³

From Exodus to Marvel: Justifying Israeli War Crimes One Blockbuster at a Time

From Exodus in 1960 to Marvel’s effort to introduce Sabra, an Israeli superhero linked to Mossad, the pattern is remarkably consistent: normalize the Israeli security state and dehumanize its enemies. Ramzy Baroud’s “From Exodus to Marvel” traces how early films romanticized Zionist militias and erased Palestinian existence, while later films presented Israeli airstrikes and invasions as difficult but necessary decisions made by anguished and enlightened leaders. Sabra is simply the latest chapter in that story.⁴⁴

Meanwhile, Palestinians remain either invisible or reduced to terrorist caricatures. There is no equivalent Marvel hero who is a Palestinian journalist, doctor, or freedom fighter. Mondoweiss’s “Zombie Hasbara” noted how World War Z relocates its apocalypse to a walled Jerusalem and portrays Israel’s apartheid wall as a rational lifesaving measure until savages storm it.⁴⁵ Hollywood repeatedly takes real apparatuses of oppression such as walls, checkpoints, and bombing campaigns and recasts them as defensive or even noble.⁴⁶

Mossad in Hollywood: Arnon Milchan and the Spy-Producer Era

If this sounds conspiratorial, consider Arnon Milchan. Milchan is a billionaire Hollywood producer behind films such as Pretty Woman, Fight Club, L.A. Confidential, 12 Years a Slave, and Birdman. He has openly admitted that he spent years working as an Israeli intelligence operative and arms dealer, helping secure technology and materials for Israel’s nuclear program while simultaneously building a Hollywood empire.⁴⁷

Investigations and biographies have shown that Milchan’s business network was intertwined with Israeli intelligence, that he used international companies and contacts to acquire sensitive technology for Israel, and that his friendships with powerful Hollywood figures gave him extraordinary soft power.⁴⁸ He is not the only person to bridge these worlds, but he is the most public. His existence destroys the comforting myth that there is a clean line between Hollywood and Zionist state operations. Sometimes that line walks the red carpet.⁴⁹

Subscribe now

Streaming Platforms and Digital Hasbara

Cinema and cable are no longer the only battlegrounds. Streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ have become major vehicles for normalizing Zionist narratives. One example is Fauda, an Israeli series on Netflix that follows Israeli undercover units hunting Palestinian militants. The show humanizes Israeli agents while depicting Palestinians largely as unstable, fanatical, or duplicitous. Critics have described it as clumsy hasbara wrapped in the aesthetics of prestige television.⁵⁰

This fits into a broader pattern that some scholars and activists call the Israelification of Western media: the spread of Israeli security logic, including walls, surveillance, and preemptive violence, as common-sense solutions, with Arabs and Muslims cast as permanent suspects.⁵¹

Real-World Damage: When Tropes Become Policy

All of this would be just movies if movies did not shape public opinion, policy support, and everyday violence. But they do. USC Annenberg’s data shows that Muslims are almost absent on screen and, when present, are disproportionately associated with conflict and extremism.⁵² Alhassen’s Haqq and Hollywood synthesizes scholarship showing that decades of negative portrayal help shape public perceptions of Muslims as dangerous, foreign, and less deserving of civil rights.⁵³ Leah Balter’s “A Violent Reality” directly connects Islamophobic attacks and hate crimes to cultural conditioning, arguing that people primed to see Muslims as threats are more likely to tolerate or commit violence against them.⁵⁴

These tropes also appear in policy debates. Surveillance programs targeting Muslim communities are framed as common sense. Wars against Muslim-majority countries are marketed as humanitarian or defensive. Palestinians are treated as inherently suspect, which makes their testimony about Israeli atrocities easier to dismiss as “Pallywood.”⁵⁵ When Israel bombs Gaza, the average Western viewer has already consumed thousands of films and shows in which Arabs are villains and Israeli or American soldiers are noble heroes. It should not surprise us that many people’s first instinct is to assume the dead Palestinians must have brought it on themselves.⁵⁶ Hollywood did not drop the bombs, but it helped prepare audiences to accept them.

Hollywood’s Reckoning

Hollywood loves redemption arcs. It is long past time it wrote one for itself. The industry has spent a century turning Arabs and Muslims into monsters, props, or invisible extras. It has recycled Orientalist fantasy, adopted Zionist talking points as plotlines, collaborated with the Pentagon to glorify imperial wars, and punished those who speak out for Palestinians while protecting those who cheer on their slaughter.⁵⁷ This is not random bias or merely the market at work. It is the product of deliberate lobbying, ideological alignment with empire, and the willingness of studios and stars to look away while Israel uses their platforms to launder apartheid.⁵⁸

A real reckoning would require ending collaboration with state propaganda machines, whether Pentagon script approvals or Israeli government hasbara. It would require funding Arab and Muslim creators with genuine creative control over stories about their own communities, including Palestinians. It would require reversing the blacklist, apologizing, and restoring those punished for supporting Palestinian rights. And it would require accountability structures so that films and shows that dehumanize entire peoples are not treated as harmless entertainment but as interventions in real lives.⁵⁹

Until then, Hollywood will keep producing stories that make it easier to bomb, occupy, and starve Arabs and Muslims while congratulating itself for providing content.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to CC

References:

1. Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2001); Jack G. Shaheen, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11 (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2008); Jack G. Shaheen, “The Not So Evil Arab Women in American Popular Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24, no. 1 (2007): 19-25; Maytha Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them (Pop Culture Collaborative, 2018); USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Missing & Maligned: The Reality of Muslims in Popular Global Films (Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, 2021).

2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2014), originally published 1978; Fatiha Zohra Mecheri, Saliha Azoui, and Nacira El Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia” (master’s thesis, Université Frères Mentouri, Constantine 1, 2022); Project on Government Oversight, “Pentagon Influence in Hollywood: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Movies,” 2019; Ramzy Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel: A Brief History of Hollywood’s Justification of Israeli War Crimes,” Jordan Times, September 20, 2022; Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman, Hollywood and Israel: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022); Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood.

3. Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood; Ayesha Qamar, Syed Irtaza, and S. Y. Raza, “Islamophobia in Hollywood Movies: Comparative Analysis of Pre- and Post-9/11 Movies,” Journal of Development and Social Sciences 5, no. 1 (2024): 529-537; Mecheri, Azoui, and Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia.”

4. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs.

5. Said, Orientalism.

6. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

7. Said, Orientalism.

8. Ibid.

9. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs; Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood.

10. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

11. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

12. Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel; Hazem Fahmy, “How Hollywood Wrote the Story of Israel,” Jewish Currents, 2022; Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel.”

13. Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel; Middle East Monitor, “Operation Exodus: How Israel Used Hollywood to Win the American Mind,” 2022.

14. Fahmy, “How Hollywood Wrote the Story of Israel.”

15. Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel; Mecheri, Azoui, and Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia.”

16. Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel; Electronic Intifada, “Hollywood Actors to Visit Israel on a Trip Co-Sponsored by AIPAC,” February 12, 2015; Middle East Monitor, “Israel Trips Add Hasbara to Oscar Swag Bags,” 2016.

17. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Belén Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem,” Al Jazeera, December 7, 2023.

18. Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem”; TIME, “Melissa Barrera and Others in Hollywood Lose Jobs, Representation over War Commentary,” 2023; Left Voice, “The New Hollywood McCarthyism Emerging around Palestine,” 2023; Middle East Eye, “Why Hollywood Needs a Reckoning over Its Pro-Israel Cancel Culture,” 2023; Al Jazeera, coverage of Hollywood and Palestine, 2023.

19. Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem”; Left Voice, “The New Hollywood McCarthyism Emerging around Palestine.”

20. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs.

21. Shaheen, “The Not So Evil Arab Women in American Popular Cinema.”

22. Shaheen, Guilty.

23. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs; Shaheen, Guilty; Shaheen, “The Not So Evil Arab Women in American Popular Cinema.”

24. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs; Shaheen, Guilty.

25. Project on Government Oversight, “Pentagon Influence in Hollywood”; Mecheri, Azoui, and Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia.”

26. Project on Government Oversight, “Pentagon Influence in Hollywood.”

27. Mecheri, Azoui, and Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia”; Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood; Qamar, Irtaza, and Raza, “Islamophobia in Hollywood Movies”; USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Missing & Maligned.

28. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

29. Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood; Qamar, Irtaza, and Raza, “Islamophobia in Hollywood Movies.”

30. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem.”

31. Qamar, Irtaza, and Raza, “Islamophobia in Hollywood Movies.”

32. Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood.

33. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Missing & Maligned.

34. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Erased or Extremists: The State of Muslim Representation on Television (Los Angeles: USC Annenberg, 2022).

35. Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem.”

36. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

37. TIME, “Melissa Barrera and Others in Hollywood Lose Jobs”; Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem.”

38. Left Voice, “The New Hollywood McCarthyism Emerging around Palestine”; Middle East Eye, “Why Hollywood Needs a Reckoning.”

39. Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem”; Middle East Monitor, “Hollywood Stars Raise Record $60m for Israel Army,” 2023.

40. Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem.”

41. Left Voice, “The New Hollywood McCarthyism Emerging around Palestine”; Middle East Eye, “Why Hollywood Needs a Reckoning.”

42. Middle East Monitor, “Hollywood Stars Raise Record $60m for Israel Army”; Middle East Monitor, “Israel Trips Add Hasbara to Oscar Swag Bags”; Electronic Intifada, “Hollywood Actors to Visit Israel on a Trip Co-Sponsored by AIPAC”; Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

43. Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem”; Middle East Eye, “Why Hollywood Needs a Reckoning.”

44. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Middle East Monitor, coverage of Sabra and Marvel, 2022.

45. Jonathan Benjamin, “Zombie Hasbara: World War Z and Hollywood’s Zionist Embrace,” Mondoweiss, June 25, 2013.

46. Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel; Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood.

47. Haroon Sherwood, “Arnon Milchan Reveals Past as Israeli Spy,” The Guardian, November 26, 2013; BBC News, “Hollywood Producer Arnon Milchan Testifies at Netanyahu Corruption Trial,” 2021.

48. Sherwood, “Arnon Milchan Reveals Past as Israeli Spy”; BBC News, “Arnon Milchan Testifies”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel; Electronic Intifada, “Hollywood Actors to Visit Israel on a Trip Co-Sponsored by AIPAC.”

49. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

50. Middle East Monitor, “Fauda Season 3: Clumsy Hasbara in the Imagined Gaza Dystopia,” 2020; Mecheri, Azoui, and Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia.”

51. Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

52. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Missing & Maligned; USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Erased or Extremists.

53. Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood.

54. Leah Balter, “A Violent Reality: Hollywood’s Influence on Violence Against Muslims,” Cultural Daily, June 5, 2019.

55. Mecheri, Azoui, and Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia”; Qamar, Irtaza, and Raza, “Islamophobia in Hollywood Movies”; Toby Friedman, “Pallywood: A Media Propaganda Model,” Wikipedia, 2017, use with caution.

56. Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem”; Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel.”

57. Said, Orientalism; Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood; Baroud, “From Exodus to Marvel”; Project on Government Oversight, “Pentagon Influence in Hollywood”; Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem”; TIME, “Melissa Barrera and Others in Hollywood Lose Jobs”; Left Voice, “The New Hollywood McCarthyism Emerging around Palestine.”

58. Mecheri, Azoui, and Megherbi, “Hollywood and the Construction of Islamophobia”; Middle East Monitor, “Hollywood Stars Raise Record $60m for Israel Army.”

59. Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel; Electronic Intifada, “Hollywood Actors to Visit Israel on a Trip Co-Sponsored by AIPAC”; Alhassen, Haqq and Hollywood; Fernández, “Hollywood’s Israel Problem”; Left Voice, “The New Hollywood McCarthyism Emerging around Palestine”; USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Missing & Maligned; Balter, “A Violent Reality.”

YouTube video links:

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People Documentary https://youtu.be/TPxak6lFd-I?si=-3wePxU9t0BZsBtA

Reel Bad Arabs: Jack Shaheen on How Hollywood Vilifies Arabs https://youtu.be/RnQND1g_y3Q?si=zVT__jcumiRhsiCN

Jack Shaheen - Hollywood Stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims https://youtu.be/CDWUomnidlc?si=ixyFzu0r52HCjY4y

Israel in Movies https://youtu.be/7rLgFYpakh8?si=U9aWjUvwphxh6L4L

Israeli Guns in Movies https://youtu.be/YjkdDa7Uv0I?si=bT6uJJYmQJQ1hNeg

Gamification of Warfare 🇮🇱🇺🇸https://youtu.be/aTeakaJRBPY?si=CfUhVqbxSYKCoGKF

Gaming Has A BIG Problem With Arab & Muslim Stereotypes https://youtu.be/K2oqo-UVD7Q?si=5Cl36w4BydP4lthq

STEREOTYPING ARABS – A Timeless Hollywood Tradition https://youtu.be/7XWucEfmH9s?si=0H-2qKFAl8nAsFM5

THE CURSE OF ORIENTALIST ART – Arab Identity of Barbaric Fantasy https://youtu.be/RgxBbnLolqE?si=noyIFAtrFZG1DNu0

Is Disney's Aladdin Racist https://youtu.be/DLQrkNIbF64?si=7r05RX0fKv2p5i75

The History of Orientalism https://youtu.be/_RZscxZwldw?si=cVeQoZocOsX8ruBh

Edward Said On Orientalism https://youtu.be/fVC8EYd_Z_g?si=KDNtQYa3Ehz8X5Us

Orientalism Part 2 : The Dark Side of Orientalism https://youtu.be/wFxbzu5sNlQ?si=SfTt5lcC8cmNg-Ki

Why Hollywood misrepresents Muslim communities https://youtu.be/jecucl7nvs8?si=8DKmHcNoxdwavHU4

Why is NCIS obsessed with Israel https://youtu.be/oRtRDeopt40?si=FD4lp103TIQX5JKy

Alaa was buried under the rubble. Metal beams and concrete crushed his face. His tongue was sliced open and later stitched. He lost several teeth and every single molar. He was pulled out alive and taken to Al Shifa Hospital, but the injuries to his mouth were catastrophic.

He has lived with the consequences ever since.

Donate to Alaa's Relief

Three years of unrelenting pain

Alaa says the pain is constant. He cannot sleep. He cannot chew. He cannot digest food properly. The damage is visible in the video he sent. His teeth are shattered, his molars are gone, and his jaw alignment is destroyed.

He has been living like this not for days, not for months, but for three years.

“Honestly, I’m dying a million deaths a day from the pain.”

A dentist examined him recently and confirmed what Alaa already knew. His mouth cannot heal on its own. He needs bridges and implants. He needs reconstruction. He needs relief.

Share

The numbers are impossible for someone trapped in Gaza

The dentist gave him two figures.

• $2000 to repair only the most urgent teeth and place a few implants. This would be enough to stop the pain and allow him to eat.

• Around $5550 for full reconstruction, including all teeth, molars, and braces. This is the amount required to restore normal function and dignity.

Alaa is not asking for the full amount. He is asking for the minimum. Two thousand dollars to stop the pain that has ruled his life for three years.

But in Gaza, in a tent, under siege, with no income, no functioning economy, and no way out, two thousand dollars is unreachable.

Everyone knows tooth pain. Now imagine losing your entire mouth

Every one of us has had a toothache at least once. A cavity. A gum infection. Food stuck between teeth. A cracked filling. We know how a single tooth can bring us to our knees.

Now imagine every molar gone.

Imagine your tongue cut and stitched.

Imagine your face crushed.

Imagine your teeth shattered.

Imagine living with that pain every day for three years.

This is what Alaa has been enduring since the bombing.

A call to this community

I am turning to this community because it is made up of people from every background and every walk of life. People who care. People who show up. People who understand what it means to respond when someone is suffering. This appeal is for all of you, because every single person here has the power to help.

We have all watched this genocide unfold. We have watched Gaza be destroyed in real time. Whether we wanted it or not, whether we consented or not, our governments funded it. Our tax dollars funded it. That means we carry a responsibility, moral and human, to help the survivors who reach our doorstep.

Alaa is one of them.

Donate to Alaa's Relief

What we are trying to raise

• Minimum goal: $2000 to stop the pain

• Ideal goal: $5550 to give him back basic normalcy, the ability to chew, speak, and live without agony

This is the largest amount I have ever asked this community to come together for. But I also know what this community is capable of.

Manufacturing Dissent have almost 14,000 subscribers and 17,000 followers. If only a small percentage of our subscribers/followers donated the minimum amount, we could get Alaa the help he needs and deserves.

Share

Please share widely

If you cannot donate, you can still help.

Share this with your friends.

Share it with your family.

Share it with your community centers, mosques, churches, and workplaces.

Share it with anyone who understands what it means to be human in a moment like this.

Alaa has survived the bombs. He has survived the rubble. He has survived the loss of his home and the destruction of his life.

He should not have to survive this pain alone.

Donate to Alaa's Relief

📎https://chuffed.org/project/171331-alaa-and-his-two-little-ones-seek-hope

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now

Commentators like Richard Medhurst argue that this isn’t chaos or improvisation. They see a deliberate strategy that many people overlook when they assume Donald Trump is stumbling from crisis to crisis. Medhurst lays out the logic behind these actions, but he also tends to treat “the US” as a single, unified actor. That framing misses how many other governments… including some in BRICS… cooperate, enable, or quietly benefit from these shifts. The system isn’t run by one monolith. It’s a network of states and elites whose interests often overlap, even when they pretend to be rivals.

The result is a world where the public sees ceasefires and diplomatic gestures, while the real contest is happening in pipelines, shipping lanes, and energy terminals. The calm is misleading. The struggle over who controls oil and gas, and who controls the currency those resources are traded in, is accelerating, not slowing down.

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

Subscribe now