Protest "October 8" film (denounce its harmful lies)

As a longtime patron of your theater, I feel completely gutted by your impending screening of the Zionist documentary, October H8te. Grounded in lies and blatant ironies, this film peddles intellectually dishonest fear mongering, further spreading Zionist propaganda into every corner of our lives. This weaponizing of antisemitism will fuel further hate and accelerate fascist crackdowns on free speech and ideological criticism that we are seeing in the illegal detentions of Mahmoud Khalil and others.

As its central fallacy, the film demonizes pro-Palestinian protestors as terrorists on no visible grounds. In truth, pro-Palestinian protestors are carrying out their legal and moral obligation, as mandated by the UN Genocide Convention to prevent and punish the perpetration of genocide by any nation and its citizens.

The second fallacy is that the imagined specter of violence drummed up in October 8 is of far greater concern than actual, ongoing violence. In the resumption of carnage, Israel has recently carried out what Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes as “the largest child massacre in its history.” One of the film’s interviewees has the gall to assert that “Hamas would have [had] no ammunition” if the U.S. and other nations had been quicker to condemn antisemitism after Oct. 7. Never mind the truth that U.S. and other countries have continuously supplied Israel with weapons of mass destruction, making taxpayers helplessly complicit in genocide.

And never mind that the ongoing carnage is part of a hundred year long history of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. Let’s only focus on post October 7 pro-Palestinian protestors because after all, the historic suffering of Jews matter most, right, over, say, the suffering of Native Americans, blacks, and other people of color like Palestinians.

Distorting pro-Palestinian dissent as leftwing antisemitism, the third gross fallacy is that the film ignores the elephant in the room, the growing Neo-Nazi movement in the U.S. (“Jews will not replace us!”). When Jews should be aligning with other BIPOC groups to counter real antisemitism, they are often siding with Trump’s crackdown on DEI, fueling the new fascist order we are living. This is evident in the aim of the well-funded Jewish legislative-nonprofit complex to pass CA’s AB1468, which in trying to prevent the teaching of Palestinian history, will gut ethnic studies to the detriment of the 77% of K-12 students who are people of color.

We must never forget the tragedy of the Holocaust. But it is a greater tragedy that the intergenerational trauma from this event is creating an endless cycle of fear and hate. The “8,” in the film’s title, alludes to not only October 8 but also the perpetual cannibalizing that the “8” as an infinity symbol evokes. Mark my words, this film will ironically stoke more hate and redound in more rightwing antisemitism, which will harm Jewish Americans more than the imagined harm from pro-Palestinian protestors working for Middle East peace and a pathway to human rights long denied to the Palestinians.

Please do the right thing: do not screen this film.