We've convinced that there are very sound reasons to declare that the suicide bomber buddy movie Paradise Now is a decent film. We're equally convinced that the film's recent Golden Globe win had nothing to do with any of those reasons. Instead, what happened is that Hollywood glitterati decided that we were entitled to their opinion, and so they took some time off from gossip rags and speed balls to give it to us. We're glad that they took time to enlighten us about the 'humanity' of Palestinian suicide bombers 'resisting' the Israelis. And we're also glad that so many people could feel so good about themselves for the brief 25 seconds that they spend listening to the acceptance speech - which apparently had very little to do with peace. There's nothing like blustering about the legitimacy of other people's violence and the necessity of other people's deaths to make resentful, impotent, wannabe activists feel like they're on the front lines. We're skeptical that 10% of the cheering crowd- convinced that they were doing their duty to world peace by applauding for a speech which pointedly did not advocate peace - could find Israel on a map. We're quite sure that no more than 1% of them know the first thing about the West Bank - at least, they don't know that the Palestinians have yet to declare a state there. Which is kind of an important thing to know about the area.
Charles Krauthammer has expressed his displeasure with that other Hollywood contribution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, Spielberg's execrable propaganda piece Munich. In his review, Roger Ebert commented that Spielberg really loves Israel. That's nice. But we're sure everyone would appreciate his love a lot more if he didn't produce lies that experts are convinced will undermine Israel's diplomatic - and thus military - prospects. This is the problem with Hollywood celebrities - even if you grant that they mean well within their own myopic, narcissistic standards, in the final analysis they still end up making the world worse. Then they talk to their therapists about it while the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of their naive garbage.