IsraCampus.org

The dictionary definition of pornography is “obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic merit.” While the popular connotation of the term used in media refers to displaying lewd sex acts, Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Dorit Naaman from Queen’s University in Canada doesn’t have to have sex scenes in her films to make them pornographic; as she accomplishes her own manner of lewdness by her encouragement of the murder of fellow Israelis by elevating female Arab terrorists to a level of being just some women seeking equal rights from men, rather than their being female primitives imitating their male counterparts who engage in terrorism and the murder of Jews.

Naaman likes to contrast these Palestinian women with Israeli women who defend the Jewish people in the IDF by using a form of equivalency that is truly pornographic if one only takes time to smell the coffee, or look at this woman’s work.

Get this description of her from another university’s website:

“Dorit Naaman is a film theorist and documentary filmmaker from Jerusalem, teaching at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern cinemas (primarily from post-colonialist and feminist perspectives), and she is currently working on a book on the visual representation of Palestinian and Israeli women fighters. She published in Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Style and Third Text, edited a special issue of Framework and co-edited a special issue of Public. Dorit Naaman is also an activist for a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (italics are this writer’s).

Naaman has received money from the Ford Foundation for some of her films which explains why she tosses around the anti-imperialist rhetoric (“post-colonial perspective”), as well as what also sells so well on college campuses these days (“feminist perspectives”) and “social justice” (a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict).

Here’s one of her presentations:

“Brides of Palestine/Angels of Death: The Representation of Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers” Dorit Naaman, a Five College Women’s Studies Ford Associate from Queen’s University in Toronto, Canada, will examine the ways in which media representations deal with the loaded image of the Palestinian female suicide bomber. Seminar room, *Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, 7:30 pm.”

If Dorit Naaman really wanted to show a “socially just” “feminist perspective,” why not do a film about the mother of little Afik Zahavi who spent fifteen years trying to conceive her child, then finally did so through artificial insemination only to have him die at age 4 from a Palestinian Arab Kassem rocket hitting his day care center in Sderot.? Why doesn’t she shoot films about the mothers of IDF soldiers who defend the Jewish people instead of romanticizing the few women suicide bombers that the pathological culture of Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” has produced?

Israeli and American universities as bastions of radical leftist Marxist ideology combined with Arab attempts to boycott Israel have made bashing Israel, particularly among Israeli academics extremely profitable and career enhancing. Who needs logic or real talent any more? Of interesting note is how Ms. Naaman in explaining about her work says she prefers the “documentary” style of filmmaking where her films look more like “home movies.”

As someone who has a degree in Motion Pictures myself from UCLA, and one who took several writing courses on critical theory in film, I’ve always found those too lazy to adopt professional shooting and production standards in selling themselves with a produced film product always falling back on saying they intentionally shot a home movie not because of a lack of skill or hard work (that is usually the case), but because they really aren’t capable of making a professional polished film with good production values, so “chose” to do sloppy unprofessional film work. Its an easy copout. At the same time, one learns what sells in academia to advance one’s career: talk about “post-colonialist theory,” the same gobbledygook that Edward Said, the Palestinian from Egypt, who spoke such nonsense espoused in his books lambasting Israel, then throw in a little bit of talk about Gender Studies and the inequality of women (the Arabs are the biggest misogynists in world, but discussing the “oppressed woman” in any academic community is a sure-fire winner), and, to top things off, become another Israeli mouthpiece for the Palestinians who in fact do not seek a just solution but rather the annihilation of Israel, and one has an unbeatable combination for a Ford Foundation scholarship (as Naaman received) and the latest traveling sideshow in academia across America as a “film studies professor”. This is Dorit Naaman.

Dorit Naaman also penned a book titled “The Silenced Scream: A Feminist Point of View from the Israeli Checkpoints in Palestine.” Of course, the checkpoints doubly “oppress” Arab women rather than protect innocent Israelis, both Arab and Jew, from terrorist attacks and suicide bombers. One can be sure that Dorit Naaman did not include in her “feminist perspective” of Israeli checkpoints the story of the incident took place at 6 o'clock one Tuesday morning at the checkpoint near Beit Jalla, just south of the tunnel road that goes through Beit Jalla into Jerusalem. The sun had just risen. A Palestinian Arab from Bethlehem, who looked familiar to the young IDF troops at the checkpoint, proceeded to get out of his car with a prayer blanket. This was the last week of Ramadan, and the young, devout-looking man made a hand signal that he wanted to pray. The IDF troops at the checkpoint afforded him the opportunity to pray and did not conduct a security search of his vehicle nor his person. The man then knelt to the ground, spread out his prayer blanket, and proceeded to pull out an AK-47 and murder two young IDF troops at point blank range. Moshe Belsky, age 23, who was speaking on his cell phone with his mother, and Shaul Lahav, age 20, the checkpoint commander, were killed instantly. (No doubt the “feminist perspectives” of these Israeli Jewish mothers of these two boys, especially Moshe Belsky’s, were not discussed in Naaman’s trope about “Israeli checkpoints” in “Palestine”).

But then again, Dorit Naaman never seems to consider terrorism and murder against the Israelis by Palestinian Arabs as something to be taken seriously. She signed a petition demanding that Tali Fahima be released from detention. Fahima, was caught smuggling weapons and explosives for her Palestinian Arab boyfriend to kill Israelis.

Naaman explained her reasons for signing the petition: “Clearly, the state would like to scare anyone seeking dialogue with Palestinians.”

So an Israeli woman helping her Palestinian Arab boyfriend to kill fellow Israelis is merely “seeking dialogue?” No doubt Naaman also found some “feminist perspective” in signing the document also, but certainly not one of Israeli mothers murdered by Arab terrorists.

Ah well, whatever sells. But Dorit Naaman is just another example how in academia, even in film studies, there’s a career even for the illogical and those lacking any real common sense or academic talent beyond jumping on the bash Israel bandwagon.

That’s the new kind of pornography.

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Op-Ed articles appearing on IsraCampus.org are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the opinion of IsraCampus.org