Year:  2009
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Directors:  Kate Davis, David Heilbroner, Franco Sacchi
Run time:  74 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     One day, and that day is coming soon, Jesus will return to Earth amid rampant bloodshed.  World War III will be taking place in and around Israel.  The holy armies of the Lord (Christians and Jews) will defend Israel against The Rest Of The World, which will attempt to to take over Israel by force.  Then, the second coming of Jesus will occur, where the Son Of God will arrive, defeat the marauding armies of the Rest Of The World, and then take all pious Christians up to heaven with him as the Rapture tkaes place.  Look for this to happen in the next two or three years.

     What could be scarier than this?  How about the fact that 50 million Americans believe, wholeheartedly, that it will take place.  To the point where teenagers are lamenting the fact that they will never get a chance to be married, because the Rapture will happen before they are old enough to take the plunge?  Or parents, who are sad that their children will never graduate high school, because Armageddon will take place before it happens.

     There are a few problematic details with their beliefs.  One problem is that these evangelist Christians believe that the Jews are God’s chosen people.  And that any word or act against the Jews (or even against Israel) is an act against God.  Therefore, they defend Israel to the end, and they are part of the lobby in the States that says Israel can do no wrong, and any complaint about their tactics in Palestine is anti-Semitic.  (Which makes Waiting for Armageddon a really interesting companion film to Defamation, which was also released this week by First Run Features.)

     So Jesus will come and rescue God’s chosen people at the time of the Rapture.  God’s chosen people being the Jews.  And all good Christians will be taken up to heaven, everyone else will be Left Behind.  But – and here’s where it becomes a little problematic – the Jews will not get to go unless they convert to Christianity.  Which would make them…no longer Jews.  And for some reason, only 144,000 of them will do so.  Oh, there’s a lot of prophecy to back this up.  We’re told.

     That’s what Waiting For Armageddon is all about.  The 50 million Americans who believe fervently in the Rapture.  Who think the Muslim mosque in Jerusalem is a blight on the world and hope for someone to destreoy it so the Jews can build their temple there instead, so Jesus can return to Earth and save the Jews and make them no longer Jewish and bring them to heaven along with the Christian evangelicals who believe.

     There are definitely some creepy scenes in Waiting For Armageddon, mostly involving tour groups of evangelicals who visit Jerusalem and say some pretty reprehensible things about Muslims and Jews and their beliefs.  Well, I suppose that those things are reprehensible if you are of a certain viewpoint.  Surprisingly, the film doesn’t really take a viewpoint of its own.  Considering the subject matter, Waiting For Armageddon is extremely even-handed, and lets the viewers come to their own conclusions.

     I think it’s clear what conclusion I came to in watching this movie.  These people are nuts, this thinking is scary, and there are some seriously troubling connections between the Christian evangelicals and Israel.  But if you watch the movie, you may come out with a different opinion.  I really hope you do that.  Watch the movie, that is.  Because Waiting For Armageddon is good, and it’s eye opening, no matter what your opinion may be.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States, Israel, Denmark, Austria
Language:  English, Hebrew
Starring:  Abraham Foxman, Norman Finkelstein
Director:  Yoav Shamir
Run time:  91 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Defamation is a magnificent film.  It’s tough and fair and fearless, and a tour de force for Israeli film maker Yoav Shamir, who sets out to find out what the true nature of Anti-Semitism is in the world today.  What he finds is that although certainly there is a certain amount of anti-Semitic sentiment in the States and elsewhere, it isn’t nearly as pervasive as many Jewish people believe.  Or, more aptly, as pervasive as they would have the rest of us believe.

     Shamir’s greatest strength in this documentary is that he appears to keep the camera on people a little longer than they might like.  And so virtually everyone in the film is given enough rope with which to hang themselves.  Shamir talks to African-Americans in an area with a long history of tension between black people and Jewish people.  While at first the interviewees seem reasonable, after a while they do, indeed, spout some fairly surprising anti-Semitic rhetoric.

     The same goes for Norman Finkelstein, the most outspoken critic of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.  He is certainly a smart man, and his perspective is a well-reasoned one.  He thinks that the ADL uses the spectre of the holocaust and the historic persecution of Jews to advance their own agenda, and he finds it to be dishonest and sad.  I tend to agree.  But given the opportunity to talk a little more, he begins to rant and rave and certainly appears to be more of a fanatic than he did at first.

     The bulk of the discomfort in the movie though comes from the ADL itself and its leader, Abraham Foxman.  As Shamir takes his camera through the ADL offices, trying to find a specific incident of anti-Semitism in America that he can document in full, the best they can come up with are a few instances where people were not allowed to take time off work during Jewish holidays. 

     There is also a questionable incident where rocks were thrown at a bus, but it’s unclear whether that was a hate crime.  After all, it was perpetrated by ten-year-olds.  Did they throw rocks at the bus because they knew Jewish students were on board, or were they just throwing rocks at a bus that happened to contain Jewish students.?  No one seems to know, but the gut reaction is, as it so often is, that it must be anti-Semitism.

     The most incredible scenes in the movie involve Israel.  The belief among many American Jews is that anti-Zionism is merely anti-Semitism in disguise.  That anyone who speaks ill of Israel, anyone who disagrees with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, is obviously an anti-Semite cloaking themselves in the guise of political discourse.  This seems to be the number one mission of the ADL – making sure that criticism of Israel is seen as anti-Semitism.

     Their statistics that say that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise seem to make sense only if we believe the claim that any criticism of Israel IS an anti-Semitic incident.  People who try to steer the conversation another way, people who try to be pragmatic about the Palestine situation, are shouted down and viciously attacked as anti-Semites.  It’s a pretty scary situation.

     The film also deals with Israeli students who are visiting Poland to learn about the Holocaust, and about the horrible Jewish history at the concentration camps of the Nazis.  I think that is a good thing – we can never, of course, forget the Holocaust.  But while they are there, these students are constantly told, by adults who should probably know better, that anti-Semites are lurking around every corner and that their lives are in constant danger simply because they are Jewish.  And what should have been a somber, harrowing learning experience ends up fueling hatred in the kids for other people.  Hatred that may or may not be based on anything real.

     I just finished reading Leon Uris’ excellent book Exodus, which details the long, arduous struggle of the Jewish people leading up to the creation of Israel.  There is no question they have suffered for a very long time – the Russian pale, the Holocaust, and innumerable other affronts.  But Shamir’s conclusion is that maybe it’s time to leave those painful memories in the past and deal with the present.  Let’s not forget, he says.  But let’s not use the horrors of the past as an excuse for the present.  This even-handed film makes that point with a subtle humour, and is the best argument I have seen for moving forward with an open dialogue when it comes to Israel, Palestine, the Middle East and anti-Semitism the world over.  A must-see.

     Defamation comes out May 18th from First Run Features.