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The 78th annual Cannes Film Festival is underway and the pretentious participants wasted no time virtue-signaling their support for the savage terror group Hamas and their self-righteous indignation over Israel’s right to self-defense.

On the filmfest’s opening day, an open letter was published in French on the website of France’s Libération newspaper (which, by the way, was founded by nihilist Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973 as a far-Left daily), in which 380 artistes called out their industry’s purported “silence” over what they ludicrously call a “genocide” in Gaza. The hundreds of Hamas supporters included the usual Progressive suspects Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Pedro Pascal, and Susan Sarandon.

The letter begins by acknowledging correctly that the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel were “terrible massacres” (although the letter does not state who committed them or why, because to do that would be to shift the focus/blame from Israel to Jew-hating Palestinians). But then it regurgitates the standard Progressive lies about the Israeli military action in Gaza: “The Israeli army is targeting civilians. More than 200 journalists have been deliberately killed. Writers, film-makers and artists are being brutally murdered.” [Emphasis added]

Let’s set the record straight before moving on. As has been noted many times elsewhere and always ignored by the mainstream media: not only are the Israeli Defense Forces not “targeting civilians,” they are unique in world history for their extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties, especially considering that the enemy Hamas ruthlessly and intentionally puts its own civilians in harm’s way in order to maximize their casualties and exploit them for propaganda purposes. Similarly, the IDF is neither “deliberately” killing journalists (except for ones that moonlight as terrorists) nor “brutally murdering” filmmakers.

The signatories of the letter went on to condemn the film world’s “passivity” toward Israel’s supposed war crimes. That’s odd, because I’m unaware of any letter signed by hundreds of Cannes artists condemning their industry’s silence on actual war crimes committed against Jews by Hamas and its supporters among the Palestinian population, many of whom participated in the aforementioned terrible massacres of October 7^th.

Anyway, the letter reads, in part,

Why is it that cinema, a breeding ground for socially committed works, seems to be so indifferent to the horror of reality and the oppression suffered by our sisters and brothers?

As artists and cultural players, we cannot remain silent while genocide is taking place in Gaza and this unspeakable news is hitting our communities hard.

Again, let’s pause for a fact check: the letter’s signers apparently are confused about the definition of the word “genocide,” which most people understand means the deliberate eradication of an entire people. And yet since 1990 the so-called Palestinians have been one of the fastest-growing populations in the world, booming from 1.98 million to 5.17 million people in 2023 (the 2025 estimate is over 5.5 million). This is a growth of over 161 percent in 33 years (in the same period, the total population of all countries worldwide increased by 52.7 percent). The Palestinian population is growing at about 2.4% per year, which is 33% higher than Israel’s growth rate.

In Gaza specifically, the population is about 2.2 million, one of the most densely populated regions in the world. At its current growth, the total size of the population in the Palestinian territories is projected to increase to 6.9 million in 2030 and to 9.5 million in 2050. If Israel has been waging genocide against them for many years as its detractors constantly claim, it is surely the most inept mass murder attempt in history.

The letter continues:

What is the point of our professions if not to draw lessons from history, to make films that are committed, if we are not present to protect oppressed voices?

The point of your profession is to entertain, not to protect oppressed voices, but let’s move on:

The far right, fascism, colonialism, anti-trans and anti-LGBTQIA+, sexist, racist, islamophobic and antisemitic movements are waging their battle on the battlefield of ideas, attacking publishing, cinema and universities, and that’s why we have a duty to fight.

What this grab-bag of Left-wing complaints has to do with protecting the “oppressed” voices of the Palestinians is unclear, until you understand that all of these intersectional social justice issues are linked in the neo-Marxist worldview. And yet the selective Left never complains that there are very few territories on earth more sexist, antisemitic, anti-trans and anti-LGBTQIA+ than the Gaza strip.

“Let us rise up…” the letter concludes. “Let us reject the propaganda that constantly colonizes our imaginations and makes us lose our sense of humanity.” This is pure Progressive projection; it is the Left that is pushing propaganda to colonize the imaginations of our impressionable youth and to sway the ignorant and the antisemitic into believing that Israel is an apartheid state and the Palestinian people are its oppressed victims.

Other actors and filmmakers subsequently added their names to the list of the letter’s original signers, notably Joaquin Phoenix (The Joker) (pictured above with Pedro Pascal), Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, French actress Juliette Binoche (The English Patient), and of course, the Cannes crowd’s favorite documentary propagandist, Michael Moore.

The celebrities and wannabes of the film world, who as I’ve pointed out many times live in the most tightly-sealed echo chamber of any demographic in the world, justify their privileged lives to themselves by believing they are compassionate, heroic champions of the downtrodden. They are in denial about the fact, demonstrated by their inability to move the needle for Kamala Harris in the last presidential election, that the more stridently political and polarizing they become, the less relevant and influential they are.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior