A documentary relying on anonymous sources to accuse the Israeli military of systematic civilian killing premiered at the New York Film Festival on Saturday — embraced by the same cultural apparatus that routinely demands censorship of speech it dislikes.
The double standard is the story. Speech the left favors gets 24-minute standing ovations at Venice and a red-carpet rollout at Lincoln Center. Speech it doesn't favor gets labeled hate and silenced.
"NAZA," made by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor in conjunction with The Guardian, claims the IDF used a code — "NAZA" — to determine acceptable civilian casualties in airstrikes. One anonymous source in the film said killing Palestinians with AI was "insanely fun." The Guardian concedes the film "features interviews with 24 members of Israeli intelligence and military, granted on the condition of anonymity" — a fact that has led Israeli government officials to denounce the documentary as lies.
The filmmakers and The Guardian have stood by the work, insisting the sources were vetted and that using anonymous claims is standard investigative journalism.
Outside Lincoln Center, a small group braved a nor'easter to push back. Protesters clutching Israeli flags gathered near Columbus Circle as four trucks organized by the Israeli-American Council circled the area screening counter-footage — including raw video from the October 7 Hamas massacre, according to the New York Post.
"History cannot be altered," Noa Peri-Jensch of the Israeli-American Council told the Post. "There are parts of history that happened on October 7th that have been ignored in the film." She added: "The movie is trying to portray the IDF or Israel as a group of people who are trying to make systematic killing, which couldn't be further from the truth."
Shalev Biton, 27, who survived the Nova Festival attack, told the Post the film is misleading and divisive. "I am not against any criticism on us as a state, as Israel, and against the idea from inside Israel or outside Israel. But there is a way to do it."
The trucks screened clips from "October 7: Bearing Witness to the Massacre," a graphic compilation of raw footage from the attack, including video filmed by Hamas during the slaughter. Biton choked up seeing footage of "people who I know" who died at the festival.
Meanwhile, in Washington this week, the First Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival launches at the Victims of Communism Museum — a deliberate counter to a cultural landscape that has long celebrated left-wing ideology on screen while burying the body count it produced. As HotAir reported, the festival's centerpiece, "The Lives of Others," depicts the surveillance state of East Germany — the kind of horror the cultural left prefers to forget while it hands standing ovations to films casting Western allies as villains.
New York resident David Cohen, 55, kept it simple at the Lincoln Center protest: "Show the film, no problem, but understand the circumstances. It's a horrible situation but what we stand for is important."
The question isn't whether "NAZA" should be screened. It's why the institutions that celebrate this film — anonymous sources and all — are the same ones demanding that counter-narratives be suppressed as hate. The gatekeepers pick the art, and they pick the silence.
