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“The Kerela Story” Controversy in India

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A recent Indian movie- The Kerela Story has stirred a huge controversy in India. The film professes to portray the tale of Hindu and Christian women who were persuaded to join the Islamic State (IS) organisation has caused a huge uproar in India. Many opposition leaders have denounced the film The Kerala Story, which is based in the southern state of Kerala. Some have referred to it as propaganda and an effort to sabotage religious harmony of India. The Kerala Story is the most talked-about movie right now, followed by The Kashmir Files. The movie is being viewed through many different lenses; where some people want it to be banned, while others want it to be promoted across all of India.

Also, read UN Defender Demands End to Crackdown on Kashmiri Activists

The Kerela Story Controversy Over Misrepresentation of Facts

The Kerela Story, which was released on May 5, has become embroiled in controversy over misinterpretation of facts. Months before it was released, The Kerala Story started to cause controversy. When the preview of the movie claimed it presented the “heart-breaking and gut-wrenching stories of 32,000 females” from Kerala who had joined the IS, some legislators from that state urged for its ban in November. This was refuted by the fact-checking website Alt News after a thorough investigation that found “no evidence” to support the claimed number.

Women who converted to Islam are the main subject of the movie. As the film’s release date approached in April, it was confronted with legal issues and growing criticism. The Kerala High Court declined to block the distribution, but the film’s producers agreed to take out the controversial 32,000 women number from the teaser. “The compilation of the true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala” was added to the description of the video on YouTube. This sparked numerous complaints from online users over claimed misinterpretations. Now that these facts have been brought forth, producer Vipul Shah has responded by saying that they are irrelevant and that these figures don’t matter.

Many acts of violence, including rape culture, hand-chopping, beheading, and trauma perpetrated to defenceless women, are graphically depicted in the film in the context of the Muslim culture and promotes islamophobia.

The film, according to a number of politicians in Kerela and Muslim leaders, would jeopardise religious harmony, demonise Muslims, promote Islamophobia, and might also humiliate the southern state.

Read also, Muslim OBC Reservation scrapped by BJP government of Karnataka

The Kerela Story Receives Both Criticism and Praise

According to analyst Taran Adarsh, the film’s box office success has been “extraordinary” for a low-budget production without any major performers. He thinks that it has made more than 560 million rupees ($6.8 million, £5.4 million) in five days, which he describes as “a feat for any new release”. On the other hand, many mainstream critics have criticised the movie for its performances and “lack of nuance”. One of the critics said that the movie’s ideas about Islam and [religious] conversion appeared to have come from hate-filled WhatsApp groups.

Audiences of The Kerela Story have praised and criticised the film, respectively, from various social groups. The “Kerala Story” has now sparked a major political uproar throughout the nation. While some states have made the movie tax-free, others have outrightly condemned it and proposed to ban it. It appears to be a point of disagreement between the states governed by the BJP and the opposition parties. A number of political organisations and parties, including the TMC, INC, and DMK, as well as some Muslim political groups, have been condemning the release of the film.

Also, Read Israeli Filmmaker Nadav Lapid Sparks Outrage in India after calling <em>The Kashmir Files</em> “Vulgar Propaganda”

West Bengal on The Kerela Story

West Bengal is one of the first states that has banned the controversial movie. It is West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee herself that has imposed a ban on the Sudipto Sen-directed movie “The Kerala Story.” “This is to avoid any incident of hatred and violence, and to maintain peace in the state. What is ‘The Kashmir Files?’ it is to humiliate one section. What is ‘The Kerala Story? It is a distorted story,” Banerjee said.

However, The Kerala Story is currently playing across the nation without incident, thus the Supreme Court today demanded to know why film was being banned in West Bengal.

The West Bengal government responded to the Supreme Court’s order banning the screening of the movie “The Kerala Story” in the state on Tuesday. The government defended themselves by claiming that the movie contains hate speech and is based on fabricated information, which may cause racial strife and problems with law and order in the state.

Read here, India- The Killing of Gangster-Turned-Politician Atiq Ahmad

Tamil Nadu on The Kerela Story

In the state of Tamil Nadu, The Tamil Nadu Theatre and Multiplex Owners Association decided to halt the film’s screening on Sunday as “a precautionary measure”. The action has been taken to uphold law and order and safeguard their properties against forces opposed to the movie’s subject. Tamil Nadu Theatre and Multiplex Owners’ Association president Tiruppur M. Subramaniam said, “The film has been taken out of almost all theatres. The film was screened only in the cities. Since it is a Hindi film and has no recognisable faces, it will not have patronage.”

Also, read UN Defender Demands End to Crackdown on Kashmiri Activists

Madhya Pradesh and Kerela on The Kerela Story

On the other hand, the state of the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh has made the film tax-free. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said “The film shows how the (life of) daughters who get entangled in the trap of love jihad gets destroyed. It also exposes the design of terrorism. While we have already brought a law against (forced) conversion, the film creates awareness about the issue. This film should be watched by all and that’s why the Madhya Pradesh government is declaring the film tax-free.”

Moreover, the Kerala High Court has refused to ban the release of the movie stating that the film is “inspired by true events”.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that The Kerela Story has gained the support of senior members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who gave it a favourable review at a recent political rally. Additionally, some party members have held screenings and given away free tickets.

Read here, The Saudi-Iran Deal and its Implications

What the Filmmakers of The Kerela Story Have to Say?

Sudipto Sen, the Kerala Story’s director, claimed that the film’s objective goes beyond the purview of traditional cinematic creativity. Additionally, he claimed that the nation had long been in denial about the long-running Kerala problem. Sen told a group of Indian American reporters during a virtual news conference that “The country was in denial of the long-existing issue in the state of Kerala. The Kerala Story is a mission which is beyond the creative boundaries of cinema, a movement that should reach the masses all over the world and raise awareness,”.

“The film’s subject was hidden from the masses and deserved to be told. We made the film to initiate deliberation worldwide,” said the producer of the film, Vipul Shah.

“This is a very bold, honest and true film which in the beginning got no support, today stands at the point of releasing worldwide with a spectacular box office success in just 6 days,” added Vipul Shah.

Also, read Festival turns bloody after Hindutva Mob Burnt Centennial Mosque

The Kerela Story draws Parallels with The Kashmir Files

The Kashmir Files, another controversial film with deep polarising representation of Kashmiri Muslims, that became one of last year’s biggest hits from Bollywood, has been compared to The Kerala Story. That movie, which focused on the 1990s exodus of Hindus from Kashmir, had a small production cost and no big actors, and was praised by Mr. Modi and other BJP leaders despite receiving mixed reviews.

Read here, Dehumanizing Representation of Tribals and Muslims in the Oscar fame RRR

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Jewish Nazism is reality not fiction

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Jewish Nazism

I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.

Read Also: No forgiveness for Jewish Nazism

These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.

But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.

Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.

Read Also: The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?

The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.

In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.

The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.

However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.

In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.

Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.

For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.

Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!

Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.

To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.

Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.

I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.

A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?

Words can kill; words do kill.

Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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I’m most definitely Palestinian!

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Palestinian

In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.

The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.

Read Also: The age-old Palestinian-fear (of the Israeli thirst)

The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.

Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.

The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.

Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.

I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.

(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.

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The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

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It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.

It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA)  led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.

How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?

Read Also: The US and IsraelThe dog versus the wagging tail.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion.  After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.

Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.

Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.

Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:

Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?

Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?

And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?

I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.

But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.

The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.

Read Also: The Palestinian Authority: confused, frustrated and corrupt

In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.

But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.

Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?

It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.

That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves.
And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.

Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.

In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.

What should be done?

We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).

We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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