"What's the best introduction to Pallywood?"

"What do you consider the importance of the material you have presented here."

"How did you acquire these tapes?"

"Where does the expression Pallywood come from?"

"Isn't "Pallywood" disrespectful and mocking?"

"Is Pallywood not a legitimate expression of the Palestinian narrative? Who are we to judge?"

"Why do you say that the Palestinian victim narrative victimizes the Palestinian people?"

"Why do you think that these scenes are so obviously fake?"


"What's the best introduction to Pallywood?"
The sources themselves. Go to the pages where we have posted the raw footage from three Palestinian cameramen, working for major Western news agencies at Netzarim Junction on Sept. 30, 2000, and judge for yourself if what you see filmed represents real or staged "events." Only then should you investigate further and read the opinion of others


"What do you consider the importance of the material you have presented here."
We consider this footage the equivalent of looking behind the curtain at the "Wizard of Oz." The media production of Pallywood has been absorbed without any evident protest or criticism by the Western press. The brief insight these rushes provide onto the quotidian of Palestinian protests, on a day which, retrospectively, grew to a virtual massacre of "more than thirty Palestinians and hundreds of wounded", offers a sharp contrast between the behavior of the "street" on film, and its behavior as our media present it to us. The implications of this gap between raw footage and edited, suggests a massive failure of western media, with truly catastrophic consequences for the Israelis, the Palestinians and, indeed, peaceful globalization. Uncorrected, such an error can be suicidal.

"How did you acquire these tapes?"
At this point the answer remains a public secret. On this issue, the viewer must decide whether she or he can trust us when we assure them that this tape represents an undoctored presentation of the condition of the evidence when it came into our possession, and that this represents real footage shot by a Palestinian cameraman working for a major Western news media outlet on Sept. 30 and possibly October 1, 2000.

"Where does the expression Pallywood come from?"
It plays off of Bollywood, the designation of India's film industry, based in Bombay. It identifies a practice among Palestinian journalists to turn drama into news. This fictional news industry then feeds Western news reporting, who do not seem to suspect they are being duped.
It acknowledges that the active, if still young film industry of Palestinian culture, especially since the advent of cultural autonomy with the Oslo Accords in 1993, has already made a distinctive contribution to global culture

"Isn't "Pallywood" disrespectful and mocking?"
On one level, not at all. Most national film industries would love to have the success in the larger world media that Pallywood has achieved. Pallywood is a distinctive and powerful national product. But on the other hand, because it identifies Pallywood as part of a campaign of disinformation and propaganda, why should we respect that, rather than criticize it? As for mocking, at a basic level Pallywood is a joke played on the Palestinians and the West, and one can see it in the smiles on the faces of by-standers as they walk away from these stages scenes.

"Is Pallywood not a legitimate expression of the Palestinian narrative? Who are we to judge?"
Pallywood may be taken as a Palestinian narrative, although one might more accurately call it a narrative of the Palestinian elite, worked out in the matrix of Palestinian political culture and the Arab street. It is overwhelmingly male, and focused on a discourse of violent honor. As a national narrative of Palestinian innocence and Israeli aggression, it has historically served to justify policies by Arab, and later with Arafat, Palestinian elites to victimize the Palestinian people. Whether the Palestinians have a right to lie to us and to their people in the service of the [elite's definition of the] honor of Islam and of Arab Culture, is a judgment call for each individual to make. But that surely does not impose upon us the necessity of accepting those fabrications as real.

"Why do you say that the Palestinian victim narrative victimizes the Palestinian people?"
The victim narrative of the Palestinians has now been used for over a half-century by Arab and Palestinian political and religious elites as an instrument aimed at restoring their honor as they define it - the elimination of the state of Israel and the humiliation that an independent (worse, democratic) Jewish state represents for Islam and Arab identity. In this pursuit, the Palestinian people's welfare not only does not concern them, but the more they suffer, the better it is for "Palestinian" politics. In a larger context, the ability of Arab elites to keep their populations in ignorance, poverty and resignation (a pattern that predates Zionism by more than a millennium, depends significantly on their ability to blame Zionism and the Palestinian "unresolved." In their rage and frustration at not destroying Israel, and their relentless willingness to sacrifice their own people, their anti-Zionism has now morphed into paranoid anti-semitism. It represents a drug with which they cut the pain (or redirect that anger) that they inflict. When they can turn to the West and get confirmation for this victim narrative, it reinforces their ability to use this drug.

"Why do you think that these scenes are so obviously fake?"
Each case can, to someone who wants to give the benefit of the doubt, be seen as possibly real. But when one notices the behavior of bystanders, it becomes readily apparent that this is a movie set with the Israelis as a prop.
* People smiling when others have supposedly been killed or injured,
* civilians giving orders to military, which would not happen in time of war, but does happen on movie sets,
* crowds standing around in front of the Israeli guns showing no fear, while people are supposedly being shot by Israelis,
* the roughness and haste with which the wounded are evacuated
* the eagerness of people to participate in these rough evacuations - unlikely if the haste is from fear of Israeli guns, likely if it is a way to get on camera

Is 21st CMG a right wing or a left wing organization? We believe that this kind of thinking is now more harmful than useful. Ideologues tend, under stress, to move from sober appraisal to advocacy and dismissive stigmatization, often in the service of ignoring or exaggerating material to suit the world-view of the ideologues. Today's situation encourages left-wingers to ignore the bad news and right-wingers to welcome it. Defensive left-wingers have refused to listen to anyone with bad news and avidly embrace "narratives" that they think further their progressive goals, even when they backfire. In order to do so, they tend to dismiss anyone who takes the bad news seriously as retrograde neo-cons. Aggressive right wingers have dismissed progressive thinkers as soft-headed tree-huggers, and use the bad news to argue for war and aggression. The result: a conservative movement with limited social imagination that "reality tests" and a progressive movement with an active social imagination that lives in denial. We believe that creative and humane solutions to problems come from well-informed and compassionate thought. So rather than take sides in the current, impoverishing political duality, we hope to prove a forum where good and autonomous thinking and exchange takes place and perhaps new ways of "categorizing people", ways that clarify rather than obscure, can emerge.

What does Chomsky have to do with this?
Chomsky and his co-author Edward Herman have argued that much of the news in the western press - more specifically US press - is propaganda operating as neutral information, that this propaganda serves the agendas of the corporate owners of media outlets, and that reporters often serve, consciously or unconsciously, the interests of the government. Now certainly this mechanism may play a role, even a significant role, in the production of news in the US. Chomsky's great failure is an inability to distinguish between the advances, no matter how imperfect, of western free press with standards of accuracy and honesty, and a really authoritarian press in which propaganda plays the central role. "Manufacturing consent" may involve subtle and pervasive propaganda, but it is - by the standards of honesty and tolerance Chomsky appeals to - far preferable to the products of "coercive consent" in a culture where violence and intimidation back up the will of those in power.
This incapacity (unwillingness?) to appreciate the advances made by modern professional media has contributed significantly to the western media's vulnerability to misinformation coming from cultures where the media has not even begun to make the shift characteristic of - and necessary for - media in democratic countries. In such countries, a critic as remorseless and hostile as Chomsky would not be a darling of academic culture, but a dead man. XXI Century Media Group's website is established with both a profound appreciation of a culture which makes so dramatic and powerful a technology of communication such as the internet available to all, and a passionate commitment to making the quality of the communication as accurate and reliable as possible.