A series of controversial Israeli films are provoking outrage and plaudits in equal measure at the London Film Festival.

The best documentary award has gone to one of the year's most controversial films.

Defamation is a polemic by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. In his expose of America's Anti-Defamation League (ADL), he claims anti-Semitism is being exaggerated for political purposes. He argues that American Jewish leaders travel around the world exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel.

Jon Stewart's comedy news show The Daily Show is reportedly under fire from pro-Israeli groups for giving airtime to two pro-Palestinian figures on Wednesday night.

Stewart hosted Palestinian democracy activist Mustafa Barghouti and human rights activist Anna Baltzer, author of A Witness in Palestine, who explained the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of the Palestinian side.

According to a letter reportedly written by Baltzer and circulated by blogger Eric Johnson, the show "was overwhelmed with angry emails and phone calls prior to the appearance, and up until the last minute it seemed like they might cancel."

Lev Leviev, the Israeli settlement builder and diamond mogul who has been accused of supporting human rights abuses in Angola, Burma, New York City and Palestine, is lending his jewelry to some attendees of the 80th annual Academy Awards this Sunday. The jewelry loan was reported by Warner Brothers ExtraTV. Leviev has made a concerted effort to associate himself and his businesses with global elites, but a barrage of negative publicity related to these rights abuses has tarnished Leviev's image, suggesting that, as NY Jewish Week wrote recently, "For Leviev, All that Glitters Isn't Gold." Human rights campaigners from Adalah-NY have pledged to contact Academy Award organizers and attendees to voice their concerns over Leviev's involvement.

At one point in the show, David goes to the bathroom in a Catholic home and splatters urine on a picture of Jesus; he doesn’t clean it off. Then a Catholic woman goes to the bathroom, sees the picture and concludes that Jesus is crying. She then summons her equally stupid mother and the two of them fall to their knees in prayer. When David and Jerry Seinfeld (playing himself) are asked if they ever experienced a miracle, David answers, “every erection is a miracle.” That’s what passes for creativity these days.

The Pythons recalled being taken during their first tour of Germany to the Dachau concentration camp, only to find it closed. Terry Jones recounted how Chapman had said: "Tell them we're Jewish."

"It worked, they let us in," Jones said.

Pete Seeger turned 90 on May 3, providing the occasion for a huge Madison Square Garden celebratory concert, featuring a wide array of popular musicians singing his songs and honoring his influence. In the two years prior to this event, Pete has gotten more mainstream attention than he’d received in the previous 70 years of performing. Springsteen’s recorded several CD’s called ’The Seeger Sessions’ and simultaneously went on an international tour featuring material drawn from Seeger’s folksong repertory. There was a documentary film bio, released on public tv and theatrically, called Pete Seeger :The power of song. There’s an ongoing campaign to get him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

People no longer trust Congress, the President, the courts, the media, corporations, political parties, and other institutions of society. People even doubt science and medicine.

After watching the television coverage of the Roman Polanski arrest in Switzerland, I have been amazed by the tolerance the mainline media has shown for the director’s conviction for raping a 13-year-old girl in the U.S. in 1977. It is as if the act and conviction of the ‘great’ director was not really that big of a deal. After all, isn’t it more important that he produced many highly acclaimed films and that he is among the high society elite?

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglorious Bastards, gets relatively passing grades from a sampling of reviews on the Internet—or at least kid’s glove criticism—that is from some prominent and influential cyberspace sights—why? Granted, some aspects of the film were very good. But still one wonders why the “psychology” of this movie was not much considered? And you can take it as given that if Jewish Americans dominate in the U.S. film industry, which they do, then surely they have something to say on how movies are reviewed in America?

Honolulu is the top city in the U.S. for a romantic escape, but if you want to see good theater, go someplace else.

After a summer bursting with expensive box office flops, a film made for a paltry $15,000 and starring an unknown cast is shaping up to become one of the year’s surprise successes.

As the banking collapse illustrated, any time a company denies that it's about to go bankrupt, it makes sense to assume that the company is indeed about to go bankrupt--and then analyze the situation for yourself.

We've now done that for CBS. Here's the bottom line:

CBS is not on the verge of bankruptcy. The company is, however, highly leveraged, and its cash flows have been deteriorating rapidly. So if current trends continue, the company will be forced to cut more costs or risk violating debt covenants. If CBS's cash flows keep deteriorating after that, it will very much be on the verge of bankruptcy.

To offset people's general revulsion, Polanski has a pubic relations campaign that constantly plays on his tragic WWII childhood. He was born Jewish. He lived during the Holocaust. (In my view, he filmed The Pianist to exploit the Holocaust as a self promoting 'pity Polanski' PR ad.)

While Roman Polanski sits in a Swiss jail awaiting extradition to the US, the sister of his late wife Sharon Tate today said the sex act on a 13 year-old to which he plead guilty 31 years ago was consensual and that he will not get a fair trial in the US.

Reading the petition, you could be forgiven for thinking that the dispute was over some obscure diplomatic codicil. Its principal focus is on the mechanics of the arrest, namely Switzerland's detention of Mr. Polanski on a U.S. request as he was traveling to the Zurich Film Festival. It cites Switzerland's status as a "neutral country" and the "extraterritorial nature" of film festivals. The substance of his guilty plea and the circumstances of the crime receive only glancing mention, in a single line: "His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals."

One would never know that those easily brushed off "morals"—rape and pedophilia—have actually been a central concern of some of the petition's signatories.

The rush to support Roman Polanski shows how isolated the entertainment industry is from the rest of the world.

I’ve seen the world that Polanski moves in over here. I’ve been to St. Tropez and other places. I’ve seen the enormous yachts and the glitterati glittering about. I’ve never seen people take themselves so seriously. They love their importance among their fellows and, like in Hollywood, they scheme together. They look for the angles. They set out after each others husbands and wives. Scammers move among them like barracuda around a reef. When you don’t want anything from anybody you see things that others can’t see because their vision is compromised by their desires.

The spinners are bemoaning the waste of police resources in pursuing a 76-year-old man for a crime that even the victim says we should just put behind us. They cite his troubled and tragic upbringing and his creative genius.

Claire Rivero's liturgical music website.

Several episodes of the hit animated series The Simpsons have dealt with Jewish issues, and even the Middle East conflict over the years. However, it wasn’t until the series’ 21st season that Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie will finally visit Israel and meet a bitter and angry Israeli tour guide, played by Sacha Baron Cohen (whose characters Bruno and Borat have made him a household name.)

Hollywood stars from Tom Cruise to Denzel Washington as well as British actors like Anthony Hopkins have made films about historical events with glaring factual errors, it said.

Theses include showing Mozart as a spoiled brat in Amadeus when he was not or the Americans cracking top secret Nazi codes in the film U-571 when really it was the British.

This fact sheet is a response to the campaign of disinformation being waged against the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) protest letter, "The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation,” [1] signed by 1,000 people including Viggo Mortenson, Danny Glover, Naomi Klein, Harry Belafonte, Wallace Shawn, Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda along with many Israelis and Palestinians. This year, TIFF decided to put a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv at the festival, in line with the goals of the Israeli Consulate’s “Brand Israel” program. In its own words, the “Brand Israel” program aims to publicize Israeli culture in order to distract public attention from its human rights record.

In a post on the Huffington Post blog yesterday, Fonda said she had signed the letter, which has been fiercely criticised by Hollywood luminaries such as Jerry Seinfeld, Natalie Portman and Sacha Baron Cohen, “without reading it carefully enough, without asking myself if some of the wording wouldn’t exacerbate the situation rather than bring about constructive dialogue”.

What used to look like a dancing movement that the singer used to perform up till it became an identification mark and a feature of her body, now has a different meaning, there is a new identity that represents itself, and announcing her joining that small religious group, and asks to receive its blessing, and calls with the diverged and raised thighs, prophet Jacob himself and nobody else, so as to fall upon her and justify her belonging to his descendents even if it was somehow late. And when she received the response in approval, she exclaimed with open ecstasy: “Israel is the center of energy in this world, and it is the axis of peace on this earth.”

One can argue, as many opinionators have, that it's not really relevant that those former Arab villages – now part of greater Tel Aviv – were conquered by Jewish "resistance" fighters in Irgun and Haganah before the Jewish state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948.

But is it not part of the city's very recent history that most of its Arab residents were driven out, "literally pushed into the sea," as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has written? How does one deny this sorry record?

Jane Fonda, Danny Glover and Eve Ensler have joined the growing list of artists who are boycotting the Toronto film festival over a program honoring Tel Aviv’s 100th anniversary, gossip blogger Perez Hilton reported on Friday.

The three have added their names to a letter aimed at festival officials claiming that Tel Aviv was built on violence, ignoring the “suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants,” Hilton reported.

Some 50 intellectuals and filmmakers including Briton Ken Loach have accused the Toronto film festival of complicity with an 'Israeli propaganda campaign'.

The Toronto International Film Festival chose this year to present 10 films by local filmmakers on the Israeli metropolis for its 'City to City' program, which each year focuses its lens on a different city.

This year's program was devoted to Tel Aviv and the Jaffa area. However, the choice led to protests that the film festival was 'staging a propaganda campaign' on Israel's behalf, given 'the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program', said an open letter to festival organizers.

What do recording artists Green Day, Sheryl Crow, Nirvana, Radiohead, Pat Benatar, John Cougar Mellencamp and Tom Petty have in common? They've all had albums or songs banned or censored by superstore Wal-Mart. The same Wal-Mart which on August 31 will exclusively release the new album, "The Time of Our Lives" from 16-year-old writhing, gyrating, pole-dancing, near-naked-posing pop tart Miley Cyrus.

There is no need to come up with a fictional story while there is a true chapter of WWII history most people have no clue about. A Jewish American Author named John Sack risked his career and even his life to tell the story of Jews who sought revenge in his controversial book An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945. The story tells of Jews who oversaw prison camps in Poland under the Communist occupations. According to Sack, they not only sought revenge against German soldiers, but also innocent German and Polish civilians.

Ultimately the answer to combating digital piracy lies in the hands of those who own content and those who control access to the internet. Rights holders already have to take risks, and will have to take more — for example, by developing new online services such as Spotify that make much more of their back catalogue available in a way and at a price that makes sense to today’s consumers. The age of flogging a CD in HMV for £20 is well and truly over. Ask me what I think will finish off piracy as a real threat to our creators and creative businesses and the answer is obvious — it is the market.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic, sic] has been hyped as World War II action movie-cum-sadistic gorefest. In reality, it is a self-indulgent snorefest. I thought I would need a gin and tonic before I went in, but it turns out what I needed was a cup of coffee. Yes, there is some gore and sadism, but frankly I found myself hoping for more of it. Anything, really, to relieve the sheer boredom.

Tarantino Talks About His Not-A-Holocaust-Movie

The government may declare victory in wars started in foreign lands, but for the people who live in small towns in this land the results are barely distinguishable from defeat. Lives are lost, families destroyed, futures shattered, hopes ruined; all this is the price paid by the people for the "foreign entanglements" we were long ago warned to avoid. The real price of war is paid not just by those who died in it, but by those who are left behind who bury their dead and pay the bills.

Film critics and responsible authority figures in both Germany and Israel have almost unanimously announced that they dread "Inglourious Basterds," and can't see how it will contribute anything positive to the dreary world of post-Holocaust discourse. (I'm sure Tarantino is delighted with that response.) On the other hand, Tarantino's producer Lawrence Bender, upon reading the screenplay, told the director: "As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream."

Israeli television's one-time "king of ratings", Dudu Topaz, yesterday hanged himself in his prison cell while on trial facing charges of hiring hitmen to target television executives he believed were barring him from a comeback.

Love it or not, the demise of Act 221 dealt the local film industry a deadly blow. Compounding the problem, the governor is now terminating the Hawaii Film Office on Nov. 13th — depriving Mainland and local producers of a contact and permitting point. It's also a shame that we lost "A Perfect Getaway," a film set in Kaua'i, to Puerto Rico, and it's really too bad that the locally produced "Last Princess," filmed at 'Iolani Palace, is now mired in cultural controversy.

Superman is literally chopped into pieces between the Siegels, DC Comics, and Warner Bros which will do nothing but hurt in the long run. According to Variety, the Siegels have recaptured the rights to the first two weeks of the daily Superman newspaper strips, and portions of Action Comics and Superman comics. They apparently now control all depictions of Superman's origin story, which means they now own Krypton, its fiery destruction, Jor-El and Lora, and Kal El. In 2008, the Siegels recaptured the rights to the Superman character (which includes his costume and his alter-ego of Clark Kent), Lois Lane, the Daily Planet, its gruff editor, and their love triangle. DC still owns Jimmy Olson, his ability to fly, Lex Luthor, kryptonite, and Superman's expanded powers and origins.