Tag Archives: Media Education Foundation

Saturday Matinee: The Occupation of the American Mind

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Source: Media Education Foundation

“The Occupation of the American Mind” has been repeatedly attacked and misrepresented by right-wing pressure groups and outright ignored by virtually all mainstream media outlets and North American film festivals.   

To help bring context to U.S. corporate media coverage of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s escalating bombardment of Gaza, we’re releasing this newly abridged, 49-minute version of our 2016 film “The Occupation of the American Mind.” The film places special emphasis on propaganda efforts designed to conceal Israel’s brutal and illegal decades-long occupation of Palestinian land as a root cause of the conflict, and to cast those who speak up for Palestinian human rights as either anti-Semitic or terrorist-sympathizers. Narrated by Roger Waters, and featuring Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, Yousef Munayyer, Amira Hass, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis, Rula Jebreal, Norman Solomon, Max Blumenthal, Rami Khouri, M.J. Rosenberg, Stephen J. Walt, Mark Crispin Miller, Peter Hart, Henry Siegman, and Sut Jhally.

A transcript of this 49 minute version to follow along with is available by going to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jKRwdsq-As

49 MINUTE VERSION (The restriction is because of violent scenes.)

“The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States.” Despite receiving an overwhelmingly positive response from those who have actually seen it,” The Occupation of the American Mind” has been repeatedly attacked and misrepresented by right-wing pressure groups and outright ignored by virtually all mainstream media outlets and North American film festivals. To bypass this campaign of misrepresentation and suppression, we’ve decided to make the film available for FREE online so that people can make up their own minds about its analysis of U.S. media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Please watch and share widely! Support for the free distribution of this film was provided by the Wallace Action Fund of Tides Foundation, advised by Randall Wallace. If you’d like to help support the effort to provide free distribution of The Occupation of the American Mind, please consider a donation. https://www.mediaed.org/donate/

Saturday Matinee: Theaters of War

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A documentary about the U.S. military’s editorial control over thousands of Hollywood’s films and television programs.

Source: Media Education Foundation

If you’ve seen Top Gun or Transformers, you may have wondered: Does all of that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a crack at the script? Theaters of War digs deep into a vast new trove of recently released internal government documents to bring the answers to these questions into sharp focus. Traveling across America, filmmaker and media scholar Roger Stahl engages an array of other researchers, bewildered veterans, PR insiders, and industry producers willing to talk. In unsettling and riveting detail, he discovers how the military and CIA have pushed official narratives while systematically scrubbing scripts of war crimes, corruption, racism, sexual assault, coups, assassinations, and torture. From The Longest Day to Lone Survivor, Iron Man to Iron Chef, and James Bond to Jack Ryan, Theaters of War uncovers an alternative “cinematic universe” that stands as one of the great Pentagon PR coups of our time. As these activities gain new public scrutiny, new questions arise: How have they managed to fly under the radar for so long? And where do we go from here?

Watch Theaters of War on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/12327337

Saturday Matinee: The Occupation of the American Mind

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From OccupationMovie.org:

Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territory and its repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world — except the United States. The Occupation of the American Mind takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S. Narrated by Roger Waters and featuring leading observers of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the film explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel’s favor. The Occupation of the American Mind provides a sweeping analysis of Israel’s decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people — a battle that has only intensified over the past few years in the face of widening international condemnation of Israel’s increasingly right-wing policies. (Running time: 85 mins)

If you are a member of a major library system you can watch the full film at Kanopy.