The Strangest Fruit of All

Posted on March 15, 2017

by Richard Edmondson

Filmmaker Jason Pollock

if Pollock had wanted to make a film about people being killed solely because of their ethnicity, he could go to Israel, where he would find a much greater abundance of material for an investigative journalist to work with than he would ever find in America. Does it not bother Pollock that our own government, the US government, gives the Jewish state billions of dollars a year to maintain an illegal occupation? And that in turn Israel routinely kills civilians in the course of maintaining this occupation?

Millennials today have lived their entire lives in a culture 
in which deprecatory remarks about whites are viewed as trendy and acceptable…

By Richard Edmondson

Whether the film “Stranger Fruit” was intended to inflame racial tensions in America, it likely will have that effect. The film rehashes events surrounding the 2014 shooting of African-American teen Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, purportedly shedding new light on the case by means of previously unreleased video footage.

Made by Jewish filmmaker Jason Pollock, the film debuted at the South By Southwest Film Festival on March 11 and has been referred to as an “explosive documentary.” Pollock apparently took the title from the song, “Strange Fruit,” recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, whose lyrics deal with the lynching of blacks in the southern United States during the post-reconstruction era. A stanza from the song goes:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pollock’s choice of the title for his film is not exactly a subtle literary allusion. The song was named “song of the century” by Time Magazine in 1999.

In the film, Pollock alleges that Brown did not rob the Ferguson convenience store he was said to have robbed, basing his claim on security video taken inside the store but which previously had been unreleased to the public. Pollock claims in the film that the footage proves Brown did not carry out a robbery of the store but that he had merely returned to pick up merchandise he had previously paid for–it is a claim that has been refuted by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch and by Jay Kanzler, an attorney representing the owner of the market, both of whom have accused the filmmaker of selectively editing the footage.

You can go here to see a two and a half minute segment from the film that contains the security video and Pollock’s narrative on what it purportedly shows…and you can go here to see the response by Kanzler, whose presentation includes footage that Pollock edited out of the video. I suggest you review both and make up your own mind about who is telling the truth.

You can also go here and see a video of Pollock exploding in anger during an interview on Fox News.

“He [Brown] didn’t rob the store, and anyone who sees the exchange that takes place with a conscience, a heart, two minds and is not a bigot, pretty much understands what happened,” he tells the Fox interviewer.  “Unfortunately, there’s so many people in America with so much bias inside of them, that they just want to think that Michael Brown is a bad guy.”

The presumptive implication is that the police officer in Ferguson killed Brown for no other reason than because of his skin color.

Additionally, Pollock told CNN that, “I obtained this video by deciding to move to Ferguson, work with the family, and do real investigative journalism for the last two years. And that’s how the truth comes out.”

Of course if Pollock had wanted to make a film about people being killed solely because of their ethnicity, he could go to Israel, where he would find a much greater abundance of material for an investigative journalist to work with than he would ever find in America. Does it not bother Pollock that our own government, the US government, gives the Jewish state billions of dollars a year to maintain an illegal occupation? And that in turn Israel routinely kills civilians in the course of maintaining this occupation?

Imagine how many family members of Palestinians shot in cold blood by Israeli forces Pollock could get interviews with were he to move to Israel and “do real investigative journalism” for two years, and imagine the quality documentary this enterprising social justice advocate could produce as a result were he to undertake such an effort!

I took the trouble to visit Pollock’s Facebook page. In addition to numerous posts promoting his new film, you can also find posts about white people. “Dear white people, it’s time to wake up,” he says in one:

He also apparently thinks there are too many white people working as interns in Washington…

And apparently he opposes any restrictions on immigration–to America…

The filmmaker also has concerns about Russian hacking…

…but nowhere on his Facebook page could I find any mention of Israel, and I scrolled the timeline back for nearly a year.

I have asked this question before, but I will ask it again here: why do so many US Jews stridently condemn racism in America but have nothing to say about it in Israel? Racism does exist in America, but America does not define itself narrowly and specifically as a state for people of this or that religion or ethnicity. The same cannot be said of Israel.

And how does Israel’s defining of itself as a “Jewish state” translate into daily life? What is the net effect of its policies for those who must live under its occupation? If you go here you can read the precise legal definition of genocide as defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN in 1948. What you will notice is that much of it describes, almost to a T, what Israel is doing today to the Palestinians. But yet US Jews like Pollock apparently have nothing to say about it.

As I said above, racism does exist in America…and a significant portion of it is directed against white people. That’s because racism against white people is seldom if ever condemned or called what it is. Imagine if someone were to say in condescending tones: “Dear black people, it’s time to wake up,” or “Dear Jews, it’s time to wake up.” That person would immediately be accused of racism or anti-Semitism. And if they were white, they would be accused of “white supremacism” as well. But Pollock obviously had no fear of posting such words about white people on his Facebook page–and for good reason. In the culture which currently exists in America, it is acceptable to denigrate white people.

Look at the millennial protesters at this anti-Trump protest in Portland, some of them yelling out the racial epithet “white trash.” These are people of course who would never dream of shouting derogatory remarks about any other race or ethnic group.

The irony, of course, is that some of the people shouting “white trash” are white themselves. But here again, it’s not terribly surprising. Millennials today have lived their entire lives in a culture in which deprecatory remarks about whites are viewed as trendy and acceptable.

By contrast, every single person in America is well aware of the fact that making racist slurs against nonwhites or voicing anti-Semitic remarks about Jews can get you fired from your job. We even have seen university professors fired or denied tenure for nothing more than criticizing Israel.

The period we are going through now is in many ways unprecedented. We live in a time in which hurling any kind of baseless accusation against Russia is wholly permissible, encouraged even, but in which we have to cautiously watch what we say about Israel. The truth of the matter, however, is that Israel exerts far more influence over US elections than Russian “hackers” ever dreamed of. Consider that, and then factor in two other elements to the equation as well: efforts to inflame racial tensions in America and efforts to provoke a war with Russia. The picture that emerges is not pretty.

So what chance do Americans today have of regaining our independence from the Jewish lobby which controls our government? It’s hard to give definitive odds on that, but one thing is for sure: Israel, out of all nations on this beset and torn-apart earth, is one strange fruit.

And the Jews who lash out angrily at others for alleged racism–while at the same time supporting their own apartheid Jewish state–are perhaps the strangest fruit of all.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

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