Don’t you just hate how Osama bin Laden is portrayed by the mainstream media? A man with a fully thought through programme for government, he is nonetheless demonised as some sort of mass murderer. And as for Hitler: all he was really doing was standing up for Germany after it was so badly treated at Versailles. Sadly, he is portrayed only as some sort of madman.
I haven’t encountered the work of the Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries before, but on the basis of his review of Channel 4’s superb documentary, One Day in October, I’ll make a stab at his view of Osama and Adolf. Misunderstood – or, rather, not properly understood. Caricatured as villains when in reality they are so much more complex.
Jeffries has had the misfortune to have had to watch and review One Day in October for the Guardian. Misfortune for us, that is, because his review has now been published. I would ordinarily have recommended you give it a miss – the review, not the documentary – because it is in many ways no more than the usual boilerplate Guardian drivel and it will just anger you.
But perhaps this time you might actually want to have a read of the review, because it is something quite special - even for the Guardian, which infamously ran a column by Osama bin Laden at the height of Al Qaeda’s success as a terrorist organisation.
The standfirst to Jeffries’ review makes clear where we are heading straight away: “This disturbing documentary about the attack on Be’eri kibbutz is full of troubling interviews and phone/CCTV footage. Sadly, it also demonises Gazans as either killers or looters.”
Ah yes, those poor misunderstood killers and looters. All they did was rape and murder 1200 Israelis. I mean, let’s get some perspective here. It wasn’t that big a deal. And they are people, too, you know. Don’t define them as murderers just because they, er, murdered people.
Jeffries then gets to the meat of his concerns: “If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help. Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.”
Yes, Jeffries actually wrote that. He really did review a documentary about the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah by writing that the film won’t help us understand why the perpetrators of that massacre chose to massacre 1200 people, raping them, decapitating them with farm tools, shooting them in front of their children and burning them alive. Because obviously the real crime here is what led these otherwise decent chaps, who in another world would surely have been Guardian reading liberals, to be so mean for a few hours. (Do you think it could be the Jews? Who knows. I hear bad things about them.)
Jeffries’ review is worth reading as the archetype of a certain type of response to the murder of Jews, which can never simply condemn but has to place it “in context”. In Jeffries’ case, we are confronted with the amorality of a world view that looks at the “evil” (a word he rightly uses) of October 7 and responds by comparing it to…a Michael Caine film. Yes, really. Jeffries tells us that he is “reminded of Cy Endfield’s film Zulu, with its nameless hordes of African warriors pitted against British protagonists with whom we were encouraged to identify. TV and cinematic narratives often work as othering machines in this way. At its worst, One Day in October, if unwittingly, follows the same pattern.”
I wonder if Jeffries has realised that October 7 wasn’t a film. It wasn’t scripted. It actually happened. The “pattern” of “hordes” of Hamas terrorists was what actually happened on October 7. That’s the point of a documentary.
But even that’s not enough for Jeffries. “All our sympathies are with relatable Israelis. A mother texting farewell messages as she dies from gunshot wounds. A girl sending cute pictures of her playing with friends to her mum, who is cowering in a toilet cubicle, hoping the terrorists she can hear breathing outside can’t hear her. By contrast, Hamas terrorists are a generalised menace on CCTV”.
At this point I am not so much lost for words as barely able to contain my anger. As JC editor for 13 years and editor at large for three, I have spent most of the past 16 years having to deal with the views of the likes of Jeffries, and I have never quite come to terms with such a mindset. Jeffries is genuinely criticising a documentary about a massacre on the grounds that including the victims’ stories means the film is slanted towards sympathy with the victims. It isn’t so much immoral as amoral – unable to deal with evil as evil, always seeking to relativise, and thus diminish, it.
One person on social media asked this morning why no one at the Guardian thought perhaps it best not to publish Jeffries’ review. I think the answer to that is clear to anyone who actually reads the Guardian.
