On Thursday, Nov. 14, the pro-Palestinian Claremont Colleges student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) will host a screening of the film Gaza Fights for Freedom. SJP will host the event at Pomona College’s Rose Hill Theatre; the event will consist of a screening of the film followed by a discussion with director Abby Martin and journalist Mike Prysner. Pomona, Pitzer, and Scripps Colleges—three of the five colleges in the Claremont Colleges Consortium—are funding the event.
“Join Claremont SJP on November 14th for our screening of ‘Gaza Fights for Freedom’! This collaborative documentary, produced by incredible Gazan journalists and filmmakers Abby Martin and Mike Prysner of the Empire Files, shows you Gaza’s protest movement like you’ve never seen before,” reads the event description.
Martin, a former contractor and anchor for Russian state news agency RT and Venezuelan state news agency Telasur, is a self-proclaimed “radical” and conspirator. Until recently, she claimed that the September 11 terrorist attacks were an inside job by the government, and recently on the Joe Rogan Show, claimed that the CIA is responsible for a string of assassinations, including those of Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy.
Gaza Fights for Freedom claims to “[show] you Gaza’s protest movement like you’ve never seen before. Filmed during the height of the Great March Of Return protests, it features exclusive footage of demonstrations where 200 unarmed civilians have been killed by Israeli snipers since March 30, 2018.” Around 90 percent of Palestinians who perished in the riots were affiliated with terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Martin also alluded to Israel’s control over the world’s media: “Forgot how big Israel’s propaganda apparatus is. Hasbara [Israel’s public relations efforts] trolls jump to distort the truth like it’s their job to paint victims as oppressors.” The Israeli communications department receives less than $35 million dollars in funding annually, a fraction of the funding given to the state agencies of Russia and Venezuela where Martin previously worked.
On International Holocaust Rememberance Day in 2011, speaking at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Pryzner, another speaker at the event, stated that “history will not just remember these people [Jews] as fools but really in context of other atrocities we’ve seen, in particularly that the Nazis waged during the Holocaust…I think you really can draw an equals-sign between what was done in Germany and what is done to the Gazan people because Gaza literally is one massive concentration camp where people are kept just hanging on by a thread.”
Martin also said in a 2013 television segment aired on RT that “[the] Israeli government’s words don’t cut it when they already act with complete impunity…that same group of people [the Jews] to now use Hitler’s methods against another minority to maintain a Jewish majority. I guess it’s true that they say history repeats itself.”
Despite these questionable statements, numerous departments at the Claremont Colleges have decided to co-sponsor the event. SJP listed its cosponsors as the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Anthropology departments at Scripps College, the Institute for Global Local Action Studies, Munroe Center for Social Inquiry, and Campus Life Committee at Pitzer College, and the Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Gender & Women Studies departments and program at Pomona College.
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