An important, extraordinary, and shattering film started screening this week. Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again is about the massacre at the Supernova music festival during the Oct. 7 pogrom in southern Israel.
A preview was shown at the JW3 Jewish community center in London on Tuesday evening; it was subsequently being screened on BBC television and is being streamed on Paramount.
Somewhere over 360 of the approximately 3,500 participants and staff at the festival were murdered and about 40 kidnapped into Gaza, where an unknown number are still being held hostage.
The film stuns because it shows us the events of that terrible day as they unfolded through the eyes of the young festival-goers—and of the Hamas terrorists themselves—through footage taken from phones, Go-Pro cameras and studio interviews with survivors themselves.
We see the secular young Israelis dancing during the Friday night before the attack at what they called a “trance party” (with a disconcerting number of them high on drugs).
-We and they hear the shooting start, and they can’t believe what’s happening—disbelief accentuated by the effect of the drugs they’ve taken.
Shockingly, we see what’s unfolding through the Hamas Go-Pro cameras as, deliriously screaming Allahu akbar (“God is great” in Arabic) and about martyrdom, the Gaza stormtroopers smash through the border fence, and ride their motorcycles and vehicles into Israel and the festival. And then we watch as they systematically commit mass slaughter.
We watch the young Israelis being mown down as they run. They film themselves as they confide their terror to their iPhones and desperately chart what’s happening. Through the eyes of Noam, we watch them hide in a garbage bin, which is then raked with bullets, killing her longtime boyfriend, David, and leaving her wounded among a pile of bodies.
We hear the heartbreaking sound of these secular young Israelis crying out the words of the Shema as they realize they are facing their deaths. We see the astounding courage of Aner Shapira, who tosses out, one by one, no fewer than seven grenades thrown by terrorists into the roadside shelter where he is trapped—with a group including his best friend, 23-year-old Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was subsequently taken hostage and murdered—but is finally killed by the eighth. Another young survivor, Eitan, takes over throwing out the grenades until he passes out after an explosion, only to recover to find himself among a mound of the dead.
Four of these survivors along with Aner’s father, Moshe, spoke at the London screening. This took great courage because they clearly remain in the deepest possible trauma. But they came to deliver an urgent message. Tell everyone to see this film, they said. Make people understand what happened that day.
Alas, we know that the people who most need to see it will refuse to do so. These are the people who deny what happened on Oct. 7, who say accounts of these atrocities are just Israeli propaganda, who say if they did happen it was Israel’s fault and who obscenely support Hamas as a “resistance” movement.
And even if they do watch it, will it make any difference? How on earth can so many deny the obvious truth of what happened?
The reason is that, for many on the left, absolutely nothing can be allowed to contradict the narrative that Israel is an illegitimate state that has colonized and oppressed the Palestinian Arabs who are the indigenous people of the land. Although every element of that is untrue, it constitutes the default belief in liberal circles which permit no challenge to it whatever.
That’s because such liberals believe that their support for the Palestinian cause defines them as moral and good people. The fact that the Palestinians have committed bestial and sadistic atrocities upon Israelis therefore cannot be believed—because it would mean the Palestinians are in fact the oppressors and the Israelis their victims. And that would place these liberals on the side of evil.
As a result, they put forward any explanation, however preposterous, to deny what actually happened. They are totally immune to demonstrable evidence, because they fear that accepting it would shatter their entire moral personality. When it comes to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, their whole thought system is therefore entirely sealed against the truth.
So the overwhelmingly liberal Western media will continue to tell murderous lies about Israel. Interestingly, the film was made by the BBC in its Storyville strand. Yet the BBC’s appallingly biased coverage of Israel is the prime reason why the vast majority of the British public remains almost wholly unaware that Israel is being subjected to an eight-front Iranian war of extermination—and why so many have so viciously turned against the Jewish state.
So why has the BBC made this film? Storyville’s commissioning editor, Lucie Kon, is herself a Jew with a courage and determination that are vanishingly rare in the BBC.
Even so, there were reportedly difficult negotiations to get the film on the air. Director Yariv Mozer told The Hollywood Reporter that the BBC forced him to agree not to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization if he wanted the film to be shown. “It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not,” Mozer said.
In fact, the young Israelis in the film refer to terrorists in Hebrew on many occasions. The film itself states: “The IDF says that more than 3,000 terrorists breached the 40-mile-long border in around 30 places.” This apparently met the BBC’s distinction between using the “t-word” itself and reporting others doing so.
The problem with the BBC’s reporting of the Middle East, however, goes far beyond its perverse refusal to use the word terrorist. Day in, day out the British news outlet disseminates the malevolent falsehoods and distortions about Israel produced by Hamas and its fellow travelers in the international “humanitarian” establishment that wickedly portray the IDF entirely falsely as human-rights abusers and war criminals.
Not once has the BBC—or any other media outlet—ever told the public that every correspondent in Gaza is forced to toe the Hamas line under threat of death or expulsion, and so every piece of information from there has to be treated as unreliable or worse.
The BBC’s chief content officer, Charlotte Moore, attended the London screening. She introduced the film by referring to the “incredibly difficult year” for so many in the room and said: “I hope this film is a demonstration of the BBC commitment to telling stories fearlessly and fairly in pursuit of the truth.”
Well, no it isn’t. The BBC has contemptuously dismissed all complaints about the shocking malevolence of its coverage as being without foundation. It is nevertheless deeply discomfited by the charge against it of systematic bias and antisemitism.
So while the commitment of Lucie Kon to the truth is not in doubt, it’s hard not to conclude that the BBC top brass are using this film to sanitize their coverage—a prime source of incitement to hatred of Israel and the Jews—by giving the impression that it is instead fair-minded.
The deeply perverse response to Oct. 7 goes far beyond one news organization. Mozer says he offered the documentary to multiple streaming platforms in America, but they were unwilling to pick it up due to “concerns about the political situation.”
Israel is battling not just against genocidal enemies but also against a tidal wave of lies in an epidemic of insanity that has consumed the West. This film is vital because, like Israel itself, it stands for truth and justice against a West that has simply lost its mind.
{Reposted from JNS}
