Last evening we viewed the Israeli film Room 514, vaunted for its 'best new narrative director win and special jury mention Tribeca Film Festival'. The result is that we are both agreed it would be best to avoid any such future temptations to view such recognized Israeli films, and perhaps take a wider arm's length of any Israeli-produced films. Their invariable soul-searching dilemmas and unveiling of the dark side of Jewish values where the conscience is such a haunted room of hand-wringing excess it inevitably reveals an exercise in moral relativism beyond absurd.



The plot of the film, an Israeli Army investigation into a complaint lodged by a Palestinian family and the rumoured brutally ill behaviour of a platoon commander against Palestinians cringing before the the dominating Israeli military who do wrong to people who have committed no sins themselves against a neighbouring country seems the specialty of Israeli film-makers prostrating themselves before Western public opinion, grovelling in the hopes of achieving special recognition for their humiliating revelations of human fallibility.

In the film the alpha-male platoon commander is accused by a truth-invested female investigator who contends in her own way with Israeli misogyny that prevails in the culture both of primitive religious orthodoxy and the male-pugnacious military of having assaulted and insulted a Palestinian man by slapping his face in the presence of his children, of making off with the family vehicle, and a host of other corrosively uncivilized acts.

This, in the face of Islamist menace that has caused the deaths of countless Jews, let alone even greater numbers of Muslim civilians and Westerners unfortunate enough to fall into the psychopathic hands of dedicated Islamist jihadis, represents some of the head-banging claims of Israeli malfeasance against an innocent Palestinian public who in the aggregate majority approve enough of terrorist groups like Hamas to usher them to power.

Contrast that to the United States where a trial was held in 1970 finding high ranking American Army officers covering up the My Lai 1968 massacre of 500 women children and elderly Vietnamese, resulting in 14 U.S. officers being charged of crimes specific to the event. Contrast that to the Syrian regime using starvation, torture, rape, chemical attacks, artillery and barrel bombs against its own people, Syrian Sunnis whose original protest asked for equal benefits in Syrian society.

Contrast that to the terroristic fear engendered within Western democracies, and no less in Muslim-majority countries of the world by the decades-long advent of Muslim Islamist jihad and its attraction for disaffected Muslims who embrace the ideology of violence, martyrdom and international conquest. Contrast that to the revelations contained in The New York Times' latest expose on the horrors inflicted on Western hostages by the Islamic State: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/world/middleeast/horror-before-the-beheadings-what-isis-hostages-endured-in-syria.html?emc=edit_na_20141025&nlid=26862448&_r=0