Actors’ opinions on the Middle East are rarely interesting, but there are occasional exceptions. Denise Gough, a fairly generic actress from Ireland, had recently tried to pull a Hannah Einbinder—say something sufficiently bizarre about the Jews so that someone who isn’t related to her might remember her name. Gough has appeared in a Disney Star Wars series and, so, has taken to using a Star Wars analogy to convince people that the Jewish state is a uniquely evil force.
Gough says she doesn’t understand the analogy—she heard it from a friend with a stronger grasp of intergalactic space fables—but she gets the crux of it, which involves shooting Israel:
“Apparently the Death Star has a place in it that if you shoot through that specific place in the Death Star, you explode the entire Death Star, okay? And so somebody said Palestine is that place. And the construction of the Death Star is like all of it—Sudan, Congo, all of it everywhere, Nigeria now, everywhere. If we can free Palestine, it explodes everything.”
One can only imagine Gough trying to describe the concept of an Achilles’ heel.
I should note that for this conversation Gough is in costume—not a Star Wars costume but a Palestinian costume, a designer keffiyeh from an Instagram influencer.
Gough is promoting the idea that the Jews are responsible for all the remaining injustice in the world. Destroying the Death Star of David would liberate Congo, in her portrayal. Gough’s understanding of geopolitics is what things would look like if Carmen Sandiego worked for the NKVD.
Why is this interesting? Because Gough is describing the progressive obsession with Israel as a form of primitive religious fanaticism. And it is accurate.
Nothing about this view of Jewish power is rational. Anti-Judaism is a kind of secular monotheism. But instead of being the single source of all blessings, the Jews are treated as the single source of all curses.
It’s also interesting because one rarely sees these shallow activists even attempt to explain why they care about destroying Israel and only Israel. As I’ve written previously, the industry of which Gough is an inconsequential part is subsidized, and thus compromised, by the genocidal Chinese Communist Party, which has undertaken a documented campaign of ethnic cleansing of its minority Muslim population. If silence were ever complicity, it would be the case with regard to Hollywood and China. And yet Hollywood stars are currently boycotting… Israel. And actors and other industry professionals are often asked about Gaza and only Gaza. Why would Jennifer Lawrence be asked about Gaza at a film festival press conference for her upcoming movie when neither she nor the movie has any connection to Gaza? It’s because the question is a stand-in for whether she worships at the one acceptable progressive altar. Here was Lawrence’s answer:
“I’m terrified. It’s mortifying. What’s happening is no less than a genocide and it’s terrible.”
It’s an incantation, or an oath, or an article of faith. Jennifer Lawrence knows what she’s supposed to say and she says it. She is an actress after all. She knows her lines.
There’s no follow-up—they are only ever asked about Gaza. And Gough’s analogy is why. It’s not that they don’t care about Sudan or Nigeria or the Congo or any other examples of suffering. It’s that they believe the Jews are the head of the snake, the source of the problem, the root of the poisoned tree. Why treat the symptoms when you can treat the disease?
It’s darkly brilliant, if you think about it. The Death Star of David Theory is the greatest excuse for laziness and single-minded bigotry the anti-Semites have been able to come up with.
It’s not very original, of course. It’s as old as time. But this version has finally been updated for the binge-watching age.
