> But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.
> Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.
> Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive producer of “Jihad Rehab” and called it “freaking brilliant” in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.
> The film “landed like a truckload of hate,” Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.
You may not refer to it as a "woke mob", but that really seems what happened. As someone who has always identified as liberal, it is absolutely shocking to me how large swaths of the American left are OK with the idea that "Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men". To me, telling someone they aren't allowed to do something because of their race is the absolute antithesis of everything I felt it was to be "liberal".
Well the recent leaked LA city council tape should dispel any notions that left wing politicians aren’t racist. In fact the race-essentialism of the left is laid bare in that tape. “He’s with the blacks” etc.
In particular anti-semitism is usually associated with the right, but it has a pretty long tradition on the left as well. The 60s in the communist block were a good display of that, but also the 40s in France (Tony Judt wrote a couple books about that, e.g. the French Communist Party, as depicted in The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century).
Secular urban-Turkish-style Muslims are in the minority though. I agree people shouldn’t make sweeping statements, but the majority are indeed patriarchal conservatives.
And while there are definitely understandable concerns about interviewing a basically imprisoned population, 1. the fact that only a handful of prisoners opted to speak while the rest declined shows that they did have at least some degree of choice, and 2. the viewer can balance what the documentary presents against the circumstances in which it was created.
Considering the actual content of the documentary it’s hard to see how else this story could be told.
Finally, I thought we were past the whole “only people of a community can make stories about that community” thing. It would be one thing if someone with a similar background had stayed in the facility for a year and also made an equivalent story. Arguably they should get higher weight. But no one else did. This story is not displacing anyone else. In its absence all we have is a vacuum.
You need to realize that mobs are a real thing and in this case, they ruined a woman’s career for completely constructed, ridiculous reasons. This kind of behavior is disgusting. I don’t know why you describe this article as “whining”. This person had nearly a decade of her life’s work torn apart by people who only see the world through the lens of power and oppression, and whose only goals are to endlessly virtue signal to one another while creating nothing of value themselves.
With a lot less whining about 'the woke mob'.