Confession: I am so here for this generation of unapologetically ethnic movie and TV stars.

Back in the day, film and TV stars had to change their name to some Anglo shit, dye their hair to look more WASPy, and cut up their face to hide their ethnic features. Not no more.

These are not our grandparents’ type of famous people. Today’s generation of film and TV stars are Ethnic ™ and proud of it! You’re gonna say their name, and nobody’s gonna shame them for participating in their culture or being proud of where they came from.

I fucking love it!

I lovelovelove Quvenzhane Wallis with her little puppy purse shutting down that reporter saying, “I’ll just call you Annie” with, “My name is not Annie. My name is Quvenzhane.”

I am so here for Lana Parrilla being proud proud proud of her Puerto-Rican heritage. Said it point-blank, “The Evil Queen is Latina.” She ain’t changing her name to something more Anglo like Lana Perry or some shit.

I love how John Boyega ain’t here for these bitches on Twitter clutching their white pearls because he danced at Carnival like the Black-assed Black man he is at a Black-assed cultural event.

I am so fucking here for Gal Gadot being so joyously Jewish and Israeli in public, not assimilating shit. Neo-Nazis getting bold as hell, and she posts a picture of her doing something really Jewish like lighting Shabbat candles with her family or telling a story about her Holocaust survivor grandparents.

We need more of this.

If you dislike Gal Godot for her past service in the IDF, that is entirely your prerogative. 

If you dislike Gal Godot for her support of IDF initiatives during Protective Edge, that is also your prerogative. 

I am not going to tell you how to feel about that; you are entitled to make your own judgments as informed by your personal values.

But if you use those judgments as a platform to spread falsehoods—especially ones that rooted in anti-Semitic tropes about how Jewish people are evil child murderers—then you and I are going to have a fucking problem. 

Gal Godot spent her time in the IDF as a fitness instructor, not as a sniper. She never saw combat, never shot any children, and certainly did not have kill notches on her rifle. She did not brag about killing Palestinians. She did not say “I want them all dead.”

She did make a post in 2014 that supported people in the IDF for “protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children” and tagged it with a few phrases including #loveidf and #coexistence. Now, again, maybe her support is antithetical to your beliefs, and I’m not here to lecture you on that. But no, she did not post anything about “praying for Palestinians to die quickly” or brag about killing people’s families. 

If her actual involvement with and statements about the IDF are things you find unsavoury, then fine; but if that’s the case, then you shouldn’t need to make up lies that evoke historical anti-Semitism to drive home your points. 

The things you oppose should hold up as they already are—otherwise, you’re effectively conceding that the things you don’t like aren’t bad enough to warrant your reaction on their own. 

For example, I don’t like the football player Luis Suarez because, despite being a talented goalscorer, he has a weird, creepy history of biting his opponents during matches. Now, this is a total valid reason not to like a professional athlete, so I have no cause to gild the lily. I don’t need to say “Well, actually I don’t like Luis Suarez because when he was at Liverpool he ate a Manchester United player’s liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti,” because his actual behaviour is aggressive, unprofessional, and straight up bizarre—meaning I don’t need to embellish the truth in order to be justified in how I feel about him. 

If you think serving in the IDF is bad, then just say “I don’t like Gal Godot because I think serving in the IDF is bad.” Don’t make shit up, don’t exaggerate the truth. Otherwise it looks an awful lot like you’re deliberately going out of your way to insinuate that Jewish people are evil child murderers, which says a lot more about you than it does about Gal Godot. 

On that note, please make sure that you are also holding Adam Driver accountable with equal gusto for serving in the Marine Corps and continually supporting the U.S. armed forces by boycotting the new Star Wars movies. Again, you are totally entitled to dislike the military, especially in relation to conflicts ongoing conflicts that have had horrible effects on the Middle East, but not when it’s only against the j00z and nobody else. 

I cannot believe y’all are about to make me defend that literal moose Adam Driver. Until that motherfucker posts a picture with the hashtag we are right and I love the military in an answer to the lives lost due to the American Military…IT IS IN NO WAY THE SAME FUCKING THING. 2,100 Palestinians were killed because of the IDF attack in 2014 and all she has to say for herself is we are right? And I love IDF. Putting all the blame on Hamas and using the “human shields” defense is complete and utter bullshit. Oh and before anyone comes at me with a “why are you taking this so personally? It’s just a movie?” I was stuck in an apt in Lebanon for 14 days while the IDF blasted us to hell. I spent my birthday not knowing if the next bomb would be close enough to kill. Enjoy your white woman power movie all you want. But until you can come at us with an actual defense for her, please keep your mouths fucking shut. Also if your criticism of zionism has any antisemitism in it you can fuck off. Boycotting this movie just like I will boycott the Suicide Squad sequel if that piece of shit Mel Gibson is directing it.

Um…I’m really not sure why you felt the need to react with fury to this post when it has nothing to do with defending her personally (I have literally never even seen any of her work before) and everything to do with telling people who want to boycott her that it’s absolutely fair so long as they do not embellish her background by making use of anti-Semitic canards. 

If people want to boycott her for specifically for her comments supporting the IDF, I seriously do not give a shit. That is an entirely fair criticism. My complaint was about all posts effectively accusing her of fucking blood libel, like this:

Because you can say you think she was morally complicit in Bibi’s war crimes without making outlandish claims rooted in old anti-Semitic tropes about how she’s a coldblooded child killer. 

You say “if your criticism of zionism has any antisemitism in it you can fuck off,” and that was…entirely my fucking point???

Also in regards to Adam Driver, he didn’t just serve in the marines; He is massively active in fundraising for American troops in the Middle East (AITAF is literally his own pro-US military foundation), and takes fun pictures like this: 

Are we really going to pretend that’s not the same thing (or potentially even worse, given that he seems to be spending a lot of time on actual military bases to personally cheer on and donate to the people who are in active combat)? 

Again, I do not have a problem with people boycotting Gal Gadot for her support of the IDF. I have a problem with people lying about her involvement in a way that makes it sounds like she’s poisoning wells and using the blood of gentile children in her matzoh, and I have a problem with people not being consistent in their criticism of military violence and occupations, because Israel is no better or worse than United States or Britain or Pakistan. But it seems like every goddamn time I bring this up people are just so incensed, because apparently nobody can conceive of confronting anti-Semitism in these Gal Gadot posts as anything other than defending outright defending her, rather than defending Jewish people from bigotry (and of course, this goes the other way; I can’t call out anti-Palestinian rhetoric in certain Jewish spaces without people leaping to the conclusion that I support Hamas). 

I honestly don’t know how much clearer I can be about the fact that my stance here is about encouraging people to criticise responsibly. If you can’t get past the fact that I’m not going 100% along with the posts about Gadot because too many of them are patently anti-Jewish, then I’m sorry, but you’re not as uncomfortable with anti-Semitism as you think.

@makiruz You may want to read this. All of it.

I dunno, that pic of g@l g@dot’s husband wearing the your wife/my wife shirt just bugs me. We get it, your rich thin able-bodied model/actress wife is awesome and the rest of us are generic blahs.

I didn’t plan on watching ww in any case but this confirms my suspicion that gg is just an asshole who just happened to star in a movie that meant a lot to people (and i’m happy for them). Not the violent murderer antisemites want to paint her as, but the boring kind of asshole who’s comfortable with the status quo and doesn’t ask a whole lot of questions. Good for her, i guess.

@rose-griffes Because she was in the picture, too, pointing and smiling at the shirt. I mean maybe it’s some cultural nuance I’m missing and maybe I’m already inclined to view Gadot unfavorably due to her seeming support of the IDF in a conflict that killed over a 1,000 civilians. (No, I don’t think she killed people or called for the deaths of Palestinians or anything asinine like that. And obviously Hamas is scum that needs to be removed. I just don’t think she questions her country very much, which doesn’t make her worse than many other patriotic people everywhere. It’s not about Gadot doing anything wrong, but about my personal discomfort and ambivalence with Israel.) Maybe I just felt particularly bad seeing that picture at a time when my dad was commenting on my body shape and my self-esteem was particularly low. I just try to avoid WW and Gadot content altogether using blacklists, etc., but I was shown this picture and it bothered me enough that I wanted to vent.