My Favorite Oscar Acceptance Speech
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Jimmy Carter’s Amazing Speech
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The Vanessa Redgrave Oscar winning speech in the 1970s is my favorite Oscar acceptance speech because it coined the term 'Zionist hoodlums'. Of course, she pronounced it with a upper-class British accent.
Redgrave is a long-standing liberal activist who causes range from support to the Palestinians, to Bosnian victim of Serb ethnic cleansing and massacres to freedom for Soviet Jews.
In the 1970s, due to her anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian and pro-POL activism, she came under attack by the Jewish Defense League - a terrorist organization - when she was nominated for an Oscar. There was a campaign to convince Academy members to vote against her solely due to her anti-Israel political views. Recently, it should be noted, there was a similar campaign against a Palestinian film, Paradise Now, organized by the fanatically propadanistic Israel Project group:
That campaign may or may not have worked. Paradise Now won the often predicting Golden Globe in that category, but then lost Oscar. But this is a common occurrence and this year's Globe winner did not win the Oscar either and neither did last year's Globe win - an Israeli film, in fact - win the Oscar. So there is no way of knowing and I doubt Academy members were influenced by a crude, far-right Zionist campaign which was motivated not in opposition to the alleged narrative of the film but solely out of a malice to deny the 'Palestinian Territories' (as the film was listed under) the claim to an Oscar. Zionists simply seek to undermine and deny Palestinians in everything and anything. That is why there are, indeed, Zionist hoodlums.
And know back to the phrase. The campaign against Redgrave did not work and she won and called out those 'hoodlums':
To this day, she continues to champion the Palestinians:
And believes that "the struggle against anti-Semitism and for the self-determination of the Palestinians form a single whole." I agree. It is a united fight against the ideology of hate that seeks to deny people: anti-Semitism and Zionism both seek to deny equal humanity.
