I have not seen Sydney Sweeney in any of her films, but I am aware that her boyfriend is the Jewish Scott ‘Scooter’ Braun, a very successful businessman and record executive. And he is not fearful of identifying with Israel.
He spoke in December 2023 at a rally in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square and also featured the mother of an Israeli hostage in a video posted to his Instagram calling for the music industry to spread awareness on the issue. I did see a picture of Sweeney together with Avinatan Or and his then partner, Noa Argamani, when the pair had visited America in mid-January this year.
Sweeney was interviewed by Rebecca Ford, which was uploaded on June 9 at the Vanity Fair website, and was asked if there was a narrative she had “wanted to correct or is it even worth doing that as an actor?”
She was aware that “I’m spoken for through journalists,” by which she meant that people really do not have any clue as to who she actually is or what she thinks.
Moreover, she is fully aware that anything she says can be rewritten or modified before publication.
Sweeney also noted that people like headlines as they are easier to consume and attract more attention. “People,” she continued, “often form opinions based on those excerpts rather than the complete conversation, leading to rumors.”
Reflecting on her situation, she agreed that correcting everyone would be exhausting, but as she is content with her life and her career is going very well, these narratives do not bother her much.
That attitude resonated with my thinking on Israel’s situation as reflected in the media – that of the newspapers and periodicals as well as the social media platforms of Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok and the rest.
Political commentator Cenk Uygur is an outstanding example of the blatant lying campaign on X. With 885,000 followers, he is extremely visible and generates second-tier views, especially if his appearances on Piers Morgan’s show are included.
A few examples of his: “Hezbollah is defending Lebanon from an invading army…They are clearly the aggressors”; “When Israel did their first ethnic cleansing in 1948, our media lied to us and said the Palestinians attacked the Israelis’; or “Israel stole almost all our top secrets, our nuclear secrets, our nuclear triggers and over 300 pounds of uranium.”
And here is an X post last week – from someone/thing called Ounka with 227,000 followers on – Gwyneth Paltrow promoting a Herzliya apartment complex: “Imagine advertising luxury villas in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. That’s the level of tone-deaf we’re witnessing.”
If you add to that the posts, videos, podcasts and TikTok clips of some two dozen anti-Zionists and antisemites, a powerful wall of ignorance is standing in the way not only of truth but simply any ability to argue with or counter their falsifications.
Political commentator Candace Owens, on her first broadcast returning from Russia, announced, “Zionism rots the brain,” echoing Tucker Carlson’s whine that Christian Zionists suffer a “brain virus.
It is not about the facts, nor the details, nor even the context. The claims are phrased so as to be non-debatable or even arguable. The overall narrative is negative, and it is portrayed as threatening. In other words, a classic antisemitic framework construct.
Sam Harris, in a recent Free Press piece asserting it is futile to even debate enemies of Israel, noted what need be the core elements of a hasbara – public opinion – attitude.
'Ethical difference between Israel and her enemies'
They are that there is an “ethical difference between Israel and her enemies [that] remains vast” and “global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.”
If I may rephrase that, it is not such much a matter of what battles to pick or even how to fight them. We must realize that championing Israel and justifying Zionism is in another place, totally. A rather disturbing transformation has occurred.
The idea of Palestine has colonized their minds. Matthew Schmitz, in an op-ed on the Democratic Party’s rising anti-Zionism in the Washington Post on May 29, wrote: “Anti-Zionism has bled into antisemitism.” Woke liberalism that graded up to progressivism has arrived at the stage of irrationalism.
In such an approach to geopolitics, this framework will tolerate the slaughter and rape of Yazidis and Sudanese and will ‘understand’ beheadings in France and Ireland no less than it will minimize the massacres of October 7 as well as ignore the everyday terror in Judea and Samaria.
Iran is to be championed. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's renewed Ottoman Empire revitalization campaign is ignored. Arrests and detentions of Gaza Flotilla activists in Libya are downplayed while believing their rape in Israel is accepted truth.
The pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist global collective has finally arrived at the place they want to be in confronting the Jewish national liberation movement. The campaign for a ‘liberated Palestine’, having reached a top-of-the-charts scale of media attention, is now at the pre-pogrom stage of its development.
Proactive virulent antisemitism is back and primed. A tipping-point has been reached.
There is less an ability amongst those uneasy with or opposed to Zionism and Israel to grasp the difference between those two terms. Indeed, there is much less a willingness to do so.
Proof? Humanities professors at the University of California, Berkeley are assigning fewer pages for reading as students increasingly struggle to keep up with the required knowledge needed.
The attitude of Sweeney, to realize that filtered truth now forms opinions, that wasting time on what cannot be changed is nigh useless, but that the focus should be on promoting what Israel does best and what it accomplishes for good, should be adopted.
Instead of fighting those that will not change their minds, identify those that can be persuaded and strengthen the support of those who incline our way.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.