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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 9/1/16

Israel Remains The Untouchable Election Issue

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James Wall
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Reprinted from Wallwritings


'Spotlight,' about the Boston Globe's investigation of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal
(Image by PHOTOGRAPH BY KERRY HAYES / OPEN ROAD FILMS VIA EVERETT)
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In recent weeks, I have studied Spotlight, a film that should explain why our current presidential election is about none of the critical issues facing our nation.

This Clinton-Trump campaign, is, most certainly, not about the critical foreign policy issue of Israel's expansive and repressive grip on Palestinian freedom.

Spotlight is the 2015 Academy Award winning real life examination of a team of journalists working to uncover, and identify, those at fault in a massive church cover-up.

The title comes from The Boston Globe's investigative team of reporters which spent eight months examining the role of the Boston archdiocese hierarchy in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests.

Early in the film, two men, Boston Cardinal Bernard F. Law (Len Cariou) and Martin Baron (Liev Schreiber), the editor of The Globe, are in a quiet conversation.

The Cardinal says to the editor, "The city flourishes when its great institutions work together," The editor politely dissents, arguing that the paper should stand alone.

Their conversation, New York Times critic A.O. Scott, wrote, "sets up the film's central conflict." He continues:

"The image of two prominent men talking quietly behind closed doors, haunts this somber, thrilling movie and crystallizes its major concern, which is the way power operates in the absence of accountability."

Directed by Tom McCarthy from a script he co-wrote, Spotlight is in the rich tradition of an earlier investigative newspaper story, All the President's Men, which exposed White House involvement in the Watergate Scandal.

Spotlight won the Academy Award for best picture. McCarthy won the Academy Award for best original script which he co-wrote with Josh Singer. McCarthy is currently one of our finest film-makers. See his The Visitor for his creative take on immigration.

Spotlight will remind you that our media, at its best, does not cower before the institutions that shape our nation.

What the mainstream media does at its worst, however, which it is demonstrating during the present campaign, is to "work together with its institutions" to satisfy the demands of those institutions.

Little on the political front, for example, approaches the evil conduct of Israel in its repression of Palestinians, a repression that could not continue without American financial and political institutional support.

A presidential campaign should explore how to confront such conduct. This one does not.

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James Wall served as a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois, from 1999 through 2017. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. Many sources have influenced (more...)
 

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