The blog Harry’s Place published a post last month on Guardian’s film critic Mike McCahill’s two paragraph, seven sentence review of The Confession, a new documentary about the life of Moazzam Begg.
Here it is:
The Confession review – profound Guantánamo Bay documentary ****/5
Moazzam Begg is interviewed about his incarceration in Cuba in a documentary of great clarity and gravitas
The simple framing indicates documentary-maker Ashish Ghadiali knows he has hit upon an inherently resonant modern story. For 96 minutes, here is Moazzam Begg, sitting in a mock-up interview room, describing how a lad from Birmingham wound up in Guantánamo Bay. Personal and political quickly interweave. Begg’s close-miked words, often battling against the sounds of the war machine, allow us to hear the hurt he felt in being persecuted by intelligence agencies, and in seeing his adopted home of Afghanistan obliterated after 9/11.
Ghadiali is careful to clarify key points – he delicately negotiates Begg’s attempts to reclaim the term “jihad” – while suggesting that relentless interrogation, and the suspicion powering it, might in itself be a call to arms. For his part, Begg appears to have gained an exceptional grasp of nuance from his time in captivity. In this post-Chilcot moment, this principled, consistent testimony – coming as it does from deep within Islam – assumes a rare gravity and profound moral force.
Harry’s Place noted that McCahill expressed anger over the fact that people on twitter who haven’t seen the film objected to the reverential manner in which Begg was treated.
His anger was expressed in the following tweet.
We tweeted the Guardian journalist thusly, noting his ever so casual smear of most Jews:
.@guardian journo @mike_mccahill casually uses "Zionist" (i.e., the overwhelming majority of Jews) as term of abuse https://t.co/JSN8HcahcL
— Adam Levick (@adamlevick) August 15, 2016
Well, sometime later, McCahill deleted the tweet. Here’s what you see when you try to access the url of the tweet.
For a more recent example of a journalist deleting a tweet deemed antisemitic, see this and this.
