New Delhi : “I didn’t want to insult anyone, and my aim was never to insult people or their relatives who have suffered,” remarked the controversial Leftist Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, whose comments on ‘The Kashmir Files’ made headlines.
“I totally, totally, totally apologize if that’s the way they interpreted,” he said in a TV interview.
The controversy kicked off by his comments is far from over.
For his part, the maker of the film ‘The Kashmir Files’ – which has been a blockbuster – tweeted on Thursday, Dec 1, and said – “People do and say things to hurt you because somewhere they are unhappy that you have got what they desired. That’s why they want to destroy you”.
He further wrote: “Letting such people hurt you is not just cowardice but self-destruction”.
Several tweets and comments are coming up on social media.
“Kashmir Files is labelled vulgar propaganda because it truthfully depicts Hindu genocide. Had it shown instead half a million Kashmiri Muslims being raped, murdered, and ethnically cleansed by Hindus, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece,” writes Anand Ranganathan, an author.
The film starring Anupam Kher, Mithun Chakraborty, Pallavi Joshi, and Darshan Kumaar, released in March, was a spectacular box office success and has provoked reactions from the ‘secular’ establishment.
Lapid has a track record of making news and has more often flayed his fellow citizens — a typical communist hypocrisy.
“Something in the deepest essence of the Israeli existence is false – is rotten. It’s not just Benjamin Netanyahu – it’s not special to Israel. But, at the same time, I think this Israeli sickness or nature is characterized by young Israeli men, muscular, smiling, who don’t raise any questions and don’t have any doubts,” he had said in an interview published in Toronto-based NOW magazine.
He also said – “They are extremely proud of being Israeli. They have a total dichotomist vision of existence: Us versus all the others”.
Lapid was also among a group of 250 Israeli filmmakers that signed an open letter to protest against the launch of the Shomron (Samaria/West Bank) Film Fund.
The Fund seeks to “distribute grants to Jewish settlers who reside in the West Bank (“Judea and Samaria”) and to productions by Israeli citizens filmed in the West Bank.”
