“She’s used to taking crap, but she did not expect the fallout from this ad at all.”
Oscar-winning actress and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow might be just another narcissistic celebrity and nepo baby as the daughter of the late movie and television director Bruce Paltrow.
People may dislike her personality, her family, her movies, the overpriced and sometimes strange items that her wellness company sells, her business acumen as displayed on Shark Tank, or whatever.
Gwyneth Paltrow, 53, is, however, a private citizen, and does not represent any government.
But that’s not stopping social media users from trying to cancel her merely for filming a real estate commercial.
The negative online reaction, which apparently was helped along by a condemnatory Instagram video, occurred after Paltrow promoted luxury condos in Herzliya, Israel, and appears to be yet another example of the power of propaganda.
It also might constitute what evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad characterizes as suicidal empathy or moral preening.
Celebrities endorse products or services all the time as way to leverage their deserved, or undeserved, status.
In this instance, “the ensuing backlash has been swift and savage,” the London-based, left-leaning news outlet The Independent claimed.
As alluded to above, Livia Firth, the ex-wife of A-List actor Colin Firth, was among those leveling criticism about Paltrow’s “completely unacceptable” and “disgusting as it can be” yet innocuous commercial.
On Instagram, Firth boasted how she disinvited Paltrow from visiting her farm in Italy, and called for the cancellation of Paltrow and others who supposedly support or is complicit in genocide.
“How detached are you from reality? You’re either so detached that you need to be cancelled, because you live in another world, or you’re actually a really, really nasty person. Or you are stupid. Which three are you, Gwyneth Paltrow?,” she asked, in part.
Armed conflict is ugly and horrible to say the least, and those committing war crimes should be held to account.
Regardless of your opinion of Israel’s current government under Prime Minister Netanyahu, or the country itself, however, Firth and other similarly situated or gullible persons who lack even a rudimentary knowledge of Middle East history are hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of being detached or dumb.
Firth, who seems to simultaneously suffer from Israel derangement syndrome and Trump derangement syndrome, and who enjoys the privilege of being formerly married to a major show business star, also accused Paltrow of having privilege.
Australian commentator Erin Molan questioned Firth’s moral compass by way of wondering if Firth “backgrounds every guest” or if she ever purchased a product for her farm from, e.g., China, despite that country’s rampant human rights abuses under CCP rule.
This controversy over a random commercial is just a small indicia of the perverse reaction after the Hamas terrorist organization — from its base of operations in Gaza — waged a barbaric attack on Israeli civilians and others on October 7, 2023.
“The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on October 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced. Instead, it spawned a gathering storm of antisemitism,” historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote in late May.
The ex-Mrs. Firth, along with other virtue-signaling activists, would be terrified to live under Hamas, Hezbollah, or IRGC rule.
The cohort that throws around the “g word,” or other false narratives such as colonization, apartheid, starvation, and so on, are actually apologists for those committing such diabolical offenses.
Last October, the American Enterprise Institute asserted the following:
“A genocidal state does not drop leaflets warning civilians to evacuate. It does not open humanitarian corridors or pause operations for aid and prisoner exchanges. It does not call on its enemy to surrender in order to save lives. These are not the acts of a nation seeking to destroy a people, but of one struggling—however imperfectly—to uphold its humanity its humanity while defending its existence….And yet the word persists. On campuses, in marches, and across digital platforms, genocide has become a ritual incantation: a way to brand Jews as monsters and to invert the meaning of justice itself….”
U.S. Army veteran and urban warfare scholar John Spencer expanded on this concept earlier this month:
“The [Israel Defense Forces] takes extraordinary measures to mitigate civilian harm in Lebanon. In fact, as in Gaza, it employs more civilian harm mitigation measures than any military in past or current operations. The IDF issues evacuation warnings through multiple channels including text messages, phone calls, voicemails, flyers, radio, television, and social media. It operates dedicated civilian harm mitigation cells, tracks civilian presence through drones, cell phone data, and other ISR capabilities, and uses rigorous targeting processes that include legal reviews and proportionality assessments for any planned strikes. Legal reviews at lowest tactical level, and with the ability (which happens often as well as command decisions not to strike based on all context) to override commander decisions, unlike any other military.”
Pundit Sam Harris, who is no fan by an means of either President Trump and Netanyahu, wrote on Substack in early June that “If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7.”
In a footnote, Harris asserted that “any focus on Israel’s conduct in this war tends to be misleading, because activists and critics routinely lie about it, inflating the ordinary horrors of urban combat into a false charge of ‘genocide.’ This specific claim is nothing short of a blood libel, and it is often intended as such.”
Insofar as the Paltrow controversy is concerned, the Page Six gossip section of the New York Post provided a history lesson, too: “Although some critics went so far as to say Paltrow is promoting stolen territory, Herzliya was officially bought from Arabs in the 1920s and originally set up as a farming community in November 1924.”
About 30 percent of the land in Israel was similarly purchased back in the day.
Gwyneth Paltrow has described herself “petty centrist” as far as politics goes, which is already tantamount to heresy in liberal Hollywood even before any theoretical cancellation might occur.
A Paltrow pal told Page Six that the actress who won an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love never anticipated this kind of outcry from appearing in the commercial.
“She’s used to taking crap, but she did not expect the fallout from this ad at all.”
Although Firth’s Instagram rant has 100K generated 100K likes, there were some dissenters:
“Jews have lived in Israel for 3000 years. Her ad was about an area that has not been contested or had any conflict…”
“I would support your position if I believed it was principled, consistent, and free from bias and selective outrage…”
You’d also think progressive activists would celebrate Israel as one of the few countries where the indigenous people are still in charge.
Sectarian and territorial conflicts, and human rights violations, moreover, are raging all over the world.
Yet, activists remained silent when, e.g., Hamas used its own citizens as human shields and hijacked relief supplies, or when the IRGC killed thousands of its own citizens, or as Christians are being murdered in Nigeria.
In his Substack article, neuroscientist and philosopher Harris noted that “The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real.”
Again, this irrational hostility to and obsession with a multi-cultural democracy the size of New Jersey is the result, in part, of news organizations like the New York Times and the BBC, plus corrupt international organizations, pandering left-wing politicians and college professors — and unfortunately certain influencers on the right — regurgitating pro-Hamas propaganda as factual.
This smear campaign has incited violence against peaceful, law-abiding people in U.S, Canada, Europe, and Australia.
What other minority group is targeted for the actions or perceived actions of a nation thousands of miles away?
The anarchists who engage in harassment or violence on the street, outside houses of worship, or on college campuses are generally the same people who protested against DOGE, interfere with ICE, and burn American flags.
Parenthetically, U.S. Democrats and Democratic socialists, or whatever they call themselves, don’t even like their own country, so their hostility to another western-style democracy, or western civilization in general, is not particularly surprising.
No one is more critical of the Israeli government, however, than citizens of Israel. Deep divisions exist between the left and right and even the right and the right, which led to five national elections in about a four-year time frame, culminating in 2022.
Time will tell if a coalition of right and left parties will win enough parliamentary seats to oust Netanyahu in elections scheduled for October.
On a podcast recently, historian Hanson opined that “It’s always Israel…which I think is the definition of an anti-Semite is when you accuse Israel of a particular alleged offense or crime, sin, and yet there’s far greater examples elsewhere, but you choose just to focus on the Jews.”
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