Cheering for the Brutal, while Silent for the Dead and Brutalized,
By Melanie Nathan, Dec 05, 2025
More than 200 “cultural icons” have now put their names to a letter demanding the release of Marwan Barghouti , a man serving five life sentences plus 40 years in Israel, for orchestrating attacks during the Second Intifada in which five civilians were murdered.
Among the signatories are people who have been the soundtrack, the bookshelf, the cinema of my many decades of life:
- Paul Simon, Sting, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox – the musicians who brought me the sound of tenderness and protest
- Sir Ian McKellen, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Stephen Fry, the actors whose performances shaped my ideas of courage, irony, queerness, power.
- Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Annie Ernaux, the writers whose words walked me through patriarchy, dystopia and moral crisis.
- Richard Branson, Ai Weiwei, Gary Lineker, the figures of innovation, dissent, and conscience.
And now they are united, not around the raped women of Nova, not around the babies and grandparents dragged into Gaza, not around the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, but around a convicted terrorist they choose to rename “the Palestinian Mandela.”
Who is Marwan Barghouti?
In 2004, an Israeli court convicted Barghouti on five counts of murder and one of attempted murder, plus membership and activity in a terrorist organization.
The murders he was found responsible for include:
- The killing of Greek Orthodox monk Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis in a roadside shooting.
- A shooting attack near Giv’at Ze’ev in which a civilian was gunned down.
- The Seafood Market attack in Tel Aviv, where gunmen opened fire and murdered three civilians eating in a restaurant.
Barghouti was a co-founder and leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the terrorist group aligned with Fatah which carried out dozens of terror attacks against civilians. Publicly, Barghouti had called for attacks on Israeli soldiers and Israelis living in both Gaza and the West Bank, but not Israeli civilians elsewhere. He refused to present any defence against the charges against him, maintaining that the trial and court were illegitimate.
He was not some abstract symbol. He led and authorized violent attacks in which ordinary good people, people who loved, worked, had children, were slaughtered mercilessly and left bleeding on the street. The court sentenced him to five consecutive life terms plus 40 years, a punishment designed to reflect the gravity of those killings.
However one feels about the fairness of his trial, nobody signing that letter can pretend they don’t know what he was convicted of. It’s written in every profile, every news story that now romanticizes him.
And what happened on 7 October?
On 7 October 2023, Hamas and allied terrorists stormed into southern Israel and carried out a massacre that governments and human-rights bodies alike describe as a terrorist attack of unprecedented brutality: around 1,200 people murdered, and about 250–251 hostages, including babies, women, and the elderly, dragged into Gaza, some held for two years, others summarily executed without trial.
UN and independent investigators have since found reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang-rape and other forms of conflict-related sexual violence were used against Israeli women (and some men) on October 7 and against hostages thereafter, including at the Nova music festival, where bodies were found showing clear signs of sexual abuse and mutilation. Not to mention the testimony of those who we believe.
The silence that roars
Public reporting notes that Paul Simon has not spoken out about the war in Gaza at all, even as he now publicly joins the call to free Barghouti.
For the others, I am painfully careful with my words: I cannot forensically prove they never said anything, somewhere, somehow. What I can say is this:
- These same figures are highly visible when they sign open letters condemning Israel, calling for boycotts, or demanding ceasefires.
- I have not seen – and mainstream coverage does not highlight – equally loud, specific, unequivocal condemnations from them of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, the mass rapes, or the kidnapping and torture of hostages. They never made enough of a statement, or noise or campaign for us to hear their words, even as a whisper.
The asymmetry is blinding: when Jews are slaughtered, raped, burned in safe rooms, dragged from kibbutzim and dance floors, these artists fall back into a soft, foggy silence or vague “cycle of violence” language – if they say anything at all. When a man – ONE MAN- is convicted of organizing attacks that murdered civilians is loudly recast as a hero, suddenly their pens are sharp, their signatures decisive, their moral conviction crystal clear.
The personal heartbreak – This is not abstract for me.
I learned issues, life and my immigrant feelings through Paul Simon’s lyrics, the ache of “American Tune,” the tender defiance of “Still Crazy After All These Years.” His music gave me a way to inhabit vulnerability without shame.
Sting was the soundtrack to my coming-of-age politics; “They Dance Alone” taught me about the disappeared in Chile and the power of bearing witness.
Margaret Atwood helped me understand patriarchy and authoritarianism long before the word “Handmaid” became a lazy Halloween costume.
Ian McKellen as Gandalf told me that “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us,” a line that carried me through countless nights of activism and despair.
Mark Ruffalo made righteous rage look gentle in the Avengers films – (ok – why even mention him as notably I can write an entire essay on just how much he has offended me before Oct 07); Benedict Cumberbatch gave us complex, brittle heroism; Tilda Swinton blurred gender and alienness in ways that made queer and Jewish otherness feel almost holy.
These weren’t just entertainers. They were, for me, moral weather-vanes, cultural elders who seemed to stand on the side of the vulnerable. My feminism, my queerness, my activism , they all carry fingerprints of their work.
And now those same hands sign a letter saying, effectively: Free the man convicted of murdering Israelis, the man Hamas wants out of prison while they still hold our people underground ….
Layered on top of everything since October 7
Since October 7, Jews in every “progressive” space have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that our dead are inconvenient, that our grief is conditional, that the screams of raped Israeli women at Nova are a distraction from the “real” analysis.
- We’ve watched friends go silent about the massacre but poetic about “decolonization.”
- We’ve been dropped from panels, shouted down at rallies, or told that our terror is “weaponized.”
- We’ve seen “intersectional” movements decide that the one identity that doesn’t fit the story board is ours, the Jew!
And now, as if to press a thumb deeper into that bruise, with smirk, the very artists who tutored our consciences treat a convicted organizer of civilian murders as a martyr, while the names of Israeli civilians he was convicted of killing, and the names of the October 7 dead and raped and kidnapped, slide off the cultural memory like they were never there.
It feels like a moral mirror has shattered: the people whose art helped build my ethical vocabulary have chosen to speak not for the victims of terror, but for a man judged responsible for it, and to do so at a time when Jewish pain is already being minimized, denied, or justified across the globe.
What this betrayal actually is
I know the script they will recite: that Barghouti’s trial was flawed; that he is a symbol; that peace needs “difficult compromises.
I know all about flawed systems: At African Human Rights Coalition I bear witness to them- daily. None of that erases the fact that five civilians are dead in attacks he was convicted of directing, and those lives are not props in someone else’s redemption myth.
To mobilize global celebrity power for his release, while failing to match that energy for the Jewish women whose bodies show evidence of rape and mutilation, the murdered at Nova, the hostages, including infants, children, and frail grandparents, dragged into tunnels and cages, is not “complexity.” It is a mind blowing devastating moral collapse, that I am not sure we can recover from.
My Jewish soul feels like standing in a burning house and seeing the fire brigade drive past with sirens blaring, banners flying, to go and lobby for the man who lit a similar fire, somewhere else, long ago.
By publicly urging the release of a man convicted of orchestrating lethal terror attacks, these celebrities are not merely wading into a political debate, they are, willingly or not, lending moral cover to the escalating wave of violence Jews are now facing in the United States and around the world. Their endorsement reverberates as a permission slip, as though the brutality of a past Intifada may be read as a blueprint rather than a warning. And in the very moment we are still grieving two young Israeli Embassy employees murdered in Washington, D.C., their signatures feel like an endorsement of this new American chapter of terror: the Molotov attack in Colorado, the arson-murder attempt on the Shapiro family, the assaults and threats multiplying in our streets and on our campuses. When cultural icons elevate a convicted terrorist as a freedom symbol, they signal intentionally or not that this terror has legitimacy, that Jewish lives are once again disposable in the grand theatre of someone else’s “cause.” The call to Globalize the Intifada is their Shofar!
No individual, whether celebrated, obscure, or elected or appointed to government, stands above the law. No murder is sanctified by ideology, no killing becomes righteous because some one person declares themselves entitled to choose who may live and who must die. The moment we allow any man to assume that authority, we unravel the very fabric of justice that protects every one of us. And those who endorse such acts, who lend their voices to absolve or romanticize violence when it suits their politics, forfeit all moral standing when they protest other forms of brutality, including today’s atrocities unfolding at sea as vulnerable fishermen are slaughtered under orders granted by the Hegseths of this moment. You cannot selectively dismantle what is right and then claim to champion human dignity. You cannot excuse terror in one breath and condemn it in another. To do so is to invert the moral universe itself, to lift up what is corrupt and tear down what is humane.
I can no longer recognize the beauty of the art they made. Now, every chorus, every line of dialogue, every carefully constructed metaphor comes with a footnote I cannot unread: When Jews were massacred and raped and held hostage, they did not raise their voices like this. But they did for him.
Melanie Nathan,
commissionermnathan@gmail.com
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