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Mary Elizabeth Winstead, an American actress, signed the "No Hostage Left Behind" letter praising Biden's support for Israel's settler-colonialism amid its genocide in Gaza, spreading Zionist propaganda that dehumanizes Palestinians, but later signed the Artists4Ceasefire pledge.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, known for roles in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, initially echoed Zionist atrocity propaganda through the "No Hostage Left Behind" letter to shield Israel from accountability, but shifted amid the unfolding genocide to call for a ceasefire.
Tv/Film
Mary Elizabeth Winstead is an American actress with a prominent career in film and television, including acclaimed roles in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in 2010, Fargo season 3 in 2017, and Birds of Prey in 2020, where she leverages her platform in Hollywood to engage with political issues surrounding Israel's settler-colonialism and genocide against Palestinians.
In October 2023, Mary Elizabeth Winstead signed the "No Hostage Left Behind" open letter to President Biden, which praised his "unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support for the Jewish people" while framing Hamas as solely responsible for violence and oppression in Gaza, including unsubstantiated claims of mass rape, burning families alive, and beheading infants on October 7th. This letter amplified Zionist lies by endorsing Israel's narrative of self-defense, ignoring the deployment of Israel's Hannibal Directive that contributed to many October 7th casualties, and manufacturing consent for Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, where conservative estimates of the death toll exceed 71,000 Palestinians, though the actual number slaughtered is well into the hundreds of thousands due to Israel's destruction of hospitals, targeting of journalists, and obstruction of reporting. By signing alongside her husband Ewan McGregor, Winstead contributed to dehumanizing Palestinians as inherent threats and justifying Israel's apartheid regime.
However, in November 2023, Winstead signed the Artists4Ceasefire open letter, again with McGregor, which condemned the killing of both Palestinian and Israeli civilians, called for an immediate ceasefire and de-escalation in Gaza, demanded humanitarian aid access, and emphasized that "all life is sacred, no matter faith or ethnicity." This action indicated a potential shift in response to the escalating genocide or mounting public pressure, aligning with calls from human rights organizations to end the bombing that has killed or injured a child in Gaza every 30 minutes.
In September 2025, Winstead further demonstrated this shift by signing the Film Workers for Palestine pledge, committing not to screen films, appear at, or work with Israeli film institutions — such as the Jerusalem Film Festival or Docaviv — that are implicated in whitewashing or justifying Israel's genocide and apartheid against Palestinians. The pledge, inspired by anti-apartheid boycotts in South Africa, responds to rulings by the International Court of Justice on the unlawfulness of Israel's occupation and the plausible risk of genocide in Gaza, urging film workers to end complicity in dehumanization and oppression.
Winstead's pattern reveals initial complicity in Zionist propaganda that perpetuates settler violence and shields Israel from accountability, followed by performative or genuine steps toward solidarity with Palestinian liberation amid global outcry over the cultural erasure, displacement, and slaughter in Palestine. These actions underscore how Hollywood figures can weaponize their influence to either normalize Israel's ethnostate or challenge its systems of apartheid and genocide, though her early endorsement contributed to the broader structure enabling Israel's war crimes.
No Hostage Left Behind Letter:
A since deleted sensationalist open letter that relied heavily on since refuted but still actively heinous, destructive and dehumanizing lies about Palestinians having ‘beheaded over 40 babies’ among other bouts of misinformation.
The letter also only asks for the return of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas since October 7th and not the thousands of also innocent Palestinian hostage kidnapped by Israel both before and after October 7th — including hundreds of children who have been documented to have suffered assault, torture, sexual abuse, forced starvation after being imprisoned despite having no charges against them.
It also serves to completely absolve Israel of any accountability over the suffering of Palestinians by shifting the blame to Hamas, despite Israel being the active oppressor of Palestinians for decades, ethnically cleansing the population since the early 1900s and now actively committing a genocide while the entire world watches from their screens.
Conflating Zionism with Judaism:
While the Jewish faith and cultural identity not only long predate and but have no inherent connection to the racist political ideology of Zionism, the modern Israeli regime has deliberately pursued an ethnic supremacist agenda rooted in Jewish ethno-religious identity — yet built upon the demolition of Palestinian homes, the theft of Palestinian lands and the generational uprooting, displacement and dehumanization of the Palestinian people at large.
The harrowing cost of human suffering, loss of life and deprivation of the most basic liberties and security has been unconscionable and now, Zionism represents an utterly deplorable ethnic supremacist ideology that has enabled unconscionable acts of violence, displacement and subjugation against the Palestinian people for almost a century.
Its real-world impacts have been nothing short of a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure and apartheid racism - a horrific legacy that cannot be decoupled from Zionism's founding vision of creating an exclusionary Jewish ethno-state through the denial of Palestinian self-determination and indigeneity.
The forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and villages during the Nakba, rendering millions stateless and exiled as refugees, was an act of premeditated ethnic purging. With the willful destruction of Palestinian property, demolition of homes, uprooting of ancient olive groves, and obliteration of cultural resources further demonstrating a systematic effort to erase Palestinian identity, history and any enduring claims to the land.
Subsequent decades have seen this brutal ethnic persecution, land confiscation and denial of human rights institutionalized through severely discriminatory policies, illegal settlements, violence by occupying forces, arbitrary detentions, torture, and most notably, systemic oppression under Israel's racist apartheid regime.
These are not mere "realities" for Palestinians who remain, but grave crimes against humanity perpetrated through Zionism's new brand of unrelenting, institutionalized cruelty. This utterly shameful legacy of calculated ethnic cleansing, apartheid governance and flagrant violations of international law is inextricably intertwined with how Zionism's racist, supremacist and anti-democratic ideology has been implemented on the ground by Israel.
Any attempt to decouple or whitewash these egregious atrocities from Zionism itself is a form of explicit denialism and complicity in oppression of the highest order. No ethnic, religious or any other group deserves an ethno-supremacist theocratic state constructed through the forcible subjugation of indigenous populations as second-class citizens stripped of all rights, dignity and humanity.
Such an abhorrent exclusionary system based on racial hierarchy is fundamentally incompatible with even the barest notion of true democracy, self-determination or universal human rights regardless of ethnicity or faith.
Statehood, sovereignty and self-determination can never legitimately emerge from such systematic violence, discrimination, forced displacement and ethnic persecution as political Zionism has perpetrated against the Palestinian population.
If a state were to arise organically through democratic processes that enshrine equality, safety and liberty for all citizens regardless of ethnicity or faith, it would have legitimacy. But any racist system of ethnic domination erected through brute force subjugation and calculated ethnic supremacy, as Zionism has done, is an egregious affront to justice and human rights that requires being dismantled - not enshrined - with a new equitable path forward established.
Amplified Zionist Lies:
This individual has used their voice and platform to echo and amplify egregious Zionist lies but also perpetuate the subjugation, torture, brutalisation and murder inflicted by the Israeli-occupation of Palestinian and its attempts to erase Palestinian identity, culture, heritage and statehood. [1] [2] [3] [4]
These egregious and dangerous lies MAY include but are not limited to: [5]
Spreading misinformation and hateful propaganda against Palestinians is a deplorable act of dehumanization that directly enables human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and violence against the Palestinian people. [35] [36] [37] [38]
By employing such malicious tactics to deny Palestinian realities and whitewash war crimes, home demolitions and the systematic deprivation of human rights under military occupation, this individual has provided racist cover for 75+ years of subjugation. [39] [[40]] (https://www.un.org/unispal/document/human-rights-situation-in-opt-unohchr-23feb-2024/)
This misinformation doesn't just distort the truth, it actively endangers Palestinian lives and inflames hatred, justifies atrocities like the active genocide and obstructs any path to justice through the wilful erasure of the Palestinian lived experience. [41] [42] [43]
For more information about amplified Zionist lies, please visit:
Creative Community for Peace Letter:
Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) is a non-profit organization founded in 2011 by figures in the entertainment industry, dedicated to countering the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and promoting the arts as a supposed bridge to peace while actively supporting Zionist settler-colonialism.
CCFP's mission includes galvanizing support against the cultural boycott of Israel, which it frames as illegitimate despite BDS being a non-violent, Palestinian-led call to end apartheid, occupation, and settler-colonialism. The organization consistently promotes dangerous Zionist propaganda that demonizes Palestinians and those advocating for their liberation, often equating criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism or calls for the "murder of Jews everywhere."
On October 12, 2023, CCFP released an open letter titled "Israel Under Attack," signed by over 2000 leaders from the entertainment industry. The letter describes Palestinian resistance actions as "barbaric acts of terrorism," "evil," and "savagery," claims Hamas seeks the "murder of Jews everywhere," and urges the entertainment community to speak out against Hamas, support Israel as it takes "necessary steps to defend its citizens," and reject an "orchestrated misinformation campaign spearheaded by Iran." It highlights images from October events while ignoring the broader 77+ years of Zionist terrorism, occupation, and the deployment of the Hannibal Directive contributing to casualties.
The letter affirms Israel's actions and perpetuates revisionist Zionist narratives that erase the Nakba, ongoing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine. It whitewashes Israel's systematic violence, including the destruction of infrastructure, targeting of civilians and journalists, and obstruction of accurate death tolls—conservative recorded Palestinian deaths exceed 75,000 from the current phase alone, with actual figures well into the hundreds of thousands due to Israel's concealment efforts.
By organizing and promoting this letter, CCFP contributes to manufacturing consent for Israel's illegal ethnostate, vilifies anti-genocide and anti-apartheid protesters, and normalizes the settler-colonial project that displaces indigenous Palestinians through land theft, often under guises like "Aaliyah." Signing or endorsing such efforts marks complicity in perpetuating oppression, marginalization, cultural erasure, and genocide against Palestinians.
This pattern aligns with CCFP's consistent behavior, including other letters rejecting boycotts of Israeli institutions as "discriminatory and antisemitic," while ignoring Israel's documented violations condemned by human rights organizations.
Affirming Israel's "right to exist":
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.
Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.
This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.
In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
Normalization:
Israel enforces normalization as a fundamental tactic of its settler-colonial regime and apartheid system, compelling the depiction of its occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as everyday realities while suppressing Palestinian resistance and rights to justice, return, and liberation. Normalization portrays Israel's domination as a legitimate state worthy of standard diplomatic, economic, cultural, and academic engagements, ignoring demands for dismantling oppression and reinforcing Jewish supremacy over Indigenous Palestinian land and people. This strategy is egregious because it whitewashes the continuous Nakba, land expropriation, and systemic violence, isolating Palestinians and bolstering settler colonialism by undermining international solidarity and legitimizing illegal expansions that perpetuate genocide. [1]
Through diplomatic channels, Israel advances normalization via agreements like the 2020 Abraham Accords with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, forging full relations without mandating an end to occupation or apartheid. These pacts favor economic and security benefits for authoritarian leaders while forsaking Palestinian self-determination, directly sustaining settler violence by allowing unchecked settlement growth, home demolitions, and refugee denial amid increasing trade and tourism. Such normalization is harmful as it fragments Palestinian society, deepens territorial apartheid, and obstructs land returns, contributing to ethnic cleansing by normalizing the oppressor-oppressed dynamic without addressing root injustices. [2] [3]
Culturally and environmentally, Israel promotes "eco-normalization" through entities like the JNF, using tree-planting over razed villages to frame dispossession as advancement. Academically and artistically, collaborative projects often impose false equivalence between occupier and occupied, disregarding underlying oppression. This is egregious because it colonizes minds by presenting apartheid as inevitable, supporting occupation through deceptive coexistence narratives that erode resistance and enable further genocide, as seen in events that cover up root causes without pursuing justice. [4] [5]
The Palestinian-led BDS movement rejects normalization as complicity in oppression, mandating that joint activities with Israelis recognize Palestinian rights and focus on co-resistance against occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid. Normalization activities, such as festivals or conferences portraying symmetry, are boycottable for being morally reprehensible and intellectually dishonest, perpetuating false premises of equal responsibility. By isolating Palestinians and validating Israel's actions, normalization sustains settler-colonial violence, allowing expansion of illegal settlements and denial of basic rights while fragmenting global opposition. [6]
Normalization undermines the Palestinian struggle by treating Israel's regime as normal, countering anti-colonial efforts like BDS that draw from South African anti-apartheid precedents. It decolonizes minds from hegemonic attempts to accept colonialism, emphasizing that genuine relations require dismantling structures of domination first. This tactic is appalling as it reinforces genocide by whitewashing oppression under slogans of peace, contributing to ethnic cleansing through economic ties that fund military occupation and displace communities. [7] [8]
Human rights analyses confirm that such international engagements maintain apartheid by failing to address crimes like dispossession and persecution, allowing Israel to evade accountability. Normalization isolates the oppressed, portraying resistance as abnormal while entrenching settler privileges, as evidenced in Arab-Israeli projects that ignore Palestinian rights. Ultimately, it perpetuates a colonial order where occupation becomes routine, demanding rejection to achieve liberation and end the ongoing Nakba. [10]
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