News

Nakba porn kingpin Michael Lucas bullies LGBT center against Anti-Apartheid Party

Wealthy gay porn producer Michael Lucas has successfully pressured New York City’s LGBT Center to renege on its agreement to host a “Party to End Apartheid” on Israeli Apartheid Week. Lucas threatened to boycott the center and pressure its donors to pull their money out. He called the event an “anti-Semitic” affair held by a “hate group.” It seems that money talks, because I doubt that a progressive institution like the LGBT Center would have otherwise responded to an open bigot like Lucas who has used ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages as sets for sex scenes.

Israeli gay porn actor Jonathan Agassi describes his sex scene inside an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village in Michael Lucas’s “Men of Israel”

Lucas, who leads gay tours to Israel to promote the country’s supposedly tolerant gay culture, has celebrated fellow porn producer Charles Merrill’s public burning of a Qu’ran, calling it an act of “artistic bravery.” Last year, he joined the Islamophobic bandwagon in calling the Cordoba Initiative’s plan to build an Islamic community center near Ground Zero part of a covert plot to install Shariah law in the United States — he described the proposed center as a “monument to Muslim terrorism.” A laundry list of racist statements by Lucas would be so long it is impossible to compile (for more, see here); it is enough to note that his political views are defined by crude resentment of Muslims, the fetishization of an Israel that does not exist, and little else.

What is more remarkable about Lucas is the way in which he has fused extreme Zionism with homoeroticism in his films. His most widely promoted film, “Men of Israel,” contains a sex scene inside a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1947-48. Lucas describes the scene here (NSFW), deceptively stating that the village was “deserted centuries ago:”

…we went to an abandoned village just north of Jerusalem. It was a beautiful ancient township that had been deserted centuries ago…however, that did not stop our guys from mounting each other and trying to repopulate it. Biology may not be the lesson of the day but these men shot their seeds all over the village.

But again to get to the point of pleasure we had no easy task to tackle. We had to break down carefully replace the metal barrier guarding us from entering the village and hike up the treacherous mountain that was lined with barbed wire and dense torn bushes.

Never to miss a beat, the Israeli media was there to document and run a broadcast profile on our filming. Channel 1 Israel, the oldest and longest running public television station in the country, interviewed the cast and embraced our excursion Inside Israel!

Lucas does not name the village where the scene was shot, but my guess is it was Lifta, which was attacked by Zionist militias in December 1947 (five months before any Arab armies entered Palestine), bombed, and ethnically cleansed. Today, the ruins of the village are well preserved — so well that the Jerusalem municipality plans to transform it into a Jews-only luxury development.

It is not hard to imagine what would happen to an Arab porn director if he went to a site of Jewish genocide like a destroyed shtetl from the Pale of Settlement or a concentration camp, and filmed actors as they “shot their seeds” on it. Yet Lucas profits from desecration porn, and maintains enough cachet to bully a major gay institution in New York City.

This post originally appeared on Max Blumenthal’s website.

47 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments