Liel Leibovitz
Tablet, Nov. 14, 2023
“They cheer for #MrFAFO not despite the fact that he’s so obviously faking it but precisely because of it. His performances promise liberation from the annoyances of a fact-based reality whose contradictions are inherently troubling.”
There he is, a victim of an Israeli air raid, writhing in pain in a Gaza hospital, his slender frame dotted by wires and electrodes. And there he goes again, a day or two later: He’s a radiologist now, helping a blood-smeared patient into a small MRI machine. Since Oct. 7 he has died on camera—not once but twice—and then, like Lazarus, come back to life. He sired a (fake, plastic) child, then lost it in a bombing; found work as a foreign correspondent; picked up a gun and joined the fighting; laughed joyfully when Jews were slaughtered; wept bitterly when the Jews struck back; discovered his calling as a singer; led us on guided tours of his shelled-out hometown.
Who is he? He is Saleh Aljafarawi, 25, Gazan, Hamas supporter, and professional social media influencer. The genre in which he works is Pallywood, the term coined by scholar Richard Landes to describe a long Palestinian cinematic tradition, in which a wide variety of political parties and terrorist groups create fake dramatic videos and peddle them to sympathetic Western media outlets who pay for these comically obvious fabrications and then cynically or cluelessly present them as indictments of the Jewish state’s cruelty.
But such literal-minded answers miss the larger point. #MrFAFO—the acronym means “fuck around, find out”—matters because his work is the best prism we’ve got if we wish to truly gaze into the heart of darkness.
Because #MrFAFO, truly, c’est nous.
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