Paramount ran its PR engine into the trade press on Friday to accuse Mark Ruffalo of “antisemitic tropes”.

Why?

Ruffalo had shared a video of Oracle executive Safra Catz describing technology her company supplied to the Israeli military. He quoted her own words about her own employer. Think about that. Her words, her employer, repeated. And somehow the person repeating her words is the bad guy?

Paramount defense of a $110 billion merger, when measured on my highly accurate disinformation sensor gets the following result.

You don’t have to be Jewish to check what either party said against the traditions of Judaism. The Ellisons’ conduct is the obvious immoral failure here. Allow me to explain, as I think you will soon see Ellison doesn’t hold a candle.

Start with the verse that sets the category. Ezekiel 18:20: the person who sins bears the sin. Halakha judges deeds. It refuses inherited guilt and collective guilt alike. That refusal shields every Jew from association with Oracle’s contracts, and it shields Ruffalo from the claim that scrutinizing those contracts touches Jews at all. Paramount’s statement performs the exact awful conflation that it alleges shouldn’t happen. It treats one corporation’s military business as coextensive with Jewish identity, so that criticism of the business becomes prejudice against the people. Nope.

Now look at the conduct.

Larry Ellison stood before an Oracle analyst meeting in September 2024 and described the product:

Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.

The Talmud names this.

First, Hezek re’iyah, damage by seeing, treats surveillance as a tort in itself. Bava Batra prohibits even a window overlooking a neighbor’s courtyard before anyone acts on what is seen. Rabbenu Gershom banned reading another’s letters a thousand years before packet inspection. And the tradition holds that conduct produced by watchers carries zero moral weight.

Yochanan ben Zakkai’s deathbed blessing in Berachot 28b was that his students fear Heaven as much as they fear flesh and blood, because people transgress when they believe no human sees them. Ellison proposes to perfect the fear of flesh and blood. His system abolishes the moral act while claiming to manufacture it. That’s a big nope, again.

Catz supplied the second count.

Avodah Zarah 15b forbids selling weapons or instruments of harm where misuse is foreseeable, and Rambam extends the rule to anything that endangers. The prohibition presumes the seller investigates the end use.

Catz told an Israeli-American Council summit that Oracle built “really profoundly scary technology” for the military effort, including things she said she could not discuss. Secrecy about end use inverts the halakhic duty. Boasting that the use is unspeakable concedes the violation.

Nope, nope, and nope.

Third count: shochad. Exodus 23:8 warns that a bribe blinds the clear-sighted. Ellison gave Friends of the IDF the largest single gift in its history. In 2021, while a witness in Netanyahu’s corruption trial, Haaretz reported he offered the defendant a seat on Oracle’s board. A paid position, extended to an indicted head of government, by a witness in his own case. The bribery texts legislate this exact scenario, and the rabbis extended them to shochad devarim, influence through favors, because influence launders itself.

I’m gonna need a bigger nope machine.

Fourth: Isaiah 5:8. Woe to those who join house to house and field to field until room runs out. The prophet was describing market cornering. This merger would fuse two of the largest studios while twelve state attorneys general sue to block it, atop an Oracle stake in TikTok and family direction of CBS News. Information is the field being joined.

Which leaves the accusation itself. Ready? Do I even need to explain?

Motzi shem ra, spreading a false damaging name, ranks in the tradition as graver than true gossip. Paramount named its trope in the statement zero times, quoted zero sentences, identified zero mechanisms.

That’s a huge tell. Ellison runs a database that labels things without any of the data to back it up. Get it? An empty database, spreading accusations, for a fee.

An accusation that specifies nothing can be refuted by nothing, and its real audience is every other actor weighing public opposition to the merger. Deploying the memory of Jewish persecution as armor for a corporate transaction is chillul Hashem, and it leaves every genuine report of antisemitism weaker than it found it.

Ellison is undermining Jews on so many levels you have to wonder why?

Leviticus 19:17 commands rebuke. Hocheach tochiach et amitecha: you shall surely rebuke your fellow.

Ruffalo performed the mitzvah.

Paramount has attacked the Jews, repeatedly, and deployed big PR machines to label themselves as the hero.

Here’s an interesting history source, which brings to the screen Eileen Power’s Medieval Women, and which introduces some odd claims. For example, it says:

Most non-conformists became nuns

Well, that’s probably true for the gentry and nobility, and not the peasant majority. And it certainly wasn’t an option for the non-Christians. Ooops. Power wrote entirely of power (Christian Europe) as she probably considered Jewish and Muslim women as non-conforming, if she thought about them at all.

Consider the counter-example of Marguerite Porete, who wrote Mirouer des simples ames in the late thirteenth century, as found in Chapter 122, fifteenth-century manuscript, Chantilly, Musée Condé F XIV 26 (catalogue 157).

Amis, que diront beguines, et gens de religion,
Quant ilz orront l’excellence de vostre divine chançon?
Beguines dient que je erre, prestres, clers, et prescheurs,
Augustins, et carmes, et les freres mineurs,
Pour ce que j’escri de l’estre de l’affinee Amour.

Modern translation: My Love, what will the beguines say, and all the people of the church, when they hear how good your song is? The beguines already call me wrong. So do the priests, the scholars, the preachers, the Augustinians, the Carmelites, the Franciscans. All because I write about pure Love when nothing false is left in it.

Her book was burned at Valenciennes on the orders of the Bishop of Cambrai, who forbade her from circulating it by threatening judgment as a “relapsed heretic”. She circulated it anyway and was thrown into jail for a year and a half. She declined the inquisitor’s oath and never answered the tribunal, which condemned her for it on top of the book being circulated. The cleric Guiard de Cressonessart declared himself her defender and was punished with a sentence of life imprisonment. Three weeks after fifty-four Templars were burned at the stake, she was too on June 1, 1310 at the Place de Grève in Paris. Then her work circulated anonymously for six centuries in French, Latin, Italian, and Middle English, still copied and read to this day.

I guess the point here is that the film says a woman could choose marriage or a convent. Technically there was also the beguine, as a tolerated non-conformance. All of it reads as Christian. Jewish and Muslim women from birth were excluded by discrimination, their non-conformance forced upon them rather than chosen, since they couldn’t be in a convent or beguinage. Porete is the story of a woman who chose another path and was murdered for it. She didn’t even conform to the non-conformance.