Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, is being labeled in the Jerusalem Post as an associate of antisemites, in part due to his involvement in a film related to the Holocaust.  So I decided to check things out for myself by watching Operation Resist (an independent 2019 movie available on Amazon).  I discovered that the actual movie shows precisely the opposite — that Mastriano is not an antisemite.

Mastriano and his wife were involved with funding this low-budget movie, and he and his wife and two of their children have roles.  Mastriano plays OSS agent Peter Ortiz, who was an astonishingly effective agent on many fronts of WWII.  One of his many exploits involved saving Jews who escaped the Nazis by first traveling to Spain and from Spain to the U.S. (a route that one of our family's friends took to escape the Holocaust).  This is what Operation Resist covers.

Mastriano's role in the film is relatively minor.  The knowledge of guns and war tactics that he displays is impressive but not surprising.  He is a retired U.S. Army colonel who fought in Operation Desert Storm.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the movie is an "anti-abortion" movie, but there is only one mention of abortion — and not given by Mastriano's character.  The Post is correct, however, that the film opposes gun control.  It celebrates Jews who defended themselves with guns and Christians who defended them with guns.

It argues something that is indisputably true: that those who perpetuated mass slaughters, including Stalin and Hitler, began by confiscating the guns of their future victims.  It is no accident that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution defends the right to own arms as being necessary for "the security of a free state."

The Jerusalem Post article also claims that Mastriano has ties to supposedly antisemitic Andrew Torba, the self-professed Christian who runs Gab, a completely uncensored alternative to Twitter.  It is true that Gab permits antisemitic posts, but Twitter's alternative of heavy censorship has proven to be far more dangerous.

Operation Resist strongly opposes antisemitism.  The moral of the movie is "Never Again," and it celebrates Christians, including Corrie ten Boom and Audrey Hepburn, who helped rescue Jews during the Holocaust.  It specifically opposes those, including a present-day right-wing Holocaust-denier, who would erase the Holocaust from the school history curriculum.

Image: NBC News via YouTube, CC BY 3.0.