Creative Community for Peace, the Hollywood-based pro-Israel advocacy group, said enough is enough and called for a Mark Ruffalo boycott following his “antisemitic” remarks against the Ellison family and their pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
After the Marvel actor’s incendiary comments against the deal on Friday — in which he drew a line from David and Larry Ellison’s Oracle ties to what he called Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza — the long-running entertainment nonprofit called on Hollywood to rescind their support of Ruffalo and his work until he apologizes and retracts his statements.
“Mark Ruffalo’s rhetoric has increasingly crossed the line from criticism of Israel into extremist and antisemitic messaging,” CCFP Executive Director Ari Ingel said in a statement Saturday.
Ingel added that his argument against Paramount’s merger “increasingly fuses hostility toward Israel and Zionism with Jewish-associated wealth, media ownership, oligarchic power and ominous warnings about concentrated control into a single narrative.”
“Those echoes are impossible to ignore. Hollywood should not accept this kind of rhetoric from anyone. Mark Ruffalo should retract these remarks and apologize, and nobody in Hollywood should platform him until he does.”
The organization drew its hard line against Ruffalo after the actor issued a statement of his own on Saturday defending his stance against the merger, maintaining that Paramount categorizing his remarks as “antisemitic” was “appalling and fundamentally dishonest.”
“Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people,” Ruffalo wrote in a lengthy statement on X. “This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel.”
That statement came in response to TheWrap’s exclusive reporting that Paramount deemed the remarks as “antisemitic” and “a bridge too far” in a statement of their own on Friday.
This isn’t Ruffalo’s first time going to bat for a cause he believes in. Creative Community for Peace reflected on Ruffalo’s years in the spotlight as a vocal critic of Israel and its military action against Hamas in Gaza.
“For nearly a decade, Ruffalo has supported BDS and campaigns to isolate and demonize Israel. In 2021, he accused Israel of committing ‘genocide,’ then apologized and admitted that the claim was ‘not accurate,’ ‘inflammatory,’ and was ‘being used to justify antisemitism,’” Ingel said. “Instead of becoming more careful with his words, he has repeatedly doubled down on his extremism, leading to his latest antisemitic attack on Larry and David Ellison.”
Ingel pointed to specific phrases Ruffalo used in Friday’s Instagram post in which he described Larry Ellison as a “classic oligarch” and warned of people “consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.”
As for the Ellisons’ continued ties to tech giant Oracle, which earlier this year touted how its “profoundly scary technologies” aided Israel’s war effort, Ingel said Ruffalo was “recklessly insinuating that the Ellisons have designs to brutalize people worldwide.”
“Taken together, his statements echo some of the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theories in history, depicting Jews as a wealthy and sinister elite who accumulate control over media, money and power, then use that control against society,” he said. “This is also part of a broader pattern of extremism.”
In regards to Ruffalo maintaining that he is not antisemitic for being critical of the Ellisons, Ingel said, “Intent does not erase impact. Repeatedly amplifying inflammatory falsehoods and rhetoric that mirrors historic antisemitic tropes helps normalize the violent anti-Jewish hatred we are seeing take hold once again around the world, regardless of how he chooses to describe his own motives.”
“Point blank, he has been warned before about the consequences of this rhetoric, yet continues contributing to the toxic antisemitic atmosphere we are witnessing today. That makes him culpable.”
Representatives for Ruffalo did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
