Marvel removes Jewish superhero’s Israeli identity for Captain America movie after complaints from pro-jihad group

From Discover the Networks:

Established in 2005 by UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) is a major supporter of the pro-Hamas campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Several of AMP’s recent board members and key officials were previously members of, and worked closely with, now-defunct Islamic extremist groups that funded terrorist activities. These groups included:

• the Islamic Association for Palestine (which, until its dissolution in 2004, served as the chief U.S. propaganda arm of Hamas);
• the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (which from 1995-2001 contributed approximately $12.4 million in money, goods, and services to Hamas); and
• KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development (whose assets were frozen in 2006 by the U.S. Treasury Department because of its fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas).

“Marvel removes Jewish superhero Sabra’s Israeli identity for new Captain America movie,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, July 16, 2024:

The Israeli background of Marvel Comics superhero Sabra has been removed for her depiction in the upcoming Marvel Studios Captain America: Brave New World movie, according to a Friday official summary of the film.

While in the original Marvel comics continuity, Ruth Bat-Seraph serves as the Mossad agent mutant superhero Sabra, in a recent summary for the February 2025 film Bat-Seraph is described as a former member of the Soviet Russian Black Widow super spy program – the same program that trained Scarlett Johansson’s Avengers of the same name.

Played by Israeli actress Shira Hass, Bat-Seraph is “a former Black Widow, Ruth is now a high-ranking US government official who has the trust of President [Thaddeus] Ross.”

The summary made no mention of Bat-Seraph’s codename, Sabra, which comes from the slang term for native-born Israeli, though other characters are referred to by their alter-egos.

Anti-Israel activists have taken issue with the inclusion of Sabra in the film since the Unorthodox star’s casting was announced by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige at the 2022 D23 Expo event in Anaheim, California.

American Muslims for Palestine launched a letter campaign against Disney and Marvel Studios soon after the “distasteful” announcement, complaining that the character served “a state that is recognized by the entire human rights community as an apartheid regime, guilty of ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people.”

AMP contended that the promotion of the Israeli Mossad super agent character normalized the “murderous intelligence agency,” and that her name evoked the memory of the Sabra neighborhood in which Palestinians and Lebanese Shias were massacred in 1982 by Israeli-aligned Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias during the Lebanese Civil War.

“We call on Disney & Marvel Studios to immediately reverse the harm it has caused and to immediately cancel the thoughtless plan to feature ‘Sabra’ in its upcoming Marvel film,” AMP had said….