Ami Horowitz

Ami Horowitz
Education	University of Southern California(BA)
Occupation	Filmmaker

Ami Horowitz is an American media personality who is co-producer, co-director, co-writer, and star of the 2012 documentary U.N. Me. He currently lives in New York City.

Early life and education

A native of Los Angeles, Horowitz graduated from the University of Southern California with majors in political science and philosophy.

Horowitz's mother is from Israel. He is Jewish, and spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

Career

After graduating from USC, Horowitz managed a Democratic candidate's unsuccessful campaign for state comptroller of Maryland. Then, taking the candidate's advice to "make money and go into politics later," he went into investment banking, and spent sixteen years in that field. During that period, he worked at Lehman Brothers.

UN Me

Main article: U.N. Me

Horowitz's film UN Me, released in theaters in 2012 after several years of screenings at festivals, was produced, directed, and written by Horowitz and Matthew Groff.

Horowitz had been concerned about the UN for years when, one night in 2006 or 2007 (sources vary), he was watching Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine and decided to try to make a documentary about the UN. "I woke my wife up early the next morning and said, 'I'm going to quit my job and make a movie,'" he told an interviewer.

He explained this "epiphany" as follows in another interview: while watching Moore's film, his mind wandered and he began “thinking about the bias against Israel, about Rwanda and Sudan, and that while I was ensconced in my comfortable upper west side apartment in Manhattan there were people literally running for their lives, and I got very upset!" Then he looked at the TV, "and, say what you will about his politics, Michael Moore knows how to use that medium, the entertaining documentary, to get a point across. Then it all came together, and I said, this is what I'm going to do."

Horowitz told Brian Lamb on C-SPAN that "within two weeks" of seeing Moore's film, "[he] had quit [his] job and started raising money to make the [movie]."

In addition to admiring Michael Moore's documentary style, Horowitz has confessed to being influenced by Sacha Baron Cohen's interviewing technique, and has said that he "was so enamored with" both Moore's and Baron Cohen's approaches to film making that he hired much of their former teams.

“There are people who populate the UN who actively want to move the world in a bad direction,” Horowitz has said. “Others move around in a moral fog. The organization is trying to grab American sovereignty, trying to find ways to divide wealth, and as a result is making us accede to international courts.”

In UN Me Horowitz is shown mounting the podium at the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva and saying into a microphone: “You people should be embarrassed and ashamed....You have squandered the opportunity the world has given you. This is a perverse example of what it was meant to be.” In another segment of UN Me, about the organization's failure to stop the killings in Darfur, Horowitz asks Sudan's UN ambassador why his country stones gays after one sexual act but lesbians after four. "'No, no, no,' the ambassador corrects him, "'if she is married, she will be stoned immediately.'"

In an interview about the film, Horowitz cited as an example of UN bureaucrats' "foggy moral vision" Kofi Annan's comment, apropos of Rwanda, that "the UN must stay impartial even in the face of genocide." Horowitz also noted that while both conservatives and liberals in the U.S. have responded enthusiastically to the film, "Europeans generally are particularly hostile to the movie" because they are put off by "the idea of a moral high ground" and consider "preaching against a particular ideology, for instance radical Islam, is dubious, possibly even racist."

“The U.N. doesn't take any kind of moral stands, you know, unless it's Israel," Horowitz has said, and has added that he "deliberately chose not to put Israel in the movie for that particular reason....I didn't want the debate to be about Israel."

Showdown Wisconsin

In 2012, Horowitz began screening a new documentary entitled Showdown Wisconsin, about the effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Fox News

Horowitz started a series of satirical Fox News.com videos called "Ami on the Street". Horowitz has covered topics such as Iran and their pursuit of nuclear weapons, Ferguson, the IRS scandal, The Affordable Care Act and Taxes. He received a lot of attention and millions of views from his video where he waved an ISIS flag and then an Israeli flag on the Berkeley campus.

Writings

In a December 2008 article for Huffington Post, Horowitz replied to critics of U.N. Me.

Horowitz recounted his experiences at the UN's Durban Review Conference on racism in Geneva in a September 2009 article. “The conference began with an Orwellian bang,” he wrote, “as the honor of first keynote speaker was given to none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran. While the incongruous nature of such an invitation is obvious to most people in the world, the ironic nuance of inviting a women-stoning, gay hanging, genocide advocate to speak at a human rights conference is lost on the United Nations."

In a January 2010 article, Horowitz wrote that the selection of U.N. Me for screening at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam made him feel as if he had "entered the epicenter of secular, liberal, pseudo-intellectual Europe" with "the only political film that took a centrist political approach." Yet he ended up being surprised by the level of enthusiasm for the film, proving, in his view, that its arguments spoke to the concerns of audiences across the political spectrum.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Horowitz charged in a March 2010 article, "has consistently acted as a sanctuary for terrorist activity and employment," and yet the U.S. "has funded UNRWA to the tune of nearly $3.5 billion," thus effectively "acting as their enablers."

Horowitz wrote in a July 2010 article about a memo sent to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon by Inga-Britt Ahlenius, outgoing chief of the Office of Internal Oversight, in which she charged: “Your actions are not only deplorable, but seriously reprehensible... Your action is without precedent and in my opinion seriously embarrassing to yourself.”

In an August 2010 article entitled “Insecurity Council,” Horowitz lamented that “Hezbollah, widely known as the most lethal terrorist group operating today, responsible for the killing of hundreds of American marines and embassy employees, and the slaughter of 85 civilians in a Jewish community center in Argentina, has a de facto seat on the Security Council."

Horowitz complained in a November 2010 article about the formation of a new United Nations women's rights group, U.N. Women, claiming that those who would benefit from its establishment were "not the women they were supposed to protect but the leaders and governing bodies of countries that ignore the rights of women," including Saudi Arabia.

“Studies have now confirmed what was apparent from the outset,” wrote Horowitz in a May 2011 article. “Nearly 5,000 Haitians died, and nearly half a million more Haitians were sickened, because the United Nations introduced cholera to a country that had not seen the disease in over 100 years."

In a May 2012 article, Horowitz recounted that a stranger who had been waiting for him outside his apartment building in Manhattan one morning asked him: “Do you care more about your movie than about your wife and children?”

Media appearances

Horowitz has appeared on Access Hollywood, NBC Nightly News, Morning Joe, Hannity, Fox and Friends, and many other national television and radio programs.

Views

Asked by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN about his political views, Horowitz described himself as "right-of-center" but "not reflexively" so: “There are things I probably go a little bit left to and things I go a little bit more right to.”

Personal life

Horowitz lives in New York City.

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN