printAngie’s at it again with a film that is likely to bring as much joy to moviegoers as did “A Mighty Heart”:
The film was Mariane Pearl’s attempts at self-beatification. Her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, was beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who accused Pearl of being a spy and agent of the Mossad and made him recite a humiliating confession to that effect, before lopping his head off. The jihadis released a video of Pearl’s butchering titled, “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”
Mariane, upon whose memoir the film was based, did not seem to comprehended the role vintage, Islamic Jew hatred played in her husband’s “slaughtering.” At the time, she responded to the barbarism by declaring superciliously that “revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable … to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism.”
So as to aggrandize themselves, Angelina and Mariane had diminished Daniel in the film. The dashing Daniel was played by the unknown Dan Futterman, whom Salon.com’s no-doubt feminist reviewer described approvingly as “grave and elfin.” That’s a good thing only if you are a garden gnome. Mariane did, however, have the mark of a member of the media: she celebrates both herself and the Islamic hajj.
That was then. Our expert on the Balkans watched the trailer of “In the Land of Blood and Honey” (people being lined up and robbed, then shot next to a waiting earthmover). Nebojsa Malic thinks “Angie has watched too much Spielberg. Bosnia was no picnic, but any comparison with the Shoah is just plain insulting to the actual victims thereof. Especially since the Bosnian Muslims (along with the Croats) were eager accomplices in the Shoah. Israel’s Ramathkal in the Yom Kippur war, Elazar, was a Bosnian Jew. He didn’t leave Bosnia because of loud music, you know? :)”
Meantime, the question of plagiarism has been raised. It’s quite possible. Those who possess power and money, but not much by way of original ideas, do often rip off the marginalized.
MORE at Nebojsa’s
All this aside, sometimes you have to “blame the victim”. Dan Pearl, a Jew, was attempting to scoop an interview with murderous Islamic terrorists…who have no use for Jews. When you sup with the Devil, use a long spoon; Pearl used a microphone. Predictable outcome.
Our own responsibility for terrorism? give me a break. What is wrong with people? Everybody is willing to wear sack cloth and ashes an self flagellate with a cat-o-nine-tails in timid self examination whenever they are attacked. The school yard bully bloodys my nose and I’m supposed to agonize over my short comings and wonder what I did to make him smack me. Well, maybe it wasn’t me after all. Maybe he just wanted to steal my lunch money. To the professional whiners and agonizers out there I have only one thing to say. Muslim jihadists are what they are and will not change. They come up in a culture of hate and nothing dreamed up by some Ivy League egg head is going to change that. Of course if one is a coward one can take refuge in self introspection and worry about the emotional well being of the bully so they can cover up their lack of a backbone.
“That’s a good thing only if you are a garden gnome
That made me laugh. I suspect at some point in the future I shall use that line with great relish; and regret I hadn’t thought of it but only stole it.
As for Hollywood – once a dream factory, now a propaganda town, and always unaccountably financially corrupt – it now finds itself in a morass of ephebophiliacs. There’s a movie there – not an Angie vehicle but certainly one for George (Clooney).
Back when Bill Clinton was “spreading democracy” into Kosovo via laser-guided bombs, I was thinking of the address of that notorious George “America-hater” Washington:
“The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
My only connection to the Balkan-Bosnian-Bruhaha is having lived in the same graduate student housing as President Ejup Ganic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejup_Gani%C4%87
Nevertheless, the American Government seems compelled to “take sides” in every damn dispute whether it is backing Serbia when a trained gunman shoots Archduke Franz Ferdinand or having Ramadan dinner in Sandzak to support Moslem separatism in the Balkans:
http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=2742