John Galt: The author is not full of bile. The author simply recognizes that bile exists, and the liberal left can keep making wishy washy movies about it and ignoring the real world. For example, the ’’war on terror’’ is simply a conflict between rightwingers on one side and right wingers on the other side. The lefties are mostly bystanders and sometimes, like Rachel Corrie, they are victims.

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’’He can get away with it, because Muslim blood is as cheap today in the
west, as jewish blood was in europe, 60 odd years ago.

’’

What a liar. Muslim blood today is way more expensive thn Jewish blood. Pak Army is killing a few dozen muslims in Pak and there is such an uproar. Nothing compared to the Jews killed by Nazis.

Raw Dust: Pretty funny review on Bareback Mountain

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example:
Political-Islam’s potential assertion through ballot if you take the Neo-Con agenda to its logical conclusion i.e., of democratizing middle east. it will not be unlike chancellor-elected Hitler in Germany circa 1933. look at iran, we already have ahmadinejad. there are alotta questions but no easy answers. i was wondering about that....

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JG:
lets leave movies and artists aside for a bit - i found this very interesting in the article:

’’If one disdains revealed truth as a relic of the barbaric past, one finds truth only in the ’’authentic’’ self-expression of every grouplet in the world. Gays become authentic by actualizing their own truth, along with African-Americans, Native Americans, Palestinians, or whatever band of sufferers might turn up with a grievance.

The more evidence accumulates that the ’’authenticity’’ of some groups centers on wreaking havoc on other groups, the more desperately liberal opinion clings to the illusion that the self-expression of each grouplet may be subject to universal reconciliation. The enemy in the Middle East, according to Spielberg, is not the Israelis, nor the Palestinians, but ’’intransigence’’. If only everyone would be nicer to each other –gay and straight, Israeli and Palestinian, cowboy and Indian –all would be well. To be able to say this without laughing, one does not have to be a Marxist –but it helps. ’’

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simon - firstly, ... secondly, ... and thirdly, because the indications are the oscars will be swept by the gay cowboys - now, who’d have thought the day would dawn when you;d be grateful to a couple of closet queens in boots, eh?

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@ amrita

Btw, I have no reason to doubt JG’s prediction up there. Sadly, the only
story Speilberg saw fit to bring to the screen about Israel, in these times,
is how the jews successfully hunted down some Palestinians. Why couldn’t
he tell the Rachel Corrie story (the US teen who sat in front of an Israeli
bulldozer ready to destroy a Palestinian home and paid with her life).

This film, is akin to some director making a movie during WW-II about
how Hitler’s Gestapo were successfully able to hunt down and murder
some ’uppity’ jews in the fatherland. Frankly, it’s in poor taste.

He can get away with it, because Muslim blood is as cheap today in the
west, as jewish blood was in europe, 60 odd years ago.

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well, in this matter you know best )

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#18 You can say the same thing about farting in an elevator. ~

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imo, if everyone’s pissed then someone’s doing the right job

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huh...

thanks raw dust for that article.

maybe tom we can all resume this discussion

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#15 Raw Dust, that review is full of bile and little substance. The reviewer’s main grouse seems to be that spielberg does not pander to the tastes of movie going audiance in america. Well, why should he?

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helo and happy holidays to everybody...

to the topic: i dont know... imo, extracting politics and social meanings out of a work of art is an exercise in stupidity BUT i m gonna contradict myself shortly... alephnull: if you see this : hope you are doing well... a tip o’ the hat to you sir.

here is an interesting take on this movie and some more..
cheers.

PS: kaka man.. you’d prolly like it too... (have you seen triumph of the will yet? )


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GL13Aa02.html

The gay, the bad and the Israeli
By Spengler

Steven Spielberg’s next movie tells the touching story of two male Palestinian suicide bombers who fall in love and engage in graphic on-screen sex before detonating themselves at a Natany shopping mall. Tentative title: Blowback Mountain. I made that up, of course, but more than happenstance links Ang Lee’s gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain with Spielberg’s Munich, the subject of the cover story in this week’s Time magazine.

It isn’t only that gays have a thing for cowboys (remember the Village People?), not to mention Arabs (wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia a gay flick?). The American left sympathizes with Palestinians for the same reason that it sympathizes with homosexuals, and the putatively oppressed of all hues and tongues.

Liberal Hollywood is the heart of America’s Democratic Party, and its offerings for the Christmas season explain why the opposition to the present administration remains weaker even than the flailing White House. A red-state cultural revolt won the last election for President George W Bush (It’s the culture, stupid!, November 5, 2004), and Hollywood presents a view of the world that Americans find –well, revolting. This is not an accident, but a nasty prank by the Zeitgeist.

With the coincident debut of the gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain (Homo on the Range, [1] as the San Francisco newspapers wrote) and the conspiratorial fantasy Syriana, it has been a banner week for gays and the Palestinians, at least in the American cinema. Syriana depicts a conspiracy by the Central Intelligence Agency and oil companies to subvert an Arab kingdom, while Bareback Mountain attempts to ’’queer’’ the traditional American cowboy film.

While these exercises in cutting-edge culture struggle at the box office, a film version of C S Lewis’ Christian allegory The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had a $70 million opening weekend.

’’Bareback Mountain’’ portends commercial disaster. In the young-adult demographic group that sustains the American cinema, on-screen anal sex draws limited interest. Young men find it embarrassing to watch a star like Jake Gyllenhaal in this context, while young women find it disappointing. But no film of the first decade of the 21st century will flop as miserably as Spielberg’s Munich, a ’’prayer for peace’’ derived from the 1972 terrorist attacks on Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. Spielberg’s theme, as he explained in the Time story, is the futility of the Israelis’ subsequent retaliation.

Futility makes poor theater. If Spielberg had portrayed a moral equivalence between the great white shark and its hunters, Jaws would have bombed at the box office. American audiences sat on the edge of their seats waiting for Roy Scheider to wreak vengeance against the toothsome monster. Indiana Jones’ enemies meet hideous deaths, to audience cheers. The director who made his reputation pandering to vengeful bloodlust now wants moviegoers to ponder the moral equivalences in war. Vengeance makes for good box office, as Aeschylus well knew. Moral ambiguity just wins the Pulitzer Prize (or in the case of Harold Pinter, the Nobel).

Speaking of the Pulitzer, noteworthy is Spielberg’s choice of the world’s worst playwright as screenwriter, namely Tony Kushner. Thanks to HBO, Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning magnum opus Angels in America was played before the world by the likes of Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman. Kushner’s ’’gay fantasia on political themes’’ waves placards and shouts slogans with the worst kind of agitprop didacticism. Kushner is not only gay, but also a Marxist. Of Jewish extraction, he despises Zionism.

Kushner identified with the Soviet Union until its collapse. Afterward he told an interviewer, ’’The collapse of the Soviet system does not mean that capitalism has succeeded ... Socialism is simply the idea that people are better off if we work collectively and that the economic system we live in is made by people and therefore can be controlled intelligently rather than let loose. There’s no way that can’t be true.’’

I have nothing against homosexuals, although I think homosexuality a poor theme for political agitation. I have a great deal against Marxists, especially apologists for the Soviet empire. And I have even more against crashing bores who inflict on the public such dialogue as:

’’The point was to be righteous. If I lose that, that’s my soul.’’
’’Do you think you can part from your fears? Your doubts?’’

And those are lines that Spielberg chose to put in the movie’s trailer.

It may seem incongruous for the liberal mainstream to set against the Bush administration a gay Marxist’s view of the Middle East. In fact, Spielberg’s transition from the world of Indiana Jones to the realm of Angels in America measures the miserable state of the liberal mainstream since September 11, 2001. Well many Americans disapprove of the president’s poor handling of Iraq, but they are quite happy to slaughter their enemies when opportunity permits. Nor do they sit up nights worrying, like Kushner’s fictional Mossad agents, about whether they might kill the wrong fellow on occasion.

If one disdains revealed truth as a relic of the barbaric past, one finds truth only in the ’’authentic’’ self-expression of every grouplet in the world. Gays become authentic by actualizing their own truth, along with African-Americans, Native Americans, Palestinians, or whatever band of sufferers might turn up with a grievance.

The more evidence accumulates that the ’’authenticity’’ of some groups centers on wreaking havoc on other groups, the more desperately liberal opinion clings to the illusion that the self-expression of each grouplet may be subject to universal reconciliation. The enemy in the Middle East, according to Spielberg, is not the Israelis, nor the Palestinians, but ’’intransigence’’. If only everyone would be nicer to each other –gay and straight, Israeli and Palestinian, cowboy and Indian –all would be well. To be able to say this without laughing, one does not have to be a Marxist –but it helps.

Arabs as well as Israelis will be outraged by Spielberg’s ’’prayer for peace’’. Mohammed Daoud, one of the Black September terrorists who organized the 1972 attack, contacted Reuters in September to denounce Spielberg’s pro-Israeli stance, while Israel’s supporters have denounced his attempt at even-handedness between terrorists and avengers.

Spielberg encapsulates everything that Islamists are fighting: the septic tide of American popular culture seeping through and eroding traditional society. The Arab world despises Marxists, homosexuals and Hollywood directors. To the limited extent that Americans bother to see Munich, it will persuade them that, like it or not, they are stuck with the likes of Bush. He may not be one of history’s great orators, but from literary a standpoint, I would rather listen to a Bush press conference than a Kushner script any day of the week.

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amrita,

You make some good points. But to me, the angryarab review is predicated on the realities of history and the cheapness of non white or non white affiliated life. Hollywood representation of the developing world is unbelievably reductive; remember that whole passage to india/jewel in the crown genre? our mass media specialises in manipulated narratives.

on one hand, i think its great that spielberg has taken on this topic-i wish more people would. however, i wouldnt compare schindler’s list to shoah. what we need are directors and writers who can make american shoahs.

tony kushner worked on this as well and i am a big fan of his. so lets see

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oye Templar didn’t you hear the right wing joo’s hated it as well, you should be getting the all clear from Mecca any time now.

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sam - i felt the same way after reading the angryarab peice on ur ilog... it definitely opened new vistas for me. and a lot of what he writes is true and are things that i have noticed before but gave a free pass on the movie coz the storytelling was so good that it passed under the radar.

but there were points in the essay that i thought he was overstating his case - a lot of what he says about the actual situation on the ground re: the events that led up to the munich massacre and the portrayal of palestinians and israelis were discussed in the movie... when you see it, judge for urself.

but yeah, i’m not ur avg american movie goer. i already had a heads up so i dont know if the references were too subtle for everyone to catch. imo it was not but thats me.

i think the truth lies somewhere in between. i’m not buying either version.

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Here’s a bit from Warner Bros’ website on the movie Michael Collins. My point is that if this movie depicted Collins as a terrorist to be assassinated by the British Secret Service, Americans (a sizeable percentage Irish American) would not be as fine with it:


Michael Collins was born at Woodfield, Clonakilty, in County Cork in 1890. He was the third son and the youngest of eight children. His father, also called Michael Collins, was 75 years of age when Michael junior was born. On his deathbed the father pointed to his youngest child and urged his grieving family to mind Michael because, ’One day he’ll be a great man. He’ll do great work for Ireland.’ Michael was 6 years of age at the time.
During those six years Michael had been greatly influenced by his father, who encouraged his children to learn patriotic ballads and poetry. West Cork was the heartland of Fenianism, the Irish nationalist movement founded in the 19th century. Jermiah O’Donovan Rossa, one of its founders, had been a teacher in a school in Rosscarberry, three miles away from the Collins household. Michael’s own teacher, Denis Lyons, was a member of the Fenian organisation, the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) and was to prove an inspirational figure. The local blacksmith, James Santry, was also a Fenian. Young Michael would often call to his forge to hear stories of earlier Irish rebellions in 1798 and 1848. Years later Michael Collins was to recall that, ’’In Denis Lyons and James Santry I had my first tutors capable of, because of their personalities alone, infusing into me pride of the Irish as a race.’’

As a child Michael also read widely. He was familiar with Shakespeare and the great novelists of the 19th century. Every week he read the nationalist newspapers ’’The Freeman’s Weekly’’ and ’’The Leader’’. When only 11 years of age Michael began to subscribe to ’The United Irishman’, edited by Arthur Griffith. Almost 20 years later, Griffith and Michael Collins would be the most important Irish representatives in the Treaty negotiations with Britain. Griffith was the founder of Sinn Fein, a nationalist party that exists to this day. At that time Sinn Fein was not a republican party. Griffith believed that a Republic was unattainable and that Home Rule, which the constitutional nationalists sought, was inadequate. His goal was an independent Ireland with the same monarch as England. While this did not accord with the Fenian view, Griffith did have a profound influence on the young Michael Collins. At the age of 12 he wrote, ’’In Arthur Griffith there is a mighty force in Ireland. He has none of the wildness of some I could name. Instead there is an abundance of wisdom and an awareness of things which are Ireland.’’

The young Michael Collins was a keen sportsman. He played the local game of road bowling. He enjoyed the Irish game hurling, and was fond of fishing. But it was his prowess as a wrestler for which Michael was noted. He took on all comers, and rougher bouts usually ended with Collins biting the ear of his opponent. Later during the War of Independence he would often break the mounting tension by insisting on ’’a bit of ear’’, as he called it, with his comrades.

In July 1906, at the age of 15, Michael Collins emigrated to London where he worked as a boy clerk in West Kensington Post Office. He quickly found his feet in the strong Irish community in London. He joined the Gaelic Athletic Association(GAA), the Gaelic League, which promoted the revival of the Irish language, and Sinn Fein. In November 1909 he was inducted into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IR. At this time the IRB was in decline, but the failure of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) to achieve Home Rule through constitutional means attracted younger members to the organisation. Shortly after joining the IRB Michael left the Post Office and took up a post with a stockbroking company and later he worked in the Whitehall Labour Exchange. Finally, before returning to Ireland, he worked briefly with an American firm, the Guaranty Trust Company.

Outside of work Collins wrote papers on Irish history and current political events. The Irish question had now moved to the centre of the political stage. The election results of 1910 gave the IPP the balance of power and its leader, John Redmond, demanded the introduction of Home Rule. The Home Rule Bill, which came before the House of Commons in April 1912, met with stiff resistance from the Ulster Unionists. Under the Home Rule scenario they feared that the Protestant culture would lose out to the Catholic nationalist majority. In 1913 the Ulster Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, organised the Ulster militias into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and threatened to set up a provisional government in Belfast if Home Rule was introduced. Nationalists in Dublin responded by forming the Irish Volunteers. Although founded by Eoin O’Neill, a professor in University College Dublin, IRB members were active behind the scenes. Seeing the threat, Redmond managed to gain control of the executive of the Irish Volunteers. With the outbreak of the First World War, Redmond proposed in the House of Commons that the Volunteers and the UVF come together to defend Ireland against invasion. With the question of Home Rule now deferred until after the war, the Irish Volunteers split into two camps. The majority followed Redmond’s advice and joined the British war effort in the hope of gaining Home Rule, while a minority dominated by the IRB stayed at home to organise armed rebellion.

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