Saturday, September 04, 2004
Newsflash! For once Bill Clinton has non-fellat!o related chest-pains and shortness of breath. Of course, this gets more coverage on the British news than the thousands of people who actually have real heart attacks.
Elsewhere in the axis of evil, George W. Bush ends the week when he has to pretend to be a 'compassionate conservative'. Now he can go back to being a 'complete scumfucker of a conservative'. Anyone who votes for him in November believing he represents a kinder, gentler conservative doesn't deserve to have the vote. But if you don't happen to be white, male, rich and already in Shrubya's cabinet, what choice do you really have over who to give your vote to? When is the Democratic party going to start acting like an opposition and stand against the ruin and destruction the Republicans want to do, not only to their own country, but the world? Why should the US people have to make do with voting for the lesser of two evils? Why don't the Democrats wake up, look at the fact they're loosing in the polls when they are up against a President who manifestly looks after only himself and his friends, they are up against a cabal of cheats and cowards who send their children to die in Iraq and Afghanistan but were too chicken-shit to serve when it was their time, and stop putting up right-wingers from their party as candidates for the Presidency of the US?
The Hamburg Cell on Thursday night was brilliant. A bit too long but very, very good. It manages to humanise the September 11th hijackers without at any point making their actions in any way pardonable. These are crazy people, no more Muslims than Shrubya, fired up on a diet of lies, distortions and a self-distorting knowledge of history (when one of their more moderate friends points out that the Jews did actually happen to suffer unimaginably in the Holocaust one of the soon-to-be hijackers points out they must be guilty because they came out of it with their own homeland).
The main character is Ziad Jarrah, played by Karim Saleh. As the film starts he is going to university in Germany, meeting women and not thinking of himself as a Muslim. Disconcertingly the film then jumps and suddenly, months later, he is joining in radical prayer groups. The drama is supposed to be based on everything that has been found out about the hijackers since the incident in 2001, therefore it seems that the writers, Ronan Bennett and Alice Pearman, have been unable to find out what turns this shy student into a fanatacist. And Saleh is wonderful, at no point does he retreat into monsterdom, instead Jarrah is pretending to start a life with his girlfriend, while all the time 'preparing for martyrdom'. When anyone argues with him you see the light in his eyes die as he shuts down, going monosyllabic, protecting his core of warped fervour from people trying to turn him aside.
(And Alexander Siddig turns up too! He changed his name from Siddig El Fadil or something while doing Deep Space Nine because he was sick of being typecast in parts as 'dastardly Arab'. Oh well, nice try.)
The film drags in the final half-hour, as though this were a ninety minute film that was stretched out to fill it's two hour time slot. But as captions fill the screen faster and faster as we approach September 11th to tell us just exactly how many warnings, clues and mistakes on the part of the hijackers that the American intelligence agencies ignored the drama also builds to a terrible intensity. When the film closes with pictures of the planes crashing into their targets it's almost an anticlimax and perhaps unnecessary to the tone of the peace. Good Republicans/Conservatives/Christians can watch this film without worrying that it's going to make them sympathise with their enemy. It doesn't do that, but it does warn of the precise nature of the fanatacism that threatens the Western world, masquerading as and using adherents of the Muslim faith, and information must always be preferable to the simplified lies that Bush feeds people in his speeches.
Elsewhere in the axis of evil, George W. Bush ends the week when he has to pretend to be a 'compassionate conservative'. Now he can go back to being a 'complete scumfucker of a conservative'. Anyone who votes for him in November believing he represents a kinder, gentler conservative doesn't deserve to have the vote. But if you don't happen to be white, male, rich and already in Shrubya's cabinet, what choice do you really have over who to give your vote to? When is the Democratic party going to start acting like an opposition and stand against the ruin and destruction the Republicans want to do, not only to their own country, but the world? Why should the US people have to make do with voting for the lesser of two evils? Why don't the Democrats wake up, look at the fact they're loosing in the polls when they are up against a President who manifestly looks after only himself and his friends, they are up against a cabal of cheats and cowards who send their children to die in Iraq and Afghanistan but were too chicken-shit to serve when it was their time, and stop putting up right-wingers from their party as candidates for the Presidency of the US?
The Hamburg Cell on Thursday night was brilliant. A bit too long but very, very good. It manages to humanise the September 11th hijackers without at any point making their actions in any way pardonable. These are crazy people, no more Muslims than Shrubya, fired up on a diet of lies, distortions and a self-distorting knowledge of history (when one of their more moderate friends points out that the Jews did actually happen to suffer unimaginably in the Holocaust one of the soon-to-be hijackers points out they must be guilty because they came out of it with their own homeland).
The main character is Ziad Jarrah, played by Karim Saleh. As the film starts he is going to university in Germany, meeting women and not thinking of himself as a Muslim. Disconcertingly the film then jumps and suddenly, months later, he is joining in radical prayer groups. The drama is supposed to be based on everything that has been found out about the hijackers since the incident in 2001, therefore it seems that the writers, Ronan Bennett and Alice Pearman, have been unable to find out what turns this shy student into a fanatacist. And Saleh is wonderful, at no point does he retreat into monsterdom, instead Jarrah is pretending to start a life with his girlfriend, while all the time 'preparing for martyrdom'. When anyone argues with him you see the light in his eyes die as he shuts down, going monosyllabic, protecting his core of warped fervour from people trying to turn him aside.
(And Alexander Siddig turns up too! He changed his name from Siddig El Fadil or something while doing Deep Space Nine because he was sick of being typecast in parts as 'dastardly Arab'. Oh well, nice try.)
The film drags in the final half-hour, as though this were a ninety minute film that was stretched out to fill it's two hour time slot. But as captions fill the screen faster and faster as we approach September 11th to tell us just exactly how many warnings, clues and mistakes on the part of the hijackers that the American intelligence agencies ignored the drama also builds to a terrible intensity. When the film closes with pictures of the planes crashing into their targets it's almost an anticlimax and perhaps unnecessary to the tone of the peace. Good Republicans/Conservatives/Christians can watch this film without worrying that it's going to make them sympathise with their enemy. It doesn't do that, but it does warn of the precise nature of the fanatacism that threatens the Western world, masquerading as and using adherents of the Muslim faith, and information must always be preferable to the simplified lies that Bush feeds people in his speeches.
